Ruben Neves admitted that Wolverhampton Wanderers “didn’t play” to their best ability against Brentford on Saturday as they suffered their fourth defeat of the campaign. The Bees won 2-0 at Molineux thanks to first-half goals from Ivan Toney and Bryan Mbeumo as Wolves struggled to break down the resolute visitors, despite the fact they were down a man for much of the second-half following Shandon Baptiste’s 64th minute red card. The result means Bruno Lage’s men have just one win from their opening five Premier League matches, leaving them just a point above the relegation zone. After the game Neves appeared more disappointed with the performance itself than the result, admitting that Wolves did not perform as well as they can, gifting Brentford their second goal.
Ruben Neves said: “We started the game well. Then we did a big mistake after that penalty. We just gave them the second goal. That was really bad for us because then we were two goals down. We tried to react but mainly after the second goal there was no more game. We did our best to get goals but in 45 minutes we had a really short time to score because we just didn’t play. We did our best. We created some good play to score but we could not finish them. They did their job and just stopped playing after the second goal.”
Although Neves was evidently frustrated with Brentford’s defensive tactics following the two goals, but the midfielder did concede that mistakes are killing the team in games this season.
Ruben Neves said: “The game was more stopped than playing in the second half but that’s not their fault. We need to look at ourselves and look at the mistakes we did today because we cannot just keep losing games. We need to improve and I think we still have time to do it so we will try to react as fast as we can.”
