Conor Coady: ‘Suárez used to twist me inside out but I’ve improved’A change of position has been the making of the Wolves captain since leaving Liverpool but an England call-up is far from his mind
few days after Wolves drew with Everton, on the opening weekend of the season, Nuno Espírito Santo called his players together for a meeting. That game was the first time Wolves had played in the Premier League for six years and, in the eyes of the manager, it showed in the mentality of his players.
“You could see as a team we were nervous,” Conor Coady, the Wolves captain, says. “Don’t get me wrong, you always get butterflies before a game, but it was a little bit more than that and you could see it because it was our first game in the Premier League. Everybody was thinking about it, everybody was over-thinking their jobs and focusing on what they needed to do. You could see a little bit of anxiety.”
Nuno recognised the need to take away some of that tension and inject a shot of self-belief into his Championship winners. “The manager spoke to us and said: ‘What are you like? Relax, they’re not superheroes. It’s nothing like that. It’s 11 men against 11 men and we go and play how we play. And if we play well, we will win. It’s as simple as that.’ Since then, nothing has changed. There’s not been one game where we’re thinking: ‘We’re not going to win today.’ We always believe.”
The fact Wolves have gone on to take points off Manchester City, Manchester United and Arsenal is evidence that any sort of inferiority complex has long disappeared, and judging by the loud cheers coming from another part of the training ground while Coady is talking, the mood among the players is about as relaxed as it could be. “That’ll be head tennis,” Coady says, smiling.
It makes a change from cricket, which is played regularly in the gymnasium and has done wonders for team spirit but not a lot for the state of the ceiling. “The holes are bad, aren’t they,” says Coady, sounding like a naughty schoolboy. “Big John Ruddy has a hard hit – he smashes it. The staff went mad when it first happened. But there are loads of holes now.”
Asked who explains the rules of cricket to Wolves’ sizeable Portuguese contingent, Coady gives an answer that makes sense on one level but would probably go down badly with Geoffrey Boycott. “It’s not hard, is it? You throw a ball and someone whacks it!” Coady says, laughing. Rúben Neves, by all accounts, is the rising star among his countrymen. “He’s good at everything,” Coady adds. “Particularly head tennis. Him and [João] Moutinho are at a different level to anyone else.”
While Neves and Moutinho are at the vanguard of the new hugely ambitious Wolves, Coady is part of the Old Gold and one of the few survivors from the pre-Nuno era. Signed three years ago from Huddersfield, who are Wolves’ opponents at Molineux on Sunday, Coady arrived as a midfielder and even filled in as a right-back before Nuno made the inspired decision to convert the Liverpudlian into the central figure in a three-man defence. Coady, who had never played in that position before, has been a revelation ever since.
“When [Nuno] came in, he didn’t have a conversation with me about [changing position] – he just put me there,” Coady says. “It was in the first session and I thought to myself: ‘OK, I’ll try to get better and listen and learn.’ But it didn’t really matter to me where I played. When I saw a manager of his calibre coming in – what he had done at Porto and at Valencia – I wanted to be part of it.”
The 25-year-old had some useful experiences to draw on when it came to adjusting to the task of facing Premier League strikers, with memories of the days when Luis Suárez tormented him in training at Liverpool still fresh in the mind. “He used to twist me inside out,” says Coady, who made two first-team appearances for Liverpool. “He’s a sensational footballer and it was never the happiest times coming in from training because he showed me up a few times. But I’ve had a lot of years between then and now to improve as a footballer.”
The fact Gareth Southgate has spoken so positively about Coady, who captained England Under-20s at a time when Harry Kane and John Stones were in the team, has led many to believe a senior call-up may not be too far away.
“I love watching England and what they are doing,” Coady says. “But I can promise you I’ve not thought about anything that high. If it does come, it would mean I’m doing OK at Wolves, so it’s important I keep improving and listening to the manager here.”
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2018/nov/24/conor-coady-wolves-luis-suarez-liverpool-englandShame he never made it here but glad to see him doing well and captaining a strong Wolves side.
