Football isn’t something we invented but it is something we (as a club) now understand. It is a very complex sport and I sometimes struggle to understand it, often needing others to explain integral events and parts of the game I remain ignorant about. I have never played football at a competitive level. But I do suspect that Nuno and the ‘kwan’ around the club has a more important and meaningful part in our current success that I previously discussed. I think Nuno means more than we can easily understand. Football here at the moment transcends the idea of football as we know it and understand it. Although we may wax lyrical about the ‘front end’ of the play ie the players and tactics. I suspect there is something else at play too. Something different. Can we make statements about a subject so close to our hearts without fear? Perhaps. Nuno has discussed the bond between players and the crowd. It becomes metaphysical then and intimate, all memes which should have no truck with the  quantitative point accumulations of the games we have played.

I suspect that there are aspects of this Nunoism that we may forever be lost in the fogs of our ignorance. The facets which he displays in his post match celebrations, the measured tones during interviews, his humility, his unforgiving destruction of the opponents ideas. If Nuno has this relationship with our support then it is transcendent of both football and politics. So it becomes a fourth dimension. 4th Dimensional football in other words. We have been imprisoned by our past and our fears for the future so we inhabited a lone space and were held by it, especially during the Morgan era. Now of course Nuno only waxes a little about previous games, he does not dwell on them, he always looks forward. I would like to call this the ‘directions of Nuno’ always forward, always looking towards the next match and the next battle. Everything driven on towards the future. But it is not entropy, the movement of an ordered system towards chaos and disorder but actually the reverse. Chaos towards Order. This is a ‘meta-statement’ where Nuno has not only galvanised the styles of football we play but also affected the way we watch it and interact with it. Often the crowd noise at Molineux this season has been subdued somewhat apart from when we play a rival or a neighbour. It is subdued I suspect because we haven’t mentally caught up with what we are watching. Nuno has created a veritable dream world of football. The last minute winner at Bristol City away, Cardiff the other night, the Battle of Boro. All benchmarks of the dream world he has made us and one in which few teams even in the Premiership have experienced.  Nuno, his technical staff, FOSUN, Jeff Shi, the staff at Molineux have all come together to give us an experience of being at last totally alive when it comes to watching our team. In essence this direction of Nuno can cut back into the past, the present and the future all ensconced in the endless push forwards into the future. It has confused us within the stadium and it has brought opposition fans to a state of apoplexy and confusion which results in an endless tirade of ill thought abuse from them and from the media a typical ham fisted and insult ridden dogma of self destructive polemic crap.

Even if the football and ethos we have is built from the familiar and traditional aspects of the game every single match is used as a building block for the next part of the story, the next match always. We are in a dream world of Nunos making and it will only be when we are awake and the season is finished we will be able to look back and see that Nuno had indeed hypnotised us with his magical skills. We will see that most of the matches were dreams, mixed in with a few nightmares just to balance it out. The stadium is the stage where this whole drama is played out and we watch it with eyes wide until we shuffle out when promotion is gained, we will rub our eyes and wonder what happened, why we are happy and some have tears in their eyes.

The rhythm? Wolves have been temporal in their football this season. Every pass has a beat to it and its own cadence. We watch and the pass here and to there is ordered and defined, hypnotic. We are being lulled by beautiful football that I suspect if we count the passes and the tackles would exactly match our own heartbeats. Thus we are hypnotised and we are taken into a netherworld of Nunos making. In the Lambert and Saunders/Hoddle years we were ostracised from this experience. We never really felt part of the whole thing. The results of course reflected our own disenchantment with the way the club was being run. But we were louder then. We did feel it. but how much did we actually feel if we were pushed away so much by boardroom bullshit? So now our return to the Premiership is seen less as a return to a place where we deserve to be and is our spiritual home but more of an observation at the time that has passed since we were there. See the famous banner unveiled at Cardiff when we were promoted. 19 years. Time has trapped us, it has moved around us and through us even if we were trapped within the stadium and intent on the dramatics of games and transfers etc.

We will travel to the Premiership on a tide of glorious victories but we will enter that place changed. It will not be as it was before. The Premiership will be alien to us and strange because we have suffered for so long being away from it. The cold of Barnsley away and the desolate identikit stadiums around the country will still ache at us and remind us of where we have been but the directions that Nuno has given us ‘forward’ should annihilate the memories of them in the end for sure. But those memories will be relentless. The 1-5 Albion game, the times when we were destroyed by teams evidently more attuned to the ideas of football than Mick Mcarthy ever was. Those pains of the past we drag with us as we travel towards the new dawn of Nunoism. The speed in which he drives us towards success will pull those memories with us in our slipstream.

But even if we can’t escape the memories of the past we can transcend them to some extent and that is what Nuno has given us. We can transcend the memories of the past by making newer more positive ones. Coady slowly raises his arms after his beautiful pass to Helder Costa during the Burton game. Nuno running on the pitch after the Cardiff game, pick any you want. Do you remember turning to your mate on the stands and hugging them tight, shouting in their ear, do you remember singing in the dark streets after a game? The songs we sing? The footballing moments that left us speechless? Now we have to utilise these positive moments to construct a new idea of what we are and how we play football. These are the constructs of positivity that will propel us through the games we will play in the future. The bad memories too. How often have I read on social media posts about games we lost so badly, days where it seemed there was no release from this existence as a sad Wolves fan. The last minute equalisers, the crumbling of our ideas and the days of decrepit dinosaur players and coaches. They are still important and yes, they are building blocks as well. For we have to experience the blackness to understand the light. We transcend the ideas of football by zipping backwards and forwards through the years and experiencing each moment through a photograph, a piece of film, even the corner shop song. Thus transcending we move ourselves higher and higher. Transcend but do we lose a connection with what’s going on at Molineux? Maybe a little. There is so much negativity in the past sprinkled with positive moments that we are confused about our place within the whole idea. I suspect this is why we have Nuno. With him we may look upon this confusing landscape and see specific parts and occurrences, incidents and events, we can make sense of them because Nuno has become an interface for our experiences in the past with our expectation of the future. Surely as well our memories are only made concrete by the scars we have suffered too? These scars I know only too well and they pull you back time and time again to periods of pain. We have been scarred by Morgan and Moxey and we return to them constantly to make sense of this new beginning and Nuno (although he never mentions them) displays their inadequacy by shining that bright light in the darkest shadows of Molineux.

When Nuno runs onto the pitch at Molineux in delight it is he that shows us the connection between those days and these. It is Nuno when showing passion and humility lays bare the stoic ministration and misery of the Moxey years. It is Nuno that connects us to our past although he himself is abstracted from it. It is our love for Nuno that builds a bridge between the future and the past so that we may make sense of all of those years in the wilderness. In these times now we will discover who we are and what our relationship with this club actually is. There will be no more ignorance, no more confusion. We now have the ability to assimilate the past with our future and we may be unstoppable due to this metaphysical transformation of our club and team. Our love for our team will tangle with our own lives and we may see at last how important our club and town is to us as we stumble through this strange trip called life. We will come to know that every tear we spilled in the past is just as important as our joys and laughter. This is art in it’s greatest form. The ability to transcend a mere sporting event, a football match, a few hours sinking beers with people you love is the greatest of art works on a par with the greatest art works ever presented to the world. This art should give us courage for the future and Nuno is the artist that drives this passion. It should give us hope for the trials that come because we now know our team and this place called Molineux is our life and does give us meaning as we gather the madness of the past with the hopes for the future. It’s an art that is total love and will always transcend ideas. In the future most of these feelings may be lost in our day to day lives, destroyed under the forensic eye of the caustic medias and the sports page, the blog and the tweet. It is our duty to save this love and to keep it safe within our own minds as the world outside seeks to trample them under the foot of banality and clicks.

Nuno will see this next few weeks as a challenge and will not let these strange philosophical thoughts endanger his idea. He is a Warrior and that’s what warriors do. But we must hold onto every memory we have of this season to prepare for the next. We do that with trust and love, creativity and dynamism. We must display in the stands around Molineux what Nuno does within it.