Wolves Flop Stale Shining Bright With Viking Invaders 

In the 1990s especially, Wolves had the unfortunate habit of signing players – often at very considerable cost – who performed or progressed much better elsewhere that they did at Molineux.

Iwan Roberts, Steve Claridge, Chris Marsden, goalkeeper Paul Jones, Robin Van Der Laan, Jason Roberts and Adrian Williams are seven that spring quickly to mind.

Leap ahead the best part of 30 years and we now see lots of a manager who misfired here but has been a star virtually everywhere else. Step forward, Stale Solbakken.

The Norwegian was sacked by Wolves after only six months in charge, a nightmare FA Cup exit at non-League Luton proving to be the last straw for Steve Morgan and his board.

The subsequent drop into League One can only partly be attributed to Solbakken as the club were 18th in the table when he left. His successor, Dean Saunders, had a cushion of six points as well as four places when he took over – and 20 games in which to organise a rescue operation. He failed and humiliation and recriminations engulfed Molineux.

What we have since learned though is that, while Saunders disappeared from the dug-out, Solbakken is using this World Cup to continue proving what a quality operator he is.

He is Copenhagen’s most successful ever manager and also has a less successful stay at Cologne on his CV. Now the 58-cap former Norwegian international midfielder is putting his unhappy Wolves experience even further behind him as he rewrites national history by the bookful.

This is the country’s first time at a tournament finals in 28 years and the win over Brazil that set up a meeting with England this coming weekend has been described by commentators as the greatest moment in their sporting history. These are seriously dizzy times for one of the traditional makeweights at this level.

Norway had previously won only three games at a finals, none of them in the knockout phse. At this tournament, they have already won four, the latest one coming at the last-16 stage after their head coach peered into a camera during the celebrations following the victory over Ivory Coast and warned: “We’re coming for you, Carlo Ancelotti!”

It wasn’t a ‘Your boys took a hellllll of a beating’ moment but it was a sure sign of a leader feeling rather bullish about the team at his disposal.

Saturday night in Miami, presumably with another full sighting of David Moller Wolfe and possibly with a glimpse of the so-far lesser-seen Jorgen Strand Larsen, will provide another close-up of the managerial talent of which so little was brought to bear in these parts.

So why that rare black mark on an otherwise excellent CV? Former Wolves owner Steve Morgan has been quoted as saying: “The reality was I don’t think Stale ever bought into living in England.

“His wife and family never came across with him. He was going back to his family in Norway every other weekend — he just never settled. I think the team’s performance suffered as a result. I don’t think he ever really bought into the English culture.”

In the red corner with Solbakken now and very much rowing in the same direction is former Wolves head of analysis Andrew Findlay, the senior performance analyst with the Norway team.

In conjunction with his work in international football, he was Luton’s analyst coach in 2023-24 during Rob Edwards’s time there and is well placed to offer a view of the mid-2020s Solbakken.

If there was a ‘right man, wrong time’ element to the Norwegian’s 2012 appointment here, his installation as the country’s boss in 2020 appears to have been perfectly aligned with the flourishing of Erling Haaland and Martin Odegaard in particular.

But Findlay is determined to see that he is recognised for his work in general. In a lengthy recent Express & Star interview with Paul Berry, he said: “We’ve got some good players but what Stale has done is turn them into a really good team.

“We won eight out of eight in qualifying and scored 37 goals in the process. Of course we’ve got Erling but, even without his 16 goals, we still got nearly three a game from everyone else.

“He has built a team and staff which has been successful in qualification and it’s also funny when we speak about Wolves, which we do not just with Stale but also David and Jorgen.

“Even though it didn’t work out for Stale, he has never said a bad word about Wolves and I think he loved the way the club was, the passion of the fans and it being a one-club city.”