Online Reporter
BEING a English Premier League footballer was always Zimbabwean midfielder Marshall Munetsi’s dream and after aiming at that target for so long, his gratitude has increased ahead of his first full season at Wolves.
In truth, however, his humility has always kept him grateful.
The 29-year-old made quite the impact in his first six months in Wolverhampton, bringing a positivity to the group, which helped guide the team comfortably to top-flight survival.
In a short space of time, Munetsi’s personality and on-pitch performances positively impacted all those around him, and with pre-season set to start back at Compton Park for the Zimbabwean skipper and his teammates yesterday, he hopes the influence he had on the squad before the summer break – which ended with his stunning strike to close the season out at home to Brentford – will enable Wolves to hit the ground running straight from the off this time around.
On covering the most distance per game in the English Premier League . . .
“I’ve always said that as long as I’m breathing, I’ll always give everything for the club. This is the mentality that I have since I was a kid. When people bring you to do a job, you want to do it to the best of your abilities and I think having that work rate is one of my qualities.
“I always want to run as much as I can to make sure that we win the games, and it’s fun when you also have people appreciate whatever you’re doing.
‘‘At the end of the day, it’s more important to get good results, but those results only come after sacrificing blood, sweat and tears on the pitch.
On his first season in Old Gold . . .
“It went quite well. The main objective was to get as far as possible away from the relegation zone and we managed to achieve that. The last few games were not good on our side, but overall, the guys really put a lot of effort in to make sure that we maintained our status in the league. At the end of the season, we also had that aspect of fatigue, because we really pushed a lot.
“I didn’t really imagine that would win six games in a row, but I obviously thought we would survive. That was the main thing that was in my head and everybody else surrounding the club.
“But we might have even overachieved considering how things had been going before, so I think everyone can be proud of the effort that the players and the management and everybody surrounding the club put in to making sure that we didn’t end up going to the Championship.”
On becoming a key player for Pereira . . .
“There were certain aspects that the manager wanted me to do to help the team, considering that they had seen me from afar, and one of them was my qualities of being a box-to-box midfielder and being able to defend and to also attack. I would have loved to have scored more goals with the chances that I had, but unfortunately, sometimes in football things don’t always work out the way you want.
“But in general, I’ve been able to add more value to the team, especially without the ball, how our shape has become more solid, because we had been conceding a lot of goals [before he arrived] and also assisting when we attack.
‘‘Overall, we managed to find a good way to integrate each and every player in the system that we were using.” – wolves.co.uk/Sports Reporter
derick.khumalo