27 years on: Derby hero Mark Bright and Blades' Kevin Gage remember Sheffield Wednesday's FA Cup semi-final win over Sheffield United

Because on this day all those years ago the people of the steel city had more important things to focus on than an afternoon’s shopping or a tour of the city’s boozers. Sheffield, for one day only, had packed up and moved to London for the 1993 FA Cup semi-final between Wednesday and United.

It was the ultimate derby. Wednesday, the footballing side of the two boasting the likes of Waddle, Sheridan and Harkes in midfield, had already booked a trip to Wembley for the League Cup final two weeks later.

By their own admission, Dave Bassett’s Blades were the workmanlike underdogs, the upstarts sat in 18th place in the Premier League. The Owls were fourth.

Mark Bright and Kevin Gage, protagonists from both side of the blue/white divide that day, agree that it was a build-up unlike any other. Bright, of course, scored Wednesday’s extra-time winner in the historic 2-1 win.

Speaking to The Star, he said: “It was just incredible. The build-up was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before or since I think.

“There is such an edge to those games, every derby has a slightly different feel I think, but the Sheffield one just bubbles away at you.

“It is just such a big game you know you have to win. People talk about the derbies that have happened before and who did what and who scored the winner.

“If you score the winning goal, you go down in history, it’s as simple as that. To be one of the people to have done that, looking back on it now? Incredible.”

There had been controversy over where the game would be played, with Elland Road initially offered up as the obvious option. Despite Bassett’s lobbying for a money-spinning Wembley date, it was felt that the billiard-table surface beneath the twin towers would serve as a better fit for Wednesday. And so it turned out.

Gage said: “We’d have been far, far better off from a footballing point of view on what was quite a poor Elland Road pitch at the time.

“That was the way Bassett set his teams out to play and it got us a lot of success. We were under no illusions that Wednesday were the better side, but we managed to have some success against them a number of times before. We went in confident that we could turn them over again.”

It wasn’t to be for the boys from S2. Chris Waddle scored in the second minute and although an Alan Cork goal at the death of the first-half levelled things up, Wednesday controlled the tie throughout.

“It set the tone for the whole match,” Gage said on Waddle’s wonder strike. “It was going to be a difficult enough match anyway, with the quality Wednesday had at the time, but when you go a goal down it puts you on the back foot.

“We just could not get any play going at all. They got hold of the ball and knocked it around and didn’t give us a kick. They really dominated.

“On a personal level at no stage did I think ‘we could nick this’, it was almost about hanging on and getting to a replay, starting afresh.”

For much of the match, the Owls huffed and puffed but blew little down. Chances came and went, Blades keeper Alan Kelly played one of the matches of his career and the match was in danger of slipping through their grasp. Until the 110th minute, a Wednesday corner and Bright’s goalward header.

Unlike Gage, Bright admitted the longer it went on, the more they feared a United sucker-punch.

“You just knew you were in for a fight. Whoever took a step back was going to go on to lose that game, that’s how it was drilled into us but to be honest we knew that anyway.

“Bassett’s sides were always horrible to play against but we could handle ourselves alright, too.

“They would never stop running and we had to match that. Make no mistake, we had the better team, Chrissy Waddle was just incredible that day, but it was always going to be a battle, I remember that.

“The way it all happened was very satisfying, obviously. The atmosphere afterwards was phenomenal.”

Gage, obviously, has more sombre memories.

“Wednesday had had so many chances and Kelly had kept us in it,” he said.

“What does hurt a bit is that defending corners were something we really prided ourselves in. For Wednesday to score from a straightforward header from a corner was really disappointing, to be honest with you.

“A lot of us were off form and didn’t play as well as we could have done. But I put it down to Wednesday’s quality to be fair. It was tough for us to get back into the game.

“They just seemed to get better and better and Waddle was quality on the day. He dictated the way the game was played.”

It was the first of four Wembley dates in two months for Wednesday in what was a halcyon period under Trevor Francis. They would go on to lose a final replay to Arsenal, but took home bragging rights that live on nearly three decades later.

“It’s about seizing opportunities,” Bright said. “You put the hard work in and it starts to come that bit easier, you start to think you’ll never get beaten. We had that at times and we had that at Wembley. It was a hell of a feeling.”