'If everything was perfect..' Sheffield Wednesday boss responds to performance critics
Sheffield Wednesday have won six of their nine competitive matches this season.
Second in the League One table, one win from one in the EFL Trophy - you’d be forgiven for thinking the early stages of the rebuild effort at Sheffield Wednesday was being welcomed as tip-top and hunky dory.
The Owls battled to win-out their opening Jersey Mike’s clash at Salford City on Tuesday evening from behind, overcoming a disjointed first half performance in which eight changes had been made to the side that drew with Stockport County over the weekend. The result means Wednesday are five unbeaten in all competitions but some supporters have raised a degree of concern over the performance levels shown in recent weeks.
An international duty-enforced three-week break from league football has begun and Wednesday have spoken about using the extra time on the training field to get players closer to speed after a rampant summer saw 18 new faces brought into the changing room. They do so on a solid foundation thanks to the results they have picked up - many of which Owls boss Henrik Pedersen has described as ‘culture wins’ at this early stage of proceedings.
Asked if he understood the concern of the supporters who have reservations over performance levels, the Dane admitted the search for more comfortable wins was a work in progress and spoke passionately in telling The Star: “If everything was perfect now after 12 weeks or something.. of course it’s not perfect. We need patience because we are in the beginning. We have 18 new players that we have to bring together. This takes time.
“We are happy with the points we have got and we are happy with the win today. Today in the second half we saw many things that we reproduce again and again - and when you can do this again and again, there is a bigger chance that we can get ‘deep wins’, instead of ‘only wins’.
“In these deep wins you see a team that can reproduce a press situation again and again, with intensity. This is what we have to work on. So when Keillor-Dunn comes from the outside or another player does this, we have more situations where the players think the same - in the same moment.
“Of course they cannot do this so quick. We need more time. But I am sure that in the next three or four weeks we will take the next steps. It is the same in the offensive stuff, you need time to get the same thoughts and time to get a better connection, better relations. We need more training time now and I am sure we will go step by step again.”
The first half of their win at Salford saw the League Two side take 10 shots to Wednesday’s one, which arrived in the final moments of the half. The second half was improved and Davis Keillor-Dunn’s first Owls goal levelled things up following fine work down the left hand side by debutant Joel Akpobi, before fellow debutant youngster Will McPartland played a role in Callum Slattery’s winning of a penalty that Jamal Lowe rolled home to win it.
Eight changes saw a number of players brought in to achieve some much-needed gametime and saw concerns raised online that player intensity was lacking the first half, along with the slickness and cohesion of their pressing. On a lack of bite early on in the game, Pedersen said: “It’s natural.
“Jaden had not played so much, Jarvis has played only under-21 in the last few weeks, Ernie has not played so much, Keillor-Dunn.. They need time. But how they grew into the game and how they found intensity when they were stepping up through the game, that is also why we need some good training weeks where we really bring intensity in.
“It is so the basic intensity is a part of them, it is not something they have to find. They will have it from the first minute and not through 20, 25 or 30 minutes. It was a really good test and it was really important we got the guys a lot of game practice tonight.”
Having celebrated the EFL Trophy win with a sold-out away allocation at the AG Stadium, Wednesday are in the final stages of securing a behind-closed-doors run-out against Championship opposition during the break and will welcome Sunderland u21s to Hillsborough before returning to league action at Huddersfield Town on October 10.