While leaving the medical aspects of Jiménez’s recovery to the specialists, Lage has concentrated since his appointment in June on helping the player to regain match fitness and belief.
“I talked to Raúl on the first day,” he said. “The first thing to do was to give him a lot of confidence. Strikers always need to score goals to feel comfortable. With goals, they start to believe they are coming back and, in his case, getting over what happened. But I said: ‘Don’t worry about the goals, because what you give the club when you are defending is so much, and the goals will come.’ And they came … I see he is happy in training – he works for the team both in defence and offensive situations.”
Lage said Jiménez was the ideal striker for the way he wants Wolves to play and expressed delight at linking up with a player who has thrived at Molineux since arriving from Benfica shortly before Lage took charge of the Portuguese club in 2019.
“I remember when I was at Benfica and we sold João Félix [to Atlético Madrid], I created a profile for a [replacement] striker. [The director of football] Rui Costa said: ‘The guy you want was here – but we sold him to Wolves.’ One and a half years later I’m here working with Raúl so I am very happy.
“With him and [Conor] Coady, you can see two guys that the younger players can look to as good examples and see that you can be a top player and also a top person.”
