Suddenly, it all feels like a bit of a blur.

It was one of a handful of social media posts that reminded the Sheffield Wednesday fanbase that the changing room felt their pain too.

Without a word posted, Di’Shon Bernard summed up the feelings of hundreds of thousands of those of a blue and white persuasion with a Jose Mourinho meme. Taken from a post-match interview in his time as manage of Manchester United, Mourinho’s immortal uttering ‘I prefer not to speak. If I speak, I am in big trouble’ has become something of a shorthand for a situation that has gone passed the ridiculous.

The defender, in the midst of a long rehabilitation from injury, posted the meme in June last year after players and staff had once again gone unpaid as Dejphon Chansiri’s ownership of the club continued to unravel at pace.

Bernard, whose return from a 19 month absence from senior Owls action ended with an EFL Trophy run-out at Salford City last week, sat out the entirety of their desperately difficult campaign last time out. But watching the club fall apart made his own injury struggles all the more painful.

“It's crazy, honestly,” he told The Star. “I got injured, then that stuff happened, not getting paid, staff not getting paid, coming into pre-season and there's no pitches, just a madness, no communication. Everything was really hitting me up, honestly.

“Like I said, everyone was really struggling. It's not easy going in a week in, a week out, last season, playing games, knowing stuff like this is happening. Losing every week, it's hard to mentally keep going, but the boys, the critics, they stuck through it, the managers stuck through it, the fans stuck with us.

“It's crazy to think about where we were, to where we are now, it's one of the biggest things for us. It's just a much happier environment. We've got a new gym, stuff around the training ground, getting done up, even staff coming in, helping us, it's just much, much, much better.”

Though his was one of the more memorable, Bernard wasn’t alone in making his protestations public. His June 3 post received a huge response from a frustrated fanbase and others did similar across a year or more of madness. A few months on, things are looking up at Hillsborough and looking back at the post, he smiled: “I'm hearing things and I'm thinking, no, surely it can't get worse, it can't.

“So you want to hold your tongue a bit, then you're thinking it can't get worse, and you go in the next day, it's gotten worse. Then you're like, okay, we're at a rock bottom now, you can't go below rock bottom. Now we've gone even below rock bottom. I just thought, ‘I'm just going to put it out’. It's unacceptable what happened, it shouldn't happen at any level of football, no one deserves anything like that. I would not wish that on anyone, really.

“It was one of 20 moments I could have sent something. I bit my tongue sometimes. I don't really regret it, because I think I had to do it. It could have been worse.”