Sheffield Wednesday’s most important player?

Fletcher is currently enjoying his best league campaign since bagging 13 goals for Hibernian over a decade ago in 2007/08, and another goal – should football return – would see it become his highest-scoring campaign to date.

With 24 goals over the last two seasons, ‘Fletch’ has seriously staked his claim for a new deal at Hillsborough, so it’s no shock that renewing his contract is high up the priority list of Wednesday management as they prepare for 2020/21.

So important has the Scotsman been, that Garry Monk’s side have won just twice in the 11 league games that he has been forced to miss this season due to injury – that’s an 18% win ratio without him – but have lost only eight of the 26 (with a win ratio of 42%) in which he’s played. He’s also scored four match-winning goals.

In fact, only six teams in the league have been as heavily reliant on one single goalscorer in 2019/20, with Fletcher scoring 28.3% of the Owls’ 46 goals, and also contributing a couple of assists along the way – taking his direct goal contributions to 32.6%.

Just Aleksandar Mitrovic (Fulham – 44.2%), Karlan Grant (Huddersfield Town – 35.6%), Lewis Grabban (Nottingham Forest – 35.4%), Ollie Watkins (Brentford – 34.4%), Cauley Woodrow (Barnsley – 33.3%) and Jarrod Bowen (Hull City – 32.7%) have scored a higher percentage of their team’s goals than the Wednesday forward, and all of them have played at least three games more than him.

At 33, Fletcher is not getting any younger, but the fact that he has hit double figures in three of his four seasons at Hillsborough – with this season being his best in over a decade – suggests that he’s still got plenty to give.

It was recently agreed that the former Sunderland and Wolverhampton Wanderers man was the Star’s SWFC Player of the Season, and the stats suggest that he deserves to get a chance to defend that title in 2020/21.