Gary O'Neil highlights changes Wolves need moving forward

A number of glaring defensive errors saw Wolves hand Crystal Palace a plethora of chances in a convincing 3-1 loss.

Many of the errors and avoidable mistakes came from Wolves playing out from defence and O’Neil says he needs to address what style his current group is capable of playing.

“There’s loads to learn from this and the last couple weeks,” O’Neil said.

“The first two thirds of the season the style really suited the group and helped them in games, but what I’ve learned in the last few weeks is maybe we need to adjust a few things with what we have available to us.

“You won’t win too many Premier League games playing like we did in the first half, so it’s one for me to help the players understand what’s needed in situations like that.

“We need to find a way to be better.”

When asked specifically if he means the mistakes when playing out from defence, O’Neil added: “The players are unbelievably brave and they keep playing no matter what.

“Crystal Palace pressed man for man, really aggressively, and we’re on the side trying to get them to play more direct and they’re reluctant to. We end up desperate to keep the ball.

“But if Crystal Palace go man for man and leave spaces, we need to be able to exploit it more quickly.

“We did it against Everton and Brentford before Channy went away, but Channy doesn’t quite look the same yet. Him and Matheus Cunha, since they’ve come back from injury don’t quite look where they were before, understandably.

“Maybe the team’s understanding isn’t quite where it was. I can’t keep doing the same thing and getting results like that, so we need to look at it.

“It’s not a crisis and we won’t rip everything up and start again, but we need to adjust to the group we now have.

“Dawson and Pedro being out, although it doesn’t sound a lot, is big for us with a squad as small as ours.

“The first thing is whether we can improve the group in the summer, but top of my list will be what I do to the group and what I can produce from the group we have.”

After a poor first half, Wolves did recover to have a better second half.

But O’Neil was still unhappy with his side’s showing in the final home game of the season.

“I’m really disappointed,” O’Neil said.

“There’s been a few first halfs like that recently that are really disappointing.

“We beat ourselves. We started the game OK and had some control with the ball.

“But that turned into us having the ball around our goal and Palace managed to gain some good momentum from just pressing.

“They regained the ball and have good attacking players that punished us.

“In the second half, to be fair to the players, they had a go. We were a big more pragmatic and went a bit more direct, which got us up the pitch a bit easier.

“We scored a good goal and had some momentum, but it’s happened to us a few times this year where we then concede fairly quickly afterwards.”

Meanwhile, Jose Sa pulled out the starting XI just before half-time and was replaced by Dan Bentley.

O’Neil said: “It was late illness and Bents got the shout around 30 minutes before kick-off.

“He wasn’t feeling too well and I thought Bents was fine.

“He gave us some calmness.”