Matt Hamshaw’s first stint at Sheffield Wednesday ended in tears. Now he’s leading a fresh charge at S6.

On Sunday morning, Matt Hamshaw will walk through the doors of Hillsborough stadium ready to take on what could prove to be the final match of his tenure as Sheffield Wednesday interim manager.

It’ll be an outing that brings him full circle on another wander into the stadium on May 30 2005, when full of the joys of being crowned a King of Cardiff he reported for what was assumed to be a routine meeting to kick off discussions over a new contract. Having started both play-off semi-finals before picking up and injury that kept him out of a dramatic and promotion-securing final, he’d be a Championship player the next time he was in.

The car was running and his suitcases were packed. He’d arranged the meeting for the morning so he could head off on his summer holidays to continue the celebrations. A few minutes later, he was in floods of tears in the Hillsborough corridors. He was to be released.

A Rotherham United fan in boyhood with strong family links to Millmoor, Hamshaw never played for the Millers. He regards that as his club, but having come through the youth ranks at S6 via England schoolboy recognition and into the first team, so too Wednesday. He passed up opportunities to move to other clubs home and abroad since leaving his role as Rotherham manager in April. The Owls switch was one he wanted.

Re-joining the club in August, the feeling was that he was a club hire after a process to bring in League One experience and set piece nous. Like others, Hamshaw hopes to have a future at Wednesday well beyond the new dawn of fresh management and for any new boss hoping to tap into the knowledge of a four-time promotion-winner from the division, they’re well set. For now he’s looking at this weekend not as a goodbye or as a victory lap, rather as an important job to be done.

Behind-the-scenes staff recall the spritely winger as a cocky teenager making his way in the first team. Legendary Middlewood Road figures such as John Murray have gone from coach driver to kit assistant via umpteen other roles in the decades passed. For Hamshaw, it’s a pleasant feeling to be leading the Owls into another Hillsborough clash - this time against Blackpool.

“They remember me being a player and they're like, ‘we just can't believe it!’” Hamshaw told the media. “Things like that are kind of nice. It will probably be a few weeks before I look back on it because I'm just that focused in this moment to try and get wins. I was disappointed straight after (Tuesday night’s 1-1 draw with Cambridge United) and when I'd spoken to you guys that we didn't get three points the other night. We're now going to another game Sunday and then obviously we've got a FA Cup and the Football League trophy to look forward to. So it's just ‘head down’. I don't think I've looked back and thought, ‘wow’...

“I just feel like I owe something back to the football club to try and get it back to where it was. I was part of that when I was in the Premier League, in the Championship and then League One and then we went back to the Championship. It felt like I only had a couple of real good days at this football club as a player in six years, which is sad, but that's the truth of it. I want to give the fans something back that we can hold on to and really take this club back to the heights it should be at.”

Hamshaw the youngster saw the first crumbling of Wednesday from Premier League contenders to the third tier. As a near-neighbour at the New York Stadium and latterly at Pride Park, he has watched on as the gruesome impact of accelerated demise came again. Now he sees the new ownership as a route back north, to the sort of status Wednesday’s heritage and fanbase should demand.

He first told The Star the story of his initial Wednesday departure over Zoom, drinking a bottle of beer in his garden with the world around locked in the clutches of pandemic. Then Paul Warne’s man at the New York Stadium, any prospect of a rebirth at S6 must have felt a faraway notion. And yet here he is. The job isn’t to rip up the methods of Pedersen or instil a new football philosophy inside the two or maybe three matches he is instructed to take, but on Sunday he can play a heightened role in pushing the mission forward for the next man.

“It's dead weird,” he said. “Just coming back here, just driving on the same roads to come here. It’s weird but nice. It's been a couple of months I've been back, but it feels like I've been back forever in a nice way. So I've really enjoyed it. I've really enjoyed the feel all the staff have given me, I've enjoyed working with the players. I just think the reason that I came back to this football club was because I can see the foresight of the club.

“I can see what the owners are trying to do. I can see the director of football, the chief exec. I can see the work at Hillsborough. I can see the work happening at the training ground here. And I know they want to win and I know they want to be successful, that's why I've come here. I could have gone to other clubs. But I just feel like this club is going to get back to what it can achieve and what it can be like.”

For someone who spent so long at Hillsborough and visited the away dugout from time to time throughout his coaching career, it came as a source of amusement to Hamshaw that upon re-joining the club he was invited to take a tour of the stadium. The ground remains a work in progress but the huge differences he witnessed - both cosmetic and in terms of infrastructure - made him take notice.

For all the uncertainty and speculation around which manager is chosen and to what immediate standards this Wednesday squad should be held to, it is those efforts that Hamshaw believes will lay the true groundwork for what is to come.

He smiled: “I went down and I saw the passion of the staff down at the Hillsborough and the things that have changed. Hirsty’s Bar, the beer pumps behind the Kop that never had any running water - these are things that needed sorting. I know people laugh, but they weren't. I knew season ticket holders who come to games and say, ‘oh, they couldn't do this, they couldn't do that’. And you see now what is happening.

“It’s something I want to be part of and that's why I've come back to the football club. The club is in amazing hands now. I know it's been negative this last, whatever it is, because every time you picked a paper up or read an article, it was a lot of negativity. And it's nice to see it positive. And it's important that we all embrace that change.

“Things don't just happen straight away, but it is moving in the right direction.”

Sunday’s match-up with the struggling Tangerines is a match-up Hamshaw is focusing on. But after departing for his jollies in tears some two decades ago, the experience of taking charge - furthermore being part of the intended recovery of Sheffield Wednesday - is one not lost on him.