Newcastle v Wolves: Premier League – live!

6 min It is too facile to call Sean Longstaff Michael Carrick with legs? Their upright style and sharp passing is extremely similar.

4 min Bit of possession from Newcastle, orchestrated by Sean Longstaff. He finds such clever angles, and a slipped reverse-pass to Almiron wins his team a free-kick, down the right. He clips it in himself and Joelinton nods back across, but Pooralmiron can’t connect properly with his shot.

3 min I’d never really noticed the majesty of Steve Bruce’s hairline, but it’s a very fine job.

2 min Nice from Wolves, the ball zipping between Jota, Moutinho and Traore, whose cross is partially cleared before Jota hooks – or hookes, in local dialect – a shot straight at Dubravka.

1 min Matty Longstaff sticks in a heed as Jota leaps with studs; of course he does. But it’s Jota who comes away with the ball and Wolves knock it about nicely.

Newcastle might fancy themselves to get involved early, while Wolves run Thursday night out of their legs. They played really well in the second half of that one, but expended far more effort than they’d have hoped.

I wonder how the teams will go about this one as both like to sit back. Wolves might struggle to pick Newcastle apart, and might need to send more men forward than usual to cause problems. Newcastle, I think, will sit back but look to attack in numbers when the opportunity presents itself.

Steve Bruce reckons good results are helpful and that Wolves are good. He says his team have had a difficult start, but it’s games like today’s that can define the season.

Nuno, meanwhile, says being without Boly is a “big blow” and he’s waiting for the assessment and hoping for the best. He thinks Newcastle are a good team, and his players need to be focused and stick with their plans. I feel extremely revelated.

“In addition to listing the head referee these days,” emails JR in Illinois, “you should probably also list the VAR referee. As we’ve seen already this weekend the use of VAR is still extremely VARiable. The VAR ref is capable of all sorts and could eff up a game as easily as not. Anyway, today’s man behind the screen is Graham Scott.

On a separate note, do you ever worry about Jimenez? I do. I think he’s a great player but I’m worried Nuno is going to break him. It seems like Jimenez plays every single game, and with Europa League participation that seems pretty brutal. Has he even had any rest this season?”

I have so little patience for VAR, which fails to solve a problem which doesn’t exist. Who fell in love with the game on account of its correct decision-making process? Which self-respecting – ok, non-self-respecting – adult experiences anger about a football match more than 15 minutes after it’s finished? As for Jimenez, I guess once Cutrone finds his feet, assuming he finds his feet, Nuno will feel able to take him out.

In other black and white news, I enjoyed this.

Question: is there a difference in pronunciation between “howay” and “haway”, or just in stripe-colour?

I cannot enjoy enough of these.

Things to which I’m looking forward (2): Adama Traore. We can’t know quite how Nuno has transformed him. It might be lots of detailed direction, with charts, diagrams, videos and such; it might be a pointed comment here and a kind word there; it might be the player reaching maturity; or it might be a combination of all three. Whatever the answer, he is now a serious threat in every game, and is only going to get better. Well done him.

Things to which I’m looking forward (1): the brothers Longstaff. Neves and Moutinho are as clever a pair as any, and playing them must be extremely frustrating. Running power is definitely an advantage when it comes to negating them, but nous and chill are necessary too. I wonder if we’ll see Sean try and take them out of the game by hitting long passes into the channels for Joelinton, Almiron and Saint-Maximin.

Newcastle make one change from their last game – and the one before that: Fabian Schar is injured, so Federioc Fernandez comes in. Andy Carroll is also injured, ctrl C, ctrl V.

As for Wolves, Willy Boly hurt himself in training – badly, say the rumours – so his place in that famous back three goes to Matt Doherty. As such, Leander Dendoncker comes into midfield, with Jota for Cutrone the other change from their last league game.

Newcastle United (a deliberately stodgy, affirmingly Spangeordie 3-4-3): Dubravka; Fernandez, Lascelles, Clark; Yedlin, Longstaff M, Longstaff S, Willems; Almiron, Joelinton, Saint-Maximin. Subs: Darlow, Krafth, Dummett, Shelvey, Atsu, Gayle, Muto.

Wolverhampton Wanderers (an ideologue’s 3-5-2): Rui Patricio; Doherty, Coady, Saiss; Traore, Dendoncker, Moutinho, Neves, Jonny; Jimenez, Jota. Subs: Vallejo, Pedro Neto, Cutrone, Ruddy, Ruben Vinagre, Kilman, Ashley-Seal.

Var’s straight man: Kevin Friend (Leicestershire)

In his epochal treatise on modern football, On Liberty, John Stuart Mill popularised the phrase “tyranny of the majority”. Roughly, his point was that most people are wrong about most things most of the time – though of course he made an exception for Mike Ashely – before going on to predict that Steve Bruce would do some decent work in his management career and that a few bad results at the start of a season would not mean that Wolves had “been found out”.

Of course, at Newcastle, all Bruce had to do was copy Rafael Benitez – it just took him a while to put his ego away, as it would as us all, and now he has things have improved. Wolves meanwhile, have not “been found out” because there is no “finding out” to be done. How they play should be obvious and why it works should be obvious; they were good last season because, as even Mill knew in 1859, football doesn’t change: decent players, well managed, will make for a decent team.

It’s hard to see much in the way of speed or goals today, but such is utilitarianism, or something.

Kick-off: 2pm GMT, baby.