Steve Davis has been speaking about his time as interim Wolves manager – and conceded there was a lot of discontent at the time.
Wanderers managed to stay up this season, after an awful start to the campaign.
Wanderers fans came into the new season full of optimism. But that was quickly extinguished, with the team unable to buy or result or even score a goal.
Lage was sacked at the start of October and things then started to come out about what things were like behind the scenes.
Apparently, many players had checked out, with Lage’s style apparently exhaustive and counter-productive.
Davis took over as interim boss along with James Collins, and the pair did steady the ship a little. But it was difficult for them, and Davis has been speaking about the weeks he spent in charge.
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Davis really did have a huge job on his hands and deserves credit for stepping in.
It is clear that all was not well at the time of Lage’s sacking.
Speaking on the Wolves Weekly podcast, he admitted: “The media was the toughest (part) for me. The difficulty was the players being fit. Obviously three or four of those players weren’t fit when we came in. We had to manage minutes.
“At Palace and one or two other games we had, we had to take them off. I would then explain that to the press. That’s where we were.
“I think there were only 16 or 17 fit players when we took over. There was a lot of injuries, and a lot of discontent. We had to get to the bottom of that very quicky.
“If we would have pushed the players too hard, we could have had even less players for Julen to work with.”
Davis went on to say that he and his team actually worked for 50 straight days to try and improve things at Wolves after the sacking of Lage.
Steve Davis comments are very eye opening – he and James Collins had it tough at Wolves after Bruno Lage sacking
These are some interesting remarks from Davis, and it’s clear things were not in a good way.
One of the first things Lopetegui reportedly noticed about the squad when he took over was how unfit all the players were.
That is a poor reflection on Lage, who should have ensured his players were in peak physical condition.
Lage did some good things at Molineux. He actually got some really good results during to being tactically superior to his opposite number.
But it seems as though he did cause some of the players to check out with some of his methods. Maybe he and his team fell well short when it came to the conditioning side of things.
Thankfully, Lopetegui was able to turn things around and guide the club to safety with three games to spare.