Wolves extended their unbeaten sequence in all competitions to five matches, as the Premier League’s bottom side battled to a 0-0 draw with Newcastle United at Molineux. Eddie Howe’s team missed a chance
to move into fifth place, and with it a possible Champions League position, after a laboured display that suggested the schedule had taken a toll.
Newcastle controlled long spells of possession yet created little clear danger, and Wolves often looked sharper on the break. Nick Pope had to react smartly to keep out an acrobatic effort from Mateus Mane, while Hugo Bueno cut in from the right and drove a rising strike that skimmed the roof of the net.
Despite that pressure, Newcastle did not manage a single shot on target until the 85th minute. Kieran Trippier went closest before then, bending a free-kick around the wall, but the effort went just wide of Jose Sa’s left post as frustration grew among the visiting players.
When Newcastle eventually worked Sa, the goalkeeper stayed composed. Sa first pushed away a volley from Bruno Guimaraes, then gathered Joelinton’s close-range header from the rebound, ensuring both teams collected only one point from a contest that drifted without a decisive moment in either penalty area.
The numbers underlined Newcastle’s problems in front of goal. This was their fourth 0-0 draw of the current Premier League campaign, compared with just one goalless league match over the previous two seasons combined. Newcastle’s earlier clean-sheet stalemate came in 2024-25, with none recorded in 2023-24.
Across the league, this match became the 17th goalless draw of the 2025-26 Premier League season from 218 fixtures. That total already exceeds the entire 2024-25 campaign, when there were only 16 scoreless games in 380 matches, pointing to a season featuring more cautious or wasteful attacking play.
Newcastle attempted 12 shots but hit the target only twice, generating an expected goals figure of 0.88. Wolves were more selective, finishing with six attempts and two efforts on target, for a combined expected goals value of 0.29, which matched the tight and scrappy nature of the contest.
The result also broke a specific pattern under Howe. Before Sunday’s game, Newcastle had won every Premier League meeting against teams starting the day bottom of the table during Howe’s tenure. Those five previous victories came with a combined score of 15-3, but Wolves stopped that run despite their position.
Wolves achieved another statistical landmark by avoiding defeat again while propping up the division. Wolves are the first team to go four games unbeaten in the Premier League while bottom of the table, since their arch-rivals West Brom enjoyed a five-match streak in April and May 2018, underlining the resilience within Rob Edwards’ squad.
Yet the scale of Wolves’ task in the relegation fight stays clear. A 14-point gap still separates Wolves from 17th-placed Nottingham Forest, meaning Edwards’ side faces a steep climb to escape danger, even as the current five-match unbeaten run across all competitions provides some stability and belief.
