How Darren Moore and players ‘shook the tree’ to win three points for Sheffield Wednesday
Stern words were shared at half-time of Sheffield Wednesday’s 2-1 win over Exeter City after a first half performance Owls boss Darren Moore admitted was well below the mark of a team battling for automatic promotion.
Wednesday produced a lacklustre effort in a laboured first 45 minutes and looked to be struggling when Josh Key opened the scoring for the Grecians, who came to Hillsbrough safe from relegation with seven first team players out.
The Owls failed to lay a glove on the visitors until the final moments of the first period but battled back from a goal down to earn three points that keeps them in the automatic promotion hunt - albeit with them looking on hoping Plymouth Argyle or Ipswich Town reverse their incredible form in the coming days.
Asked on their first half performance, Moore was only too happy to give an honest appraisal: “It was just lacking,” he said.
“It just wasn’t there. There were miscontrolled passes, there was no impetus going forward and it was almost like we lost that.
“We really went in and shook the core of the tree. We said to the boys ‘Come on’ and looked at each other in the face. It as us together as a group and we managed to just get that more impetus in the second half.
“Look, everybody is on the same page. My frustration was that we had lasted 45 minutes. That was the frustrating thing.”
And it wasn’t just Moore and his caching staff that expressed their frustration.
A number of players stood up in terms of having their say, Moore admitted. A changing room full of experienced EFL pros was frustrated at their output.
All - as they say - is well that ends well.
“It was all of us together,” he said. “All of us in a group. We knew we couldn’t carry on like that, we were a team at home and we had to go and get it. It was certainly a game of two halves and you saw we were better in that second half and we got it.”