The time is coming for Sheffield Wednesday to pull it together and start showing more swagger, writes Alex Miller.

The natives are getting restless. Sooner or later, the feeling is that Sheffield Wednesday need to start showing more.

In a world of black and white, binary opinion where everything is either so orgasmically wonderful it deserves glitterball hero worship or it is so pitiful and disgraceful it deserves unrelenting public humiliation, it might just be that the Owls are doing ‘alright’. Seventh, unbeaten since August, sticking in there despite patchy performance, but lacking.

In one of the toughest games on the calendar, Wednesday outstripped hosts Huddersfield Town on Saturday on metrics of possession, shots, touches inside the opposition box, xG, successful final third passes etc and so on. All the numbers suggest a dominant, chest-out away performance. And yet. The first hour was a trudge in which the hosts had them where they wanted them, the final half-hour a blitz of shots and flurry amid Huddersfield retreat.

Placed in isolation, the balance of performance, drama, resolve and result would have surely been welcomed. The scenes in the away end come 5pm certainly showed as much. Henrik Pedersen’s post-match ascertain that teams don’t tend to come to West Yorkshire and dominate the Terriers is of course a fair one. A 2-2 draw at the Accu Stadium is a dandy result.

But off the back of those goalless snores against Wigan Athletic and Stockport County, the hope was that there would be more threat to the Owls in the bulk of the game - and that a side that entered the 59th minute with 61.3% possession might have at some stage taken the opportunity to take a shot. Some 29.07% of Wednesday’s 605 completed passes were played forward, compared to 47.13% of Town’s more circumspect total of 261. There’ll be further work on verticality this week, you’d suspect.

The thing that football debate and indeed world debate misses these days is an acceptance that many things can be true. Sheffield Wednesday are far from the finished product because they are a brand new outfit with several key players having arrived late on in the transfer window. Injuries to their two left-sided players, one of which their star man, have disrupted what appeared to be a good thing growing. Patience has been requested from the higher-ups and is indeed required. The results are sound.

And yet at the same time, it feels as if they need to find a way to get going. More fizz, more pop, more swagger, more cohesion, more consistently. Fabulous as it was, Bromley suddenly feels like an outlier in a season that has seen inches fought for rather than taken. As was written before a ball had been rolled, no matter the circumstances and no matter how fair it may be, a club such as Wednesday in a division such as League One demands a certain level of panache.

The last fella to have a craic earned 96 points, won promotion with a four-goal comeback and yet is still regarded by some as a failure. It’s a chuffing tough school that few third tier clubs will have to contend with, but it’s the reality and it comes with the privilege of being able to write ‘Sheffield Wednesday’ on a CV.

Given the scale of the mission and the base from which it all started, these are very early days. Given an injury to their star man, it’s perhaps natural that their green shoots of attacking joie de vivre have shrivelled and that they are searching for an answer. Given many had forecasted a midtable dwelling this season, perhaps this start is brighter than it might feel.

Points without performance is fine. Performance without points is encouraging. It’s the threat of a spell without either that lingers. At this club in this division, the demand is that sooner or later you produce both simultaneously and that’s the cold reality. With so many games coming so thick and fast there is an opportunity for Wednesday to build the aesthetic momentum to go alongside the results.

As ever, there’s a lot to consider. This whole thing needs patience and at the same time, as supporter concern bubbles, Wednesday need to start clicking. Many things can be true.