Perspective is needed on the smouldering bonfire Dejphon Chansiri left behind at Sheffield Wednesday
An impressive Sheffield Wednesday fell to defeat at home to an under-par Preston North End on Saturday. Here’s Alex Miller’s view on the afternoon - and the conversation that followed.
Possession. xG. Shots. Touches in the opposition box. Passes. Passing accuracy. Successful crosses. Successful final third passes. Tackles. Tackle success percentage; all metrics by which Sheffield Wednesday bested Preston North End on Saturday afternoon. Unfortunately, the only one that truly mattered finished in favour of the Lancastrians. The Owls were magnificent, but lost. And with that brewed a cocktail of emotions from sections of the Wednesday fan base.
The entrails of a shoddy showing in the Steel City derby are fading but remain. Scrap was shown at Millwall in midweek and was matched with quality at Hillsborough this weekend. In the hour after an exhausted Wednesday conspired to lose a game they dominated for the most part, an emotional Henrik Pedersen faced a degree of dissent in his expression of pride in amongst his huge frustration at how things had played out. For the first time, the days since that sorry Sheffield United date have seen quiet-but-rising criticism of the man who has taken on surely the most difficult job in English football.
The argument has been made more than a few times online that while the depth isn’t there, actually, the line-ups Wednesday have put out this season are reasonable and competitive ones at Championship level. That line-up includes a 20-year-old holding midfielder playing as a right-back that spent a month-and-a-half out of Carlisle United squads earlier this year. It includes a talented young forward who not long ago found himself in a battle for minutes at Lincoln City.
Its goalkeeper is third or fourth choice at a League One club and over half the senior appearances on the CV of Saturday’s goal-getter have been made in the colours of Stevenage and Newport County. Others barely got a look in in Wednesday’s midtable finish last season.
This shouldn’t be read as a flippant or disparaging summation of Wednesday’s individuals, rather a point (however clumsily made) on how impressive an effort it has been that those individuals have stepped up to the scrap of Championship football to the extent that the Owls have been in the vast majority of their games this season. Of the players you would pin as bona fide second tier players, Yan Valery is having to play out of position, Max Lowe has had to play far more than you’d think would be medically advised and Barry Bannan is a 35-year-old man haring through 180 minutes of football in six days with a bandage on his knee.
Now, with the bogey man beaten back to Bangkok and the euphoria of his exit draining, the man charged with holding this lot together is coming in for creeping criticism on social media and on radio phone-ins. Saturday saw his beleaguered side fade in the second half and the central critique was that he could and should have made changes earlier; Liam Cooper and Nathan Redmond were the first changes and arrived in the 79th minute, introduced after Preston had taken the lead.
Pedersen explained afterwards that medics had advised neither could play more than 15 minutes for notable risk of injury. In what was the pursuit of a win in a season that will likely offer rare opportunities to achieve them, the question remains whether their introduction on the hour could have provided the experience and confidence necessary to see the game out would have been a risk worth taking. From the comfort of an armchair, seat or the press box it certainly was.
But Wednesday are having to be doubly, triply careful not to further reduce their squad. In modern football, physical strain is carefully monitored and the situation is such that behind the scenes, the training schedules of many players have been reduced to their bare bones in an effort to hold the squad together. That the premature introduction of two players who have barely strapped-on a pair of shinpads in the last few months was seen as the best way to win a game of Championship football serves as yet another reminder of how full of holes the good ship Wednesday really is.
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Whether or not Pedersen is the man to take Sheffield Wednesday into its bold post-Chansiri era will be a question for its new owners and may be subject to how things go on the other side of the new year. But it’s not one for now.
Nobody would suggest every decision is beyond reproach. But after passing-up the summer advances of a cushty assistant manager’s gig at Brentford, after helping Bannan to convince the likes of Valery and Svante Ingelsson to stay on and in building a culture at Middlewood Road that has retained and enhanced the club’s dignity in such perilous circumstances, it could be argued that the Dane deserves a little more slack than he is being afforded by a creeping section of the Wednesday fan base.
The naming of those new owners will deliver a fresh look to this Sheffield Wednesday season and their implementation in the weeks after will lead into the possibility of involvement in a January transfer window. These are the dog days of the campaign during which there is only football to focus on. And the results aren’t fun.
But from one seat in the press box, more perspective is needed on the smouldering bonfire Dejphon Chansiri left of Sheffield Wednesday. Defeats at Millwall and at home to Preston North End aren’t anything for a football team to aspire to, but given everything learned on the journey that has been 2025, heart and soul are so vitally important. Derby pain aside, that lot are giving it everything. And yes, that’s something to be proud of.