Mick McCarthy warns his Wolves flops: We look like a team that can get relegated

Mick McCarthy forced his Wolves side to listen to a dressing-room inquest after their Stamford Bridge flop and told his players: “We’re in a fight for our lives.”

McCarthy’s men slumped to their heaviest defeat of the season to stay firmly entrenched in the drop zone.

And while the Wolves boss bewailed the chances that went begging in a first half in which Chelsea’s efficiency in front of goal was the difference between the sides, the Molineux gaffer decided the time for pussy-footing is over.

McCarthy said: “We just have to understand that we are in a relegation dogfight and that’s why I decided this was the time to tell the players the truth.

“With all the games we have left, that’s the situation we’re in. We can’t hide from it and say 'Oh, we’re doing okay, we’ll be fine'.

“Then we get to halfway through the season and we’re not doing fine. Let’s put our chips on the table.

“We look like a team that can get relegated. There’s a difference between that and just being in the relegation zone, like Everton were for a while.

“They didn’t look like a team that could get relegated to me. There’s a difference.

“You can look back at our performances and think that we did all right in them. We created seven chances against Chelsea but we didn’t score any and we let four in!

“I don’t want them to go away this weekend and think ‘We’re not bad'. Where’s the practicality of that? We’re not bad but we’re in the bottom three.”

McCarthy said his players need to show they are worth their Premier League places, adding: “We understood that we might get a few hidings over the course of the season and we’ve had two on the bounce.

“When we were three down after 20 minutes I was just thinking ‘Keep it down to three’ – because we weren’t going to win 4-3.

“It was all about damage limitation, about not getting beat six or seven.

“But I don’t worry about how we rebound from this.

“The players knew this would be a difficult and the Birmingham one will be different, that’s for sure.”