Scoring goals in blue and white no more - Lee Gregory leaves Sheffield Wednesday with hero status

The experienced forward, whose elongated switch from Sheffield Wednesday to Mansfield Town was confirmed last week, has packed up his things and left Middlewood Road for the final time. He takes with him 29 Wednesday goals, 12 Wednesday assists and a fond relationship with Wednesday supporters forged over three seasons.

It’s not bad work for a man who arrived as a 32-year-old free transfer signing, loaded with a non-existent ‘who know what’ tattoo.

The fact is that he also leaves having played only one minute of football for the club since the end of October. The entrails of his January transfer window are by now well versed and wild internet conspiracy theories over his omission from Wednesday squads over so many months are now long gone. It’s part of the game. Honest football decisions are made, it happens.

Respect seems to have been shown at a training ground level and praise given on his own professionalism in difficult circumstances, but the fact is that it wasn’t the most fitting way for his time at S6 to end.

What’s telling is that such was his impact over his first two seasons in blue and white, conversations around Gregory’s departure from the club have been focused almost entirely on what came before rather than what followed.

Will it be his Wembley cut-back that heads the mental montage of his Hillsborough stint? Or the inspired step-over that put Reece James through for a chunk of the Miracle that even Darren Moore celebrated like an excitable child? He scored a goal of his own in that game of course, one that rolled along the Kop with the drama of that Tiger Woods chip-in, but what of a breathless and typically hard-fought hat-trick at Fleetwood, completed in two minutes of madness that sent the away end into memorable chaos?

These are surely the images Wednesday supporters are left with when thinking of Gregory’s impact on S6 - images set of course to the ear-worming mastery of Norman Greenbaum’s finest work. Gregory is a forward whose finishing ability is undoubted and whose record is League One is strong and Mansfield are getting a striker with a point to prove - as he has done so many times in his career.

Bombed by Sheffield United as a youngster for being too slight, he spent time wondering whether football was for him before battling his way through the marshlands of non-league football to jump from FC Halifax Town to Millwall. He owes Ian Holloway’s wife a wee debt of gratitude for that switch (look it up).

It is perhaps through that road less travelled that a down-to-earth air that resonated with those who have worked with him and those who watched him during his time at S6 was born. Without pushing this column into the realms of a love letter, it’s not too much of a stretch to suggest he chased every ball and thundered into every header with the spirit of a player playing at the Niagara Sports Centre.

As an interviewee, he was - and presumably still is - pleasant and honest, rarely more glowing in conversation than when discussing his scrapped rise from the youth football scrapheap to Wembley via big-money moves and hero status as most of his clubs. He was one of several Wednesday players who would so often stop and take the time to chat with the often freezing press pack after matches - even when the microphones were switched off. The down-to-earth spirit you saw on the pitch was one that continued off it.

Scoring goals in the blue and white no more, there won’t be a single figure connected to Sheffield Wednesday that doesn’t wish him well.