Chris Wilder acknowledges Sheffield United's "fall off a cliff" as Hull City result reinforces size of task at hand
Chris Wilder acknowledges Sheffield United's "fall off a cliff" as Hull City result reinforces size of task at hand
Chris Wilder is no stranger to mammoth tasks in his managerial career but on the pitch at least, he admits that turning around Sheffield United from their current predicament is right up there. Saturday’s 1-0 defeat at Hull City was United’s eighth in nine league games this term, and their third in four since Wilder returned.
It could and should have been a different story, with United hitting the post and then missing a late penalty when Harrison Burrows fluffed his lines after coming off the bench, but that will give Wilder little comfort as he plots a way out of his side’s current plight over the international break.
United’s position at the bottom of the Championship table has seen expectations redefined in many quarters, from a potential promotion push to something of a survival battle, and the Blades’ players have been warned they may “have to go through a bit of pain” before their next Championship game, in a fortnight at home to Watford.
Asked if he was now facing his biggest managerial challenge in a purely footballing sense, after previous experiences in non-league and not being paid while at Northampton Town, Wilder admitted: “Yeah, it's right up there.
Chris Wilder acknowledges Sheffield United's "fall off a cliff" as Hull City result reinforces size of task at hand
“We're 12 weeks behind everybody else, so we're playing catch-up. But I understood the situation when I came back in. I think I said straight away, about the fragility of the team. I think the team is trying and the stats point out that they're running around, they're covering distances.
“I said about the duels before, no-one was putting a foot in. To have that possession, you have to win tackles and win duels, so I don't see anybody pulling out of challenges. It's just that, from that mentality point of view, we're not playing or we're not delivering in those situations that we have done.
“So, yeah, we're playing catch-up. Everybody knows that. The owners know that, I know that. Maybe I was a little bit surprised how much of a cliff we've fallen off since I left, but we have to accept it, we have to get on with it. We have to stick together, we have to work hard, all those things that everybody talks about.
“You have to earn the right to find that little bit of luck. We've got to stick the penalty away, no doubt about it. That would make us feel a little bit better about us, but I would still possibly be saying the same things.
Because of the amount of positions that we've got into today and with the calibre of players that we've got, we have to show that. They found their moment, with a great ball in, and we haven’t. And ultimately, it's decided the game.”
Wilder and his coaching staff now have two weeks to try and find the answers to the ever-mounting list of questions surrounding the Blades at the minute, after the disastrous experiment of appointing Ruben Selles in the summer left them scrambling to recover.
“We're going to have to go through a little bit of pain over these next two weeks on the training ground and as a football club,” Wilder admitted. “Because there's no hiding the fact that one win in nine games is certainly not good enough for us. It's certainly not good enough for me, one win in four. So there's going to be a bit of pain on that.
“We're going to have to suffer a little bit and we're going to have to dig ourselves out of it. Nobody's going to come and wave a magic wand onto everybody and change everything. Nine times out of 10, it comes from work on the training ground. And that’s what we’ll do.”