With Julen Lopetegui now firmly in the managers office at Wolverhampton Wanderers, attention turns to the work that needs to be done.
Marca take up that challenge today, looking deeply at the situation at Molineux and the ‘tasks’ that the Spanish coach will have to work on.
The newspaper makes it clear that Lopetegui ‘has his work cut out for him’ at his new club, with plenty of issues to resolve.
The first big task is the one of ‘finding the net’, with Wolves having scored the fewest goals this season and managed the worst conversion rate of any side in the league.
This is borne from an inability to create chances, another stat in which they find themselves down the bottom. They also lack a ‘killer’ up front, with Ruben Neves the current top scorer and none of the forward options impressing.
That is where there will need to be a particular focus on three players, Adama Traore, Goncalo Guedes and Matheus Nunes.
‘Recovering the best’ version of Traore will be key, with it up to Lopetegui to help him ‘get back to his best’ while Guedes is yet to get going after arriving from Valencia in the summer and Lopetegui needs to find a way to get him firing.
The ‘same goes’ for Nunes, who has just one assist in 11 games and is a ‘long way from the level’ he showed at Sporting Club de Portugal last season.
Those three should be key players and help to alleviate the goalscoring problem and Marca say it is up to Lopetegui to ‘make the most’ of the new boys and Traore, who has shone in the past.
He also needs to find a way to get Wolves back to the ‘defensive reliability’ they showed during the Nuno Espirito Santo era.
That ‘security’ was built on players who have now all left and without them the club have ‘become vulnerable’, with one six teams conceding more.
Other players have stepped up and the stats show that the problem is more as a result of ‘collective organisation’ and the ‘occasional individual failure’ than anything else. It’s something Lopetegui has to work on.
If he can do that, and get the forwards firing, Wolves might be able to get out of the predicament they find themselves in. The reality is, though, Lopetegui has a big challenge in front of him, starting with Arsenal today.
