"It's not Championship Manager": Garry Monk’s defiant response to suggestion of system change at Sheffield Wednesday
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The Owls travel to second-bottom Wycombe tomorrow hoping a win will take them to within a single point of a coveted zero tally having suffered a 12-point deduction in the summer.
After three consecutive defeats there have been calls for Monk to consider a change to the 3-5-2 system preferred since the end of lockdown, a notion he resisted.
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Hide Ad“You need to stay balanced,” he said. “This is not Championship Manager, this is real football and you have to give players a clear idea around what you’ve worked on all pre-season, what you’ve designed it to be and what they know.
“You don’t change something off a feeling or on a whim, you need to put the players on the pitch with clarity of their role.
“We played with a back four at Birmingham and then we’ve played with three at the back in every other game. It will be a case of what we look at and what we need to do for this game.”
And while the 41-year-old acknowledged the system had been stretched by an incredible wave of bad luck with injuries, particularly in defence, he reiterated the need to provide consistency for his players and said his decisions are based entirely on logic and his experience as a manager.
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Hide Ad“It’s about perspective,” he said. “I don’t go with emotion, I go with perspective and logic. In terms of the disruption we’ve faced in terms of players coming off injured, players being sent off, of course we need to deal with that better.
“I defy any team to have those sort of disruptions and for it to not cause problems.
“All the way up to the Birmingham game we had more or less a settled defensive line, we were producing clean sheets and producing points. Since that disruption we haven’t been able to pick up points. It’s not an excuse but that perspective is needed.”