Welcome to Wolves Stale

Martin Swain sees Stale Solbakken unveiled at Molineux today and gives his verdict on the Norwegian's first performance in the Wolves hot-seat

First of all his name. It's pronounced 'Stoller.' Not Stale as in bread.

That probably won't stop next season's headline-writers taking liberties should Wolves have a bad day at the office but Stale Solbakken will naturally hope he keeps those down to a minimum.

Let's hope so. This was an assured, intelligent first day at the office by a comparatively young manager whose skilful handling of the trickier questions spoke volumes for the experience he has already acquired enjoying unparalleled success in Norway and chaotic destruction in Germany.

Chief executive Jez Moxey opened the press conference with a stab at Norwegian which while brave possibly suggested he has work to do should he pursue a career in languages.

"How was my Norwegian?" he later asked the media personnel from Solbakken's home nation.

"Pretty good, pretty good," they offered encouragingly.

"I take it you mean ****," said Moxey to genial chuckles. He knows it is how his new man handles all things English, however, that really counts now.

This is Solbakken's first managerial assignment in England and having arrived on the day the Premier League reached one of those climaxes that make our game such a dramatic force in global terms he has been reminded of just how intense it can be.

Naturally, as a Scandinavian, he is more than familiar with its dynamics but yesterday's first meeting with the players, and a half hour session with his new assistant Terry

Connor, would have been an important moment for him. Rightly or wrongly, English football culture tends to look down its nose at the smaller European nations and Solbakken will need to strike a convincing and unflinching character in the company of those hard-bitten Wolves players loyal to the last vestiges of the collapsed managerial regime represented by Connor.

He is also more than aware of the club he has come to. Wolves have a serious following in Norway, the nation which hosts their biggest non-UK supporters' club, a legacy of the trail blazed by Messrs Wagstaffe, Hibbitt, Dougan. Parkin et al back at the dawn of the 1970s,

As an eight-year-old growing up in Grue, he watched starry-eyed as 5,000-6,000 fans packed into his local club's ground to watch that celebrated team wallop the Norwegians by "five or six goals."

From that moment, Wolves have been imbedded in Solbakken's football consciousness and he revealed a "great privilege" in becoming the club's first overseas manager. "It was 1976, maybe '77...Wolves came to my club and I saw players like Kenny Hibbitt, Willie Carr, Steve Kindon, Derek Parkin for the first time. Scandinavians are famous for their love of English clubs...."

Actually, it would entirely wrong to neglect owner Steve Morgan's lead role in this appointment. He revealed that he had first become aware of Solbakken several years ago and had kept his name in mind for future consideration.

And he is strident, confident about his choice. Asked if he considered his first real appointment as a football club owner – discounting the ill-fated choice of Terry Connor following the sacking of Mick McCarthy – a 'brave' one, Morgan differed.

"It is only brave in the sense that Stale Solbakken is not well known in the UK. In Scandinavia, he is a legendary; everybody knows him," said Morgan.

"He's a proven manager, extremely capable with an outstanding win-ratio right up there with the very best."

That reputation stems from his achievements as Roy Hodgson's successor at Copenhagen. Five championships, two doubles, in six years.

He was Norway's coach of the year and had agreed to take on the national team when the chance to step into a prime Bundesliga job arrived.

It is Solbakken's eight turbulent months at FC Cologne which will cause Wolves fans most disquiet about the credibility of this appointment.

The anti-Solbakken lobby will tell you that he was too confrontational with established players and introduced a rigid and ugly style of football against which they revolted.

A bust-up with the team's most high-profile player, Lukas Podolski, didn't help amid reports that Cologne were not fit enough and a spent force after an hour in each game.

The man himself gave his version and painted a picture of a club made impossible to manage by "in-fighting" which "is what killed us" and problems that "Jesus and Joseph would have struggled" to resolve.

The issue of football style suggests we are about to receive a good dose of Scandinavian pragmatism.

At Copenhagen he said that he built three different types of teams which featured a direct beginning which blossomed into a more patient, passing game – "great players but without the discipline" – and a final incarnation which blended the two and won the league by 26 points.

But he added: "The type of football must be suited to the league and the players we have," he said.

"In football there is not one way which is good and one way which is bad.

"Every coach wants to play attractive football but that is no good if you are not winning games.

"The Championship will be a marathon, we all know that and we have to battle as well as play our football.

"We all want to be in the Premier League."

He will perhaps have a clearer idea about the best way forward for his new team after his summer homework – Solbakken returned to Oslo last night with 38 DVDs of the season's Premier League games which automatically makes him a braver man than most Wolves fans now doing all they can to forget about the campaign just gone.

"I don't think my wife will be very impressed," he smiled at the long hours he will now spend scrutinising the players he has inherited.

"But he is also expecting changes although not an opportunity to fill the team with Norwegians; experience of the English Championship, he acknowledged, will be important even if it is somewhat thin in the manager's office.

But Solbakken handled it all well. Trim and fit, softly spoken, undemonstrative...he struck a calm figure considering he stepped into a press conference packed with media personnel and invited Molineux staff.

Fans eager for info about the man would have stumbled on YouTube clips of some fiery outbursts, one involving Pep Guardiola after Copenhagen had held Barcelona to a 1-1 draw and another of his exploding in fury before the press in Germany.

"Every day was a press conference like this for 200 days," he said.

"I think you might lose your temper under those conditions.

"But I was never sent off as a player; I was sent to the tribune (stand) maybe once as a player. But I'm here to win football matches."

Morgan certainly believes he has brought himself a winner into the club and that will certainly be important. The Championship is getting tougher each year just as the Premier League shows no sign of slowing its advance and Wolves will be going into the league arguably the most crestfallen of the relegated trio.

Blackburn and Bolton, their companions in misery were demoted in the last week of action – Wolves finished 13 points behind the safety line and were relegated several weeks earlier.

That burdens the players with a losing mentality which Solbakken will be eager to address.

"And he knows how important it is.

"Every manager in the world wants to coach in the Premier League," he said.

"I have come to a great, traditional club but first we have to win promotion.

"I cannot make promises – all I can promise is that will give it everything, I will learn very quickly and I will be ready."

Velkommen til Wolves, Stale. Velkommen.