Wolves opened the Championship season against Blackburn Rovers at Molineux on 8pm BST, with Kieran Trippier in the line-up and four Wolves players unavailable. It was the first competitive night of the English domestic season proper, and the shape of the game was already set by what each side could and could not field.
Trippier has already explained why he made the move, saying it was important to him to be close to his children when he decided to try something new, after a long conversation with Eddie Howe and a spell in which he was unafraid to go to the Championship. That made his presence in Wolves' starting side part of the story from the start, alongside Bentley, Mosquera and T.Gomes, while Blackburn arrived with their own clear message in the team sheet.
Blackburn named a starting XI with zero new signings even though the club had added Sam Morsy, Jayden Fevrier and Moussa Baradji over the summer. Instead, Morsy and Fevrier were on the bench, and Baradji was absent through injury. Their line-up began with Toth, Alebiosu, Atcheson, McLoughlin and Pickering, with Forshaw, Montgomery, Afolayan, Cantwell, Morishita and Gudjohnsen also starting, while Pears, Ribeiro, Tavares, Morsy, Fevrier, Carter, Henriksson, Ohashi and Garrett were among the nine names waiting for a chance.
Wolves also had to manage without Hwang Hee-Chan, Sasa Kalajdzic, Santiago Bueno and Ladislav Krejci, which meant the home side started the season with gaps of its own despite the strength of the squad available to them. That left the opener less about a clean first-night statement than about which side adapted better to a line-up shaped by absence, and the answer to that should come quickly once the match settles and the result is known.
For now, the only certainty is that the Championship has begun with a contest that already says something about both clubs: Wolves are leaning on experience and depth, while Blackburn have chosen an opening-night XI that reflected a summer of limited change more than a summer of arrivals. The score is the next fact readers will want, because the team sheet has already told them enough to know this was never just another start-of-season formality.
