The best ground to report at in the EFL might shock you - Alex Miller's Sheffield Wednesday column
Sheffield Wednesday battled past Wycombe Wanderers to retain their perfect away record in League One this season. Alex Miller explains why the modest surroundings of Adams Park are a lot of fun.
Rising and stretching from a long car journey with a media colleague, back clicking from two decades of poor dietary decisions and laptop-slouching, something rather miserable protruded from the mouth of your Star correspondent.
“I don’t like this one.”
The car park at Wycombe Wanderers is a gravelly field of protruding weeds that slopes over the top of Adams Park, the view of the stadium’s tree-lined backdrop slightly obscured. It’s one of those annoying distances from Yorkshire that neither constitutes a proper south coast away jolly nor a breezy one. It’s not glamorous, nor is it novelty. It’s all a bit rural and unexciting.
How we forgot. It’s bloody marvellous.
For football reporters who travel the country taking in ground that scale from Leicester City’s King Power to Bromley’s Hayes Lane and in Sheffield Wednesday’s last League One stint from Sunderland to Morecambe, variety is truly the spice of the division. And Adams Park has a feel to it that is joyful and unspoilt and unique - and is the best place to report football in the EFL.
Bear with us. As much as a journalist’s favourite is ourselves, we’ll get to the wider relevance in good time.
The press room is unspectacular and the food is of standard procedure. But the press box? It’s the finest in the land, all cobwebs and tiredness and fold-out table tops you’re not entirely sure are going to withstand the weight of your notepad. It’s situated parallel to the 18-yard box at the end of the ground that houses the away supporters, which as a Sheffield Wednesday scribe offers you a close-up view of one of any away day’s central talking points.
You’re based an underarm throw from the technical area to the point you can hear the odd muttering and can feel the emotional weight that engulfs these professionals. You’re three metres or so from the entrance to the tunnel, which means you can see the contours of anguish in Louie Barry’s face as he’s helped out of sight, the anger in fisticuffs that followed the half-time whistle or the sweat-dappled delight of a win on the road. The Wifi works.
Before the game, supporters gather in a tent to drink flat beer from plastic cups and folk wander around freely in happy conversation. Over the way, tennis is shown on a big screen television as the club makes the best of its environment.
It was sunny and warm and there’s pretty much only one main access route into Adams Park so it brings together a collection of personalities. Hanging around a couple of hours before kick-off this reporter enjoyed chinwags with a viral social media sensation, a BAFTA winner, a CEO and Sam Hutchinson. Having taken a jibe or two from him for the ridiculousness of what it is to be a football reporter in years gone by, the irony of his popular turn on BBC Sheffield was not lost. He’s one of us.
Though their slow start has prompted grumbles and concerns over their ownership have been raised, it feels to be a ground well-suited to its fanbase and its surroundings. It’s got a charm and inside the ground it is more fierce and intimidating than any 10,446-seater ever should be.
For the evening it certainly suited Sheffield Wednesday, whose battling comeback win felt to be an important one on so many levels. But for the evening alone.
That rustic charm is fabulous but it would not work for Wednesday as it would not work for many another club. As, indeed, it didn’t. For too long Hillsborough was run on the seat of its limitations, all grey and basic and crowded by photographs of glories long since past. The old Fan Zone - not dissimilar to those of Wycombe - was a steepling effort on behalf of those who carried it out. But it was one that ultimately become tired and grey.
Much has been committed to these pages about the improvements to hospitality and such and so we won’t comb old ground, but the message is there, that new offerings will be picked up. It drives revenue and produces an environment more befitting the institution. Via entrance delays and pastry absences, every day general admission has had its teething issues under new ownership but will continue to be looked at. It’s every bit as important as those enjoying the finer things. These are early days.
Sheffield Wednesday demands and deserves the best of both worlds and with such massive investment put into Hillsborough, at last they are finally getting it.
Roll on the King Power, roll on an away cup draw at The Emirates. But give me Hayes Road and give me the close-up confines of Adams Park. For reporters and fans alike, the variety of League One is what makes it a special division to wander around in.