Sheffield Wednesday’s horrible run of form continued at Derby County as they lost 2-1 to make it 30 Championship games without a win.

The Owls were beaten 2-1 at Pride Park after Ben Brereton Diaz and Matt Clarke got the goals for the hosts either side of Jerry Yates’ equaliser. It left them still stuck on -7 points, and the incredibly loud 3.000+ Wednesdayites headed back to Sheffield having witnessed another defeat.

For Henrik Pedersen, he thought his side gave a good account of themselves in Derbyshire, but also bemoaned their decisions in the final action after getting up the pitch.

Henrik Pedersen’s Derby County reaction

“I think we competed really, really well,” he told Radio Sheffield afterwards. “We started the game really well. We were really wrong and organised. We spoke about letting the centre backs have the ball more, because we know both sides aerially are very strong - we know that a big part of the game for them is a lot of crossing. I think we closed town this a lot.

“The other thing we spoke about was the second ball football. They’re strong when there’s a second ball… We competed really well after the 1-0, and we came back into the game strongly - there was no evaluation, only next action. The 1-1 was very deserved, and we were organised for the rest of the first half with some good transitions. But again, the last dribble, the last pass, to make bigger chances, was missing.

“The second half was equal, and I think you can see that the boys tried to do everything to get a result here.”

Wednesday have now gone 30 league games without a win, and only four teams have ever had 30+ consecutive winless games in Football League history. It happened to Crewe Alexandra in 1956-57 (30), Cambridge United in 1983-84 (31), Derby County from September 2007 to August 2008 (36) and Macclesfield Town from January 2012 to October 2018 (36).

The Owls have also lost 13 league games, with Sunderland (January - August 2003) the last side to have a longer losing run in the top-four tiers (17) of English football. Wednesday will be desperate not to set another unwanted record before the current campaign comes to a close.

Next up is a home game against Watford, with Pedersen’s men playing host to the Hornets on Tuesday night in their 37th game of the season.