Sheffield Wednesday new man to test fitness in behind-closed-doors run-out days from Portsmouth opener

The exercise will feature many of those who didn’t get the benefit of an extended run-out in Saturday’s friendly at Wigan Athletic.

A handful of senior players have suffered from a touch of tightness over the past few weeks as their training workload has been increased and so have missed matches, with their conditions carefully monitored by Wednesday staff throughout.

One such player is Michael Smith, who missed out on friendlies with Bournemouth and Rayo Vallecano on precautionary measures before regaining fitness to come off the bench for the last few minutes at Wigan.

And it is hoped involvement in today’s run-out will give Smith the added boost he needs to take part in the weekend’s clash against his former club.

Moore told The Star: “He’s come back into training at the end of the week, we managed to give him some minutes at the end [of the Wigan run-out], and he’ll come back into training.

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“He’ll train Monday, we’ve got this other game on Tuesday, he’ll get sufficient minutes then and that gives him enough time to build into the game [vs Portsmouth].

“We’ll take a look at him for the rest of the week and go from there.

“We went with Greggers and Josh, we decided to give them the minutes and then on Tuesday you’ve got Sylla, Smith, Paterson. That’s where they’ll get those competitive minutes in.”

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