Blimey - Yet another night of chaos for a barmy football club they call Sheffield Wednesday

The last year tells you that, a constant and head-banging zoom-in on the madness that is Sheffield Wednesday. From a year ago and the rise of the Peterborough immortals to the worst start to a season in the club’s long and storied history. More recently, from the abject nature of their defeat at Middlesbrough to the towering win at QPR.

Even more recently, from a first half in which they stepped on the pointy end of every rake they could in a first half that saw them booed into the changing room 2-0 down to Norwich City - to a second half that roused the terraces into roaring belief. Inside 90 minutes, they were dreadful and delightful, infuriating and enrapturing. If there is a barmier club out there, we haven’t been watching it closely enough. It’s utter, at times unbearable chaos. And it all adds to the fun.

Let’s start, as most people tend to, at the beginning.

Norwich are a very good Championship football side; form that may well see them hit the play-offs after a sluggish start to the campaign is proof of that. There was further proof on the night - they were excellent in that first 45.

Had Wednesday gone 2-0 down to the Canaries due solely to the sort of swaggering football that has got them to that position, few would have grumbled. Alas. Their first 20 minutes served as an act of self-harm; a long throw not dealt with, a pass out from the back fudged. Norwich aren’t the sort of side to pass-up on opportunities such as those.

A word on playing out from the back. The fact is that in the top two divisions of English football, it’s here to stay. Championship football has changed while Wednesday were away and the anomalies of sides having success in the division with longer-ball methodology are fast becoming extinct - if they haven’t already.

The shift in Wednesday’s style to a high-intensity, at times high-risk style of play has pulled them up from a place of abject relegation certainty, but when it is executed as such and when a side like Norwich punish it so clinically, it’s not at all difficult to understand why the groans while playing out from the back are so audible. Naturally, the successes don’t get as much airtime as the failures.

Danny Röhl and his coaching staff were animated throughout on a sliding scale of miffed to apoplectic and to see four substitutions at half-time was no major shock. Some may have been through leg-saving ideal, some through performance. And while the early, lung-busting chase-and-chase of Callum Paterson roused Hillsborough into life as the back of minds shifted to the increasing likelihood of faraway road trips to Stevenage and Northampton, few could have seen what was going to come. Even, perhaps, in a game being played out on the pitch of that barmy football club on Penistone Road.

Paterson was one of those four changes. Alongside him Will Vaulks, Pol Valentin and Kristian Pedersen. And in their own ways, they helped change a game that for so long showed no sign of being changed. Whether a lung-bust, a whipped-in cross or a wave of arms to the crowd, they contributed to another bit of Hillsborough chaos.

The final night of the 2022/23 season played under floodlights at S6 was quite probably the most unbelievable evening of those played out by Wednesday. On the night they celebrated their 5,000th league fixture, there’s no adrenaline-enhanced suggestion that their 2-2 draw with Norwich City on Tuesday evening compares to that. But in the breath taking little moments, given the importance of what played out, there might be an argument to suggest the last final night of the 2023/24 season played under floodlights could hold a candle.

In the end it was the two Mikes. Those from down’t road, brought in to secure promotion from League One. Those who some have argued don’t have the attributes for the Championship. Those who have spent time on the side lines under both the Owls’ managers this season. A Michael Ihiekwe header on 78 minutes, a Michael Smith header on 85. Hillsborough, a den of ire for so much of the evening, turned to a picture of fierce belief.

As if to throw up more excitement, Huddersfield Town blew a lead at Preston North End to go down 4-1. Wednesday’s point lifted them to 22nd place - for the time being at least - and level on points with the Terriers.

They looked down and out. It looked like an evening to chalk down to experience and one that tipped the relegation scales in the wrong direction. But as Wednesday supporters left the ground with heads spinning from another night of chaos, their survival chances were kept very much alive, enhanced, even.

Blimey. It’s never dull, is it?