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With the Sky Sports Monday Night Football cameras rolling at Molineux, Wolves fans seized the additional publicity surrounding their latest inevitable loss to stage a protest against their club’s ownership. When the match against Manchester United kicked off, they massed on the concourse, a sea of old gold and black leaving the stands conspicuously empty for the opening 10 minutes. In a moment of seemingly cosmic irony – or perhaps a cruel act of counter-defiance – referee Michael Salisbury didn’t blow his final whistle until the clock had ticked over into the 10th minute of added time. By then, the game was long over as a contest and Wolves had succumbed to another defeat, a depressing staple of their season. Fans who stayed home and watched the broadcast will have seen the affable James Maddison tell David Jones and Jamie Carragher about enjoying “the little wins” (fathering twins, getting back on the grass and growing a ducktail mullet) during his recovery from serious knee-knack. They must have been wondering if they will ever get to see Wolves register a win again.

In so far as there were any minor positives to be taken from a 4-1 home defeat in which they were seriously flattered by the scoreline, Wolves did at least manage to score a goal for the first time in more than 600 minutes of league football, while the crowd’s former favourite, Matheus Cunha, drew a clearly frustrating blank despite peppering Sam Johnstone’s goal. Otherwise it was business as usual for a team that have taken just two points from their opening 15 matches and in conceding Monday night’s slapstick opener, performed a passable imitation of 11 drunks who had been press-ganged from a nearby pub after a day on the sauce and sent out in full Wolves kit, despite never having seen anyone play football before. “I understand the frustration,” blathered manager Rob Edwards, after his players were booed off by fans who had stuck the defeat out until the bitter end. “I won’t tell fans what to do. I’d love them to support the players but they have to see effort and commitment in return. Mistakes were punished and that filtered through. There was an anger in the stadium. The lads are trying. The supporters are angry and I get it.”