I watched Sheffield Wednesday's win over Leeds United with boycotting fans - and emotions were high
On Tuesday evening thousands of Sheffield Wednesday supporters took the decision to boycott the Owls’ Carabao Cup clash with Leeds United. Alex Miller spent the evening with many of them at Wadsley Bridge Working Men’s Club.
The telling moment came long before Sheffield Wednesday’s school bus had crashed Leeds United out of the Carabao Cup to send the beer garden into delirium. It came before Karl Darlow got his feet in a muddle to give the Owlets into the lead and even before a spirited first half performance got the beer garden believing.
It came a couple of minutes before 8pm, as Sky Sports cameras panned across a barren Hillsborough. In conversation with a table of Wednesday lifers who make trips home and away, to pre-season tours and often to youth matches, there was an tangible moment of anguish. One woman covered her mouth in shock. They wanted to be there, but they just felt they couldn’t fund the thing any longer.
The numbers at a protest viewing from Wadsley Bridge WMC were smaller than anticipated and until the young lads on the screen got things moving, the initial mood of the evening was of sadness. Wandering the picnic tables and chatting to those present there was certainly an undercurrent of anger. Above all there was a pensiveness, a strangeness to the feeling of not being in those seats. There was a pride to it, too, a feeling that grew and grew as the Owlets nobbled Leeds’ bevvy of internationals. These were faces of the hard core simply saying ‘no more’.
Kids in last season’s Wednesday shirts kicked balls about between desperate slurps of fizzy pop and more elderly fans supped ale inside, unable to brave the cold. A chinwag with one gentleman of a certain vintage returned childhood stories of watching half the pitch from a vantage point on Parkwood Springs in the 1950s and a trip to Wembley in 1966. He felt he couldn’t bear to spend any more money while Dejphon Chansiri still owned his club.
Wednesday’s malaise is causing headaches within households. One mother described the ongoing battle in explaining to her young daughter why the family have chosen not taken season tickets this season and why they won’t be buying up-to-date retail items from the club shop. “We’ve had a season ticket for the last six years,” she said. “She’s still nagging me to get her one but I will not give that man a penny. She’s my daughter, she gets what she wants, I’d do anything for her. But not that.”
One man described how he had fallen out with his brother and best friend over their decision to attend the match just a mile down the road, describing them as ‘scabs’ with only a small hint of jest. One die-hard confessed he had stopped even heading out to away days because his love for the club had been ‘hacked at’ by the attitude of Chansiri towards him as a supporter. The message was strong in what the breaking point had been for many; late payments to club staff. Everyone seemed to know someone who worked there. The club is a village they want to make a stand for.
They’d been gathered on the suggestion of the Sheffield Wednesday Supporters Trust, who in the days previous had found themselves once again at the centre of a social media storm alongside other members of the notorious Supporters Engagement Panel. If defiance in unity is what is being aimed at, this week missed the target only slightly less than a Dominic Calvert-Lewin spot kick. There’ll be efforts made to pull fan groups back together in the coming days.
While the numbers at the Working Men’s may well have been thinner than anticipated, there’s no doubt the boycott was effective beyond all initial expectations. An official attendance topped out at 7,801 supporters, with around 3,700 of those in the away end. There is no record of any Hillsborough crowd of less than 20,000 for any match against Leeds United. Sting as it may have for those watching from elsewhere, it certainly provided a powerful image through television screens.
“It’s not about how many people have turned out here, it’s about the number of people who haven’t turned out at Hillsborough,” Trust chair Ian Bennett - missing his first match at Hillsborough since 1986 - told The Star. “The people who have gone, I can’t knock them, that’s their choice. But if anything does happen to the club, you’ve got to think maybe can they look at themselves and think whether they did everything right? People make their own choices and that’s fine, I don’t have a beef with it. I understand.
“Look at the ground. You’d expect at least 20,000 for a game against Leeds. It will send a message that supporters are staying together, we’re getting something out of it. We need to get this guy out, that’s the top and bottom of it. Those images from tonight are sad, we don’t want to be doing this. We’re a proud club at the end of the day. But the message is that we won’t fund it anymore. It’s as simple as that.”
It was an evening at Wadsley Bridge Club that seemed foreign to the vast majority of those present. By the time the penalty shootout had come around, every passion that would have been expressed in the stands was delivered that mile up the road; shirts removed, grown men leaping, kids running in every direction.
Whatever your viewpoint, these are Sheffield Wednesday die-hards doing what they believe is necessary to improve the future of their football club, no matter how much it stings.
Our man Chris Holt spent the evening at Hillsborough, where the feeling of strangeness continued. Read his take on the night - I watched Sheffield Wednesday beat Leeds United at a deserted Hillsborough and one word summed it up