Paolo Di Canio opens up on the push that kickstarted the Premier League exile of Sheffield Wednesday

What he had no way of knowing is what a seismic moment in Sheffield Wednesday history it would be. For many, it is seen as the moment life as a Premier League club unravelled at Hillsborough.

The score was 0-0, the visitors to Hillsborough title-favourites Arenal. The first thread came loose as Gunners icon Patrick Vieira tumbled to the ground with Wednesday midfielder Wim Jonk.

A push, a shove and a coming together followed. It was a fairly routine scramble in the terms of England football’s top tier in the 90s, especially with Vieira, a World Cup winner just a few months before, in the vicinity. Known for his gentle approach to confrontation he was not.

Enter Di Canio, for once, calm in the face of a brewing storm and keen to settle things down with just a couple of minutes to go until half-time.

“I tried to stop it and push them away,” he told Sky Sports. “At the same moment, Martin Keown came and in an intelligent and malicious way tried to push away Patrick and use his elbow in my face.”

“I tried to grab his neck, his eyes, and kick his leg,” says Di Canio. “That was a stupid but instinct reaction.”

A red card followed. Nothing extraordinary yet, you might think. History, of course, followed.

“When I saw Paul Alcock, in a rash moment, put in my face the red card, I lost my temper,” he says. “I lost everything.

“I thought to myself ‘I had received the elbow, felt this pain and also you punish me?’

“I pushed him away - without any violent conduct. It was a push, which was wrong.”

Alcock stumbled to the floor.

A shocked Hillsborough was agog and immediately there was a sense that something truly incredible had happened. Half-time came and went and by the time Jonk had slid the ball to Lee Briscoe for an 89th-minute Owls winner, the enigmatic Italian was on his way to Heathrow airport.

“I took the car, I went to Heathrow,” he says. “Someone at the club told me to go to Italy straight away because it will take a few days to realise what is going on.”

The story was front-page news, Di Canio’s turbulent, big-name history providing the perfect storm for the tabloid press, who also took another angle; did Alcock take a dive?

The referee, who sadly died in 2018, recounted the incident some years later, repeatedly referring to Di Canio as ‘the Italian’. Di Canio insists the pair had spoken amicably since.

“The Italian threw the toys out of the pram,” he said. “It looked silly at the time and I don’t want to play it back or look at it, but at the time I was off balance.

“There was no way you would feign something like that on national TV. I was unbalanced.

“I ended up being the rogue in the whole thing. I had TV crews outside my house when I got home that night with my four-year-old son asking me to get the Queen to send them away.

“I suppose if it wasn’t Di Canio, people would not remember me as a referee, so I have something to thank the Italian for. I was in the wrong place at the time, shoved by the wrong Italian.

“I refereed the next Saturday, but it took me a couple of weeks to get my head around it.

“There was so much written about it, but nobody ever spoke to me about it.

“I’ve Bill Clinton to thank really. His affair with Monica Lewinsky took me off the front pages!”

While Alcock continued refereeing, Di Canio was not so lucky. He was slapped with an 11-match ban and his Wednesday career left in tatters as the club, in his eyes, failed to support him.

“Not one phonecall for the first two weeks,” he said. “I started calling to try and understand, I wanted to come back, train with the team.

“I didn’t kill anyone. You punish me, fine me - OK, but I want to stay in England. They forced me to stay in Italy.

“I wanted more fines than matches, I asked them to defend me, I wanted to reduce the 11 matches. They didn’t defend me. I went back with solicitors to try to help, they didn’t support me. At the end I said ‘now you have to sell me’.

“That was the only time I didn’t have any regret because they treated me as badly as you can imagine. Only after I thought about the fans, who were good to me. But I felt so betrayed that I had a pain, an anger inside, that I couldn’t put one foot in that dressing room anymore. My decision was made.”

Di Canio was sold on to become a legend at West Ham and while Wednesday finished in midtable that season, the threads were tugged away more easily from that moment on.

Spiralling debts and general mismanagement put Wednesday in freefall and Wednesday were relegated in the 1999/00 season.

The Owls recorded one win in their first 17 league matches, by which time they had sold Di Canio’s equivalent in genius and nationality Benito Carbone.

Dozens of other factors there undoubtedly were, but many see Di Canio’s push as the ‘Franz Ferdinand’ moment of Wednesday’s malaise.

Two decades on are yet to return to English football’s top table.