'There wasn't really an O'Neil-ball'
· Yahoo Sports
BBC Radio WM reporter Mike Taylor found it difficult to pinpoint Gary O'Neil's style of play during his time at Molineux.
The new Ipswich Town boss spent 16 months at Wolverhampton Wanderers after a spell at Bournemouth.
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Taylor told BBC Radio Suffolk's The Blue Hour: "I asked the same question when he came to Wolves of our colleagues at Solent and the suggestion was that it was too early to tell what O'Neil-ball was because he would essentially just be pragmatic at Bournemouth and so it was largely quite defensive.
"There was a bit of a move away from that after they'd found their feet and started to pull away from the bottom of the table in his first season at Wolves, and for a period they did play some quite exciting football - but for most of his 18 months, and certainly in the last six months, he was feeling he was going to become more defensive.
"At the start of the season when he ultimately was dismissed in December, he did make an effort to break away from the back-three system which has been the regular feature of football at Molineux under the past five or six managers, going back to when Nuno Espirito Santo was appointed in 2017. Several managers, including O'Neil, attempted to break away from that and found they just didn't have the squad to to sustain it."
"O'Neil switched to a back four and things just fell apart completely. Now whether they fell apart completely because he switched them to a back four and therefore that's his fault [is up for debate]. He was also under a lot of pressure to make the team more attacking and there were a lot of fans calling for them to play a back four.
"My inference from that - and I haven't studied his spell at Strasbourg this season, although it's relatively short - is that there wasn't really an O'Neil-ball.
"I did ask him about that once. He was keen to try to make them more attacking but, ultimately, they fell back on just trying to hang on in a lot of games because, frankly, that was the level of resources he felt they had."