Before Wolverhampton Wanderers’ trip to Nottingham Forest, head coach Rob Edwards stressed the need for him not to look too far ahead.
Conversations about next season were going on in the background, he confirmed, while insisting his primary focus must be on the here and now.
Fair enough, but Edwards will have to forgive Wolves’ disgruntled supporters for allowing their thoughts to drift beyond the Premier League campaign.
Because if events at the City Ground on Wednesday evening told them anything, it was that the remaining 12 league games of this dismal season are likely to be as hard going as most of the previous 26.
Edwards’ side collected just their ninth point of the season in the East Midlands, yet the performance was as poor as anything fans have seen since the whole sorry episode began in August.
Bluntly, they got away with a draw from a game they should have lost on an evening that underlined beyond doubt that Wolves’ squad is weaker now than it was before the winter transfer window.
Edwards cannot escape the role he has played in the last couple of poor displays, which began with a risky decision to move away from a system that had brought some clear improvements. Nor has he tried to absolve himself.
But across January and the start of February, Wolves took a squad that was already rooted to the foot of the Premier League and weakened it, allowing six players to leave either permanently or on loan (including their main striker Jorgen Strand Larsen and summer signing Jhon Arias) and adding just two new faces.
The window was managed with method rather than madness, however. And its logic was sound.
Wolves were realistically doomed to relegation before it even opened, and the theory is that by beginning the inevitable summer exodus early, raising around £85million ($116m) in transfer fees and moving some wages off the books, it will put them in a strong position to act early in the summer and build a squad capable of challenging for promotion at the first time of asking in time for Edwards to drill most of them for the whole of pre-season.
“It allows us to be more aggressive and do things hopefully quite quickly in the summer,” Edwards told his press conference the day before the Forest game.
“We can’t guarantee (signing) every single one of them, so we can say, ‘There’s the working squad from the first day of pre-season’, but we would love to have a good group and a good chunk of it done quite early on.”
Only Edwards himself will know whether he outlined his hopes from a position of belief in what he has been told by the Molineux hierarchy, or out of a desire to make public the plan that has been presented to him in case it does not become reality.
If it was the latter, he could be forgiven for having doubts. After all, several of his most immediate predecessors left Wolves feeling that promises made on transfers had not been realised.
That was under former chairman Jeff Shi, who departed the club at the end of 2025 as decision-makers at owner Fosun succumbed to mounting pressure.
Now it is for interim replacement Nathan Shi to prove he can deliver a strategy, and that the problems at Wolves do not stem from the ambitions and abilities of the owner itself.
The difficult decisions made in January have to count for something in the summer, because in the short term, they have made an already tough task even more difficult for Edwards.
On-loan midfielder Angel Gomes has performed positively for spells of both of his games in Wolves colours but on both occasions, he has been withdrawn in the second half.
His physical re-adaptation to English football will take time after five and a half years away in Portugal and France.
And the other January signing, Adam Armstrong, has been signed clearly with the Championship in mind. The former Southampton striker has an excellent record in the second tier but a limited one in the Premier League. Against Forest, he and strike partner Tolu Arokodare did not cause any real problems for Forest’s defenders.
When Edwards turned to his substitutes’ bench, Jean-Ricner Bellegarde was the only senior attack-minded option at his disposal. Marshall Munetsi, Fer Lopez and Tawanda Chirewa — fringe players but ones who at least could claim some first-team experience — are gone as part of the January calculations.
Hwang Hee-chan is the only Wolves forward in the treatment room, so even a fully fit squad would be short on attacking options.
Edwards stressed last night that Wolves knew where their January decisions would leave them in terms of depth, or lack thereof.
The implication is that he was willing to take a short-term hit — with the possible ramifications for his own credibility in the eyes of fans — in exchange for a headstart on the summer rebuild.
It might turn out to be a worthwhile trade-off — but only if Wolves make it pay in a few months.