Liam Keen comment: Wolves strikers’ goal-shy year is not all their fault

It is a remarkable and damning statistic that highlights Wolves’ problems over the last 365 days – and beyond.

On this day a year ago, March 10, 2022, Raul Jimenez opened the scoring for Wolves in a 4-0 win over Watford.

For many, that game is remembered for Ruben Neves’s ridiculously sublime chip over Ben Foster for the fourth goal, but a full year later it is Jimenez’s strike that is more telling.

That was Jimenez’s sixth and final goal last season, as he finished joint top goalscorer, while so far this season Daniel Podence and Neves are joint top with just five goals each. Scoring has been Wolves’ problem for some time.

Since that goal one year ago, Jimenez has played 19 Premier League games for Wolves without scoring – including all starts and substitute appearances across the last two months of last season and all of this season to this date.

Fabio Silva, who has spent all of this season out on loan, has played seven times, while Sasa Kalajdzic only played once – and only lasted 45 minutes – before picking up a serious knee injury.

Since his arrival in September, Diego Costa has played 14 Premier League games without scoring, while Matheus Cunha has played eight. The latter is considered by many to be better playing off a striker, but Wolves bought him as a number nine and have played him in that position.

Adding together those numbers for all five players, means that Wolves’ recognised strikers have failed to score a single goal in 49 Premier League games combined.

Although some of those games will vary in minutes played due to substitute appearances, it is still a dreadful return.

Looking deeper into the statistics this season shows where Wolves may be going wrong.

From the 11 league games Jimenez has played this season, the Mexican has an expected goals (or xG) of just 1.95 – which is the statistic that measures the quality of a chance by the likelihood that it will result in a goal from the position the chance came and the phase of play that led to it.

As a result, the statistics show Jimenez should have scored around two goals from his 11 Premier League appearances this season.

Costa’s numbers are similar from his 14 appearances this campaign, with an xG of 2.23, while Cunha has an xG of 1.2 from his eight games.

From Kalajdzic’s 45 minutes for Wolves this season, he had an xG of 0.27.

From these four strikers that have appeared this season, they have a combined xG of 5.65.

As a result, Wolves have missed out on somewhere between five and six goals from these four forwards, from a combined 34 league games this season.

Although five more goals would have been better than zero – the incredibly small numbers of expected goals for each player tell a story.

Simply put, Wolves are not creating enough chances for their strikers. There will be other factors in this, too. At times each of these forwards have been guilty of taking up the wrong positions, but there have equally been plenty of occasions when the right pass or cross into them has not been delivered.

Wolves strikers, as a whole, are isolated and tend to drift wide in search of service. It may be a simple solution, but getting team-mates closer to them seems to work. Jimenez and Cunha have already impressed as a pair, but have rarely been played together so far.