Wolves Stale Solbakken’s eager to put down roots

Boss Stale Solbakken cut an impressive figure as he got down to work at Molineux, writes TIM NASH.

New boss Stale Solbakken’s commitment to Wolves will be total.

It was clear from his first media briefing since his appointment in May yesterday that he intends having his family by his side for arguably his most intriguing challenge of his career.

Wearing a navy T-shirt and sandy coloured shorts reflecting the healthy tan of a hurriedly-completed holiday – no mean achievement when you’ve had to watch more than 40 DVDs of Wolves’ relegation season – the Norwegian exuded his cool determination that there will be no half measures.

Wolverhampton will be required to embrace the Solbakken family in the coming months because Wolves is going to be Solbakken’s life.

The 44-year-old has been living out of a suitcase for the first few days here, but the long-term plan is to put down roots in what will be the fourth different country of his managerial career after Norway, Denmark and Germany.

“The plan is for everyone to come across here to live and that’s what we’re working on,” said the Norwegian, a father-of-three.

“It’s important to have the family around, so they will be flying here – not the other way around.

“I haven’t started house-hunting yet because I want to find out what’s happening with the schools first – there’s no point finding a nice house if we can’t get the right school.

“They start in September so we have to find out what we’re going to do. We were all together in Cologne but the problem is our eldest son, who is 15, is in his last year in the 10th class in Norway which is an important year.

“After five-and-a-half years in Denmark and a year in Cologne, he is not at the same level as the other Norwegians.

“In some subjects, he’s at a higher level and in others he’s at a lower level so it’s a difficult year for him, especially if he’s going to start in a new country again.

“So we have to decide what to do with him because this year is important academically for the rest of his life.”

Like chairman Steve Morgan, Solbakken’s own football education was honed by watching Liverpool, the team that formed and framed his early impressions of the beautiful game.

“I grew up as a Liverpool fan because everyone who grew up in Norway at that time when I started following English football in the mid-70s supported one big club and Liverpool were winning everything,” he said.

“From that time, my favourite players were Alan Hansen, Graeme Souness and Kenny Dalglish.

“The ones coming through now probably support Manchester United or Chelsea.”

However, one game stands out from the young Solbakken’s memory that has echoes closer to home.

“When there was bad weather, the TV would go black and they would always put on the Manchester United-West Brom game which ended 3-5!” he joked.

Solbakken played in Norway’s greatest team of all time, many of whom plied their trade in England, such as Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Ronny Johnsen.

But despite his own previous time as a player on these shores being limited to a short, unhappy six-match spell here at Wimbledon under Joe Kinnear, he is determined to form his own impressions of the culture here. “When I played for the national team, virtually everyone in that side played in England, so yes, I made contacts there,” he said.

“But I think it’s also really important to make your own judgements so, although I want to hear some things, I don’t want to hear too much because I want to be my own man.”

That single-mindedness was evident in choosing Wolves as the next posting of a managerial career that has taken in two big city clubs.

He said: “I had made up my mind to maybe take one year off (before last season at Cologne), and then (after Cologne) I had two or three offers, one of which was from a club playing in the Champions League.

“There were one or two other top teams that could have qualified too with offers.

“Then Wolverhampton came in, and in a way I’d done the other things with getting clubs into the Champions League and playing there.

“In Denmark we won the league almost every year so those kind of jobs were more or less the same because you should be finishing first or second in the league and qualifying for Europe, or try to surprise everyone in Europe – that was the aim anyway. Then I got the call from Wolverhampton to go for an interview and I said yes and from then on, things went very quickly.

“The idea that it was a very different challenge was why it appealed.”

Solbakken might be more quietly-spoken than Mick McCarthy but he comes across as being no less single-minded.

And he is determined his own strengths will help ingrain his way of playing into his predecessor’s charges.

“It’s difficult to talk about yourself but I think I’m good at man-management,” he said.

“I’ve been a player myself – I know what players think and I’ve got a pretty good view of painting a picture on the training ground so players can understand what they’re supposed to do in a game.

“It’s important to organise a team well and at Copenhagen, that was our main strength.

“But, at Cologne, we struggled to do that because some players were very old-fashioned and they didn’t want to buy into it because they thought they knew best.

“They might think ‘I must play this way to look good myself’ and not sacrifice themselves for the team.”