Sheffield Wednesday man makes Owls admission but has sights set on ’14 cup finals’

The 31-year-old has had to bide his time at Hillsborough under Danny Röhl, not always playing as much as he’d like, but as the club prepare for a huge game against Millwall this weekend he says that the German ‘energised’ the team on his arrival.

Ihiekwe admits that the way Wednesday’s start to life in the Championship played out under Xisco gave them a lot of work to do, however there is hope that they can turn things around in the time that they have left.

Speaking to The Star ‘Icky’ said, “As a player you want to play at the highest level possible, but obviously we want to have won more games. You don’t want to be losing, no matter what league you’re in, but the club wants to be as high as possible and the players want to play at the best level that they can as well. So yeah, personally, I relish the challenge of the Championship - and I think the other lads do too…

“Of course the start set the team back, because football is about confidence isn’t it? You go through bad runs and confidence can dip, and I think that’s what happened at the start of the season. But the gaffer came in and energised us a lot, and I think you can see that the performances now are a lot better than at the start of the season.

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“There are still things we can improve on a lot, of course, and it does have an effect. We’ve now got 14 games - 14 cup finals - to get results to try and get out of the situation that we’re in.”

Wednesday could cut the gap on safety to four points if they’re successful at the Den tomorrow, and Ihiekwe - who has been involved in relegation scraps with the likes of Rotherham United and Tranmere Rovers - will be hoping that he’s able to play his part in picking up three valuable points in the Owls’ challenging promotion push.