Alex Miller's column: Introducing The Star's Sheffield Wednesday Player of the Year 2020

Regular readers of this column need not adjust their screens. At the outset of the suspension of football due to the coronavirus it was suggested that Morgan Fox would win this award. But Fletcher, without another ball kicked, took it by a nose.

It was the 14th annual Star Football Awards, this writer’s first and the first in such bizarre circumstances. An evening usually set to a sold-out audience at a glitzy hotel in Sheffield, The Star’s football writing team from across South Yorkshire joined for an evening on Zoom and debated the award winners to a reasonable audience on Facebook.

And so it came to award the Owls player of the year.

The question posed on social media earlier that evening, only three names were offered; Fletcher, Fox and Dominic Iorfa. If a fantasy ‘Player of the Year Podium’ were to be built, that would be the order The Star would place them in, Iorfa third after a largely excellent breakthrough season at the heart of Wednesday’s defence.

At earlier stages of the season it could have been given to Kadeem Harris of Julian Börner, the former a potential Championship player of the year on the evidence of his first couple of months at the club.

But their form dropped off, Harris strangely quiet as the weeks went on with Börner left counting the cost of injuries, suspension and lost form as he and Tom Lees awkwardly held the door open for one another in the selection stakes.

And then there were two. Fox’s tale of redemption is hugely impressive and deserves every credit thrown his way this season, offering an impressively consistent season in which he made left-back his own.

But in the end the coin landed on Fletcher. Top scorer in his most prolific season to date, the only thing standing in his way was that two-month injury.

We all saw how badly he was missed. The Star’s Sheffield Wednesday player of the year – so far – is the excellent Steven Fletcher.