Bruno Lage finds right connections at Wolves to shrug off Portuguese struggles

The temptation when Bruno Lage was appointed by Wolves was to assume it would just be more of the same: another Portuguese manager, another Jorge Mendes client, at a club with a strong Portuguese core. If managers from the German school of hard-pressing are the most modish appointment for an aspirational modern club, Portugal’s disciples of Vítor Frade and periodisation are not far behind.

While Lage is very much of that school – to the extent that in 2012, despite being a youth coach at Benfica at the time, he co-authored a report with the former Sheffield Wednesday and Swansea coach Carlos Carvalhal on the latter’s implementation of periodisation at Besiktas – this has been a season of change at Wolves.

The result is that, even after defeat at Arsenal on Thursday, Wolves go into Sunday’s game at West Ham with four more points than they have had at this stage of a Premier League season. Even if they do not finish in the top four, a club that had seemed to be stagnating have been reenergised and have a good chance of their best finish since coming fifth in 1972-73.

Lage’s report on Besiktas, Soccer: Developing a Know-How, starts in the language familiar to anybody acquainted with Frade’s work, rejecting the “reductionism” of Cartesianism and those thinkers who “having an object of study … separate its various components and attempt carefully to study each one with the goal of understanding each component better”. In football, that means separating the game into four basic components: tactical, technical, physical and psychological.

“In Tactical Periodisation,” the report explains, “the understanding of the tactical is different – it’s a dimension that assumes the coordination of the whole process involving with it all