It was as recently as March that Gary O’Neil was being lauded in Wolverhampton and beyond, entertaining two routes into Europe with Wolves eighth in the Premier League table and with only Coventry City standing between them and a trip to Wembley.

Nine months on and O’Neil has won only three Premier League matches since then. Beaten in dramatic circumstances by Coventry in the FA Cup, conceding twice in stoppage time, they are in the relegation zone. Fourteen points from the last 27 games. Unseemly scuffles at full-time.

Fans turned and bosses finally lost faith after a 2-1 defeat to Ipswich that made it four defeats in a row. Four points from safety, change was needed.The story of how it unravelled for O’Neil, a coach who might have fancied his next job could have been as England manager had that final phase of last season played out differently, is both simple and complicated. There were certainly mitigating factors.

The trajectory at Wolves has changed in recent seasons, a club seemingly contracting. The big investment stopped and there will be some sympathy as a result. Indeed, O’Neil only inherited the job because his predecessor had been so frustrated by the situation

That trend continued in the summer when captain Max Kilman and star winger Pedro Neto were sold. The club will argue that they committed £28m to sign a new striker in Jorgen Strand Larsen and a series of prospects who they have far from given up on.

But it is a far cry from the days of Ruben Neves and Joao Moutinho, Diogo Jota and Raul Jimenez, top-seven finishes and European nights at Molineux under Nuno Espirito Santo. Wolves cut ties with him at the end of a season in which they finished 13th.That was a team that knocked Liverpool and Manchester United out of the FA Cup in the same season, picking up Premier League wins over Tottenham, Chelsea and Arsenal as a newly-promoted side before doing the double over Manchester City the following year. All of which helps to explain why the excuse of Wolves’ awkward fixture list never really landed. Fans had become used to troubling the best teams, but the first eight games delivered one point. Those same fixtures brought 11 for O’Neil himself just last season.

It is that comparison – between last season, one in which Neto started fewer than half of the games, and this – that damned O’Neil in the end. Performances and results should not have deteriorated so dramatically. After all the praise, he lost his way.

The players were culpable too, of course. This season has featured a series of inexplicable errors, some of the most high-profile ones made by the most experienced players in the squad, Jose Sa, Craig Dawson and Mario Lemina among them.

The sight of Lemina wrestling with his own team-mates and squaring up to assistant manager Shaun Derry as he trudged from the field at the London Stadium might generously be described as someone showing they care. But he was the captain at the time, before subsequently being replaced.

Some of Wolves’ displays were comically chaotic. There was the 5-3 reverse at Brentford and the hat-trick of penalties conceded at home to Bournemouth. All four goals they gave away at Everton came from set-piece situations. A recipe for relegation.

Wolves’ record defending set-piece situations has been particularly poor. In total, they have conceded 16 goals that way this season. That is seven more than any other team. In fact, no Premier League team has ever conceded more at this stage of a season.

Maybe O’Neil will feel let down given the mistakes were made by players he had trusted. Maybe they will feel let down by the club’s lack of ambition and the coach’s tactics. It is that sense that O’Neil erred tactically, supposedly his strength, that undermined him.

Wolves looked far too open from the very first game at Arsenal. They have let in 40 goals in 16 games, their worst start to a top-flight season in 60 years and more than anyone else.