The story of Pavel Srnicek's Sheffield Wednesday signing, five years on from the tragic death of the Newcastle United icon

Brought in to replace the larger-than-life Ron Atkinson after his own former boss had kept them up against all odds the season before, Wilson’s Owls were in the midst of a media snowstorm after Paolo Di Canio’s pushing of Paul Alcock and subsequent suspension.

That day at Highbury had provided their most recent of three league wins that season, too, in a results sheet that had seen them lose the six by the time the final whistle was blown on a lacklustre 1-0 defeat to Coventry City on October 18.

Wilson sensed the need for change. Despite the presence of Kevin Pressman, the Owls’ undisputed number one since the departure of Chris Woods some years earlier, he wanted increased competition in the goalkeeping department.

But money was tight and weeks into his search for gloved reinforcements, the Wednesday manager began to sense a wild goose chase. Leafing through the contents of his in-tray most mornings, the football world had delivered information on a host of affordable, available goalkeepers – including a 40-year-old Neville Southall – but nothing quite fit.

Until one day he picked up the phone and heard mention of a familiar name; that of former Newcastle United goalkeeper and Czech Republic international Pavel Srnicek.

Speaking to The Star ahead of today, the fifth anniversary of Srnicek’s death, Wilson picks up the story: “You’ve always got information coming in about all sorts of players, whether that’s from your own people or agents or what have you. And most of the time things come in and you say thanks very much and just throw it away.

“We’d put feelers out about perhaps needing a goalkeeper, we’d had calls from some agents calling us up and telling us they’d got just the man. We were having to tell them they weren’t good enough.

“One day Pav’s name came up and immediately I said that would be something for us to look at. So we got him over.”

An icon at Newcastle having made 150 league appearances across seven years in the North East, Srnicek had been released in the summer to make way for the emerging Shay Given.

Unable to immediately find a suitable new club, the then 30-year-old chose to bide his time and travelled back to the Czech Republic, training and playing on a non-contract basis for his first club Banik Ostrava.

Injury to Pressman had seen Wednesday step up their search. “We needed a goalkeeper with a presence,” Wilson remembers.

“We needed that competition. There wasn’t a raft of money and I wanted somebody challenging in every position. It wasn’t going to come from some unknown or some 20-year-old kid who was going to be asked to take on Kevin Pressman, we needed somebody like Pav who had a name, had a presence and that knew the Premier League.”

After minor complications with his visa, he was invited across for a trial and after five days was given the nod. Srnicek signed for Wednesday on November 11 and made his Owls debut, ironically in a 1-1 draw at St James Park, three days later.

If a bolt to the system of Pressman was what Wilson wanted, a bolt he got.

“I watched Pavel and what he did and straight away he worried me massively,” Pressman remembers. “He made me feel slow and I just couldn’t work out why.

“I ended up watching him so closely, trying to pick his style apart. I couldn’t understand why he was so much quicker, until one day a few weeks in I was walking to get a ball and noticed something.

“He had a totally different technique of going down and getting back up. As he was going down, he was using his elbow, which I wasn’t. We had completely different ways of doing that.

“There are things I learned from him that I took into the rest of my career and that I use in my coaching now.

“He was a good pro and a good person, he worked hard and he was unique in the way he went about things.”

The pair enjoyed their battle for time between the sticks and though relegation from the top tier at the end of the 1999/00 season ended Srnicek’s relatively short time at the club on 44 appearances, his is unanimously regarded as the club’s greatest-ever foreign goalkeeper.

He would go on to enjoy stints at Italian clubs Brescia and Cosenza as well as Portsmouth, West Ham and Portuguese side Beira-Mar before making an emotional return to Newcastle, his true football love, for a swansong season as cover to his great friends Given and Steve Harper in 2006.

Sadly, eight years after retirement and a return to his homeland, tragedy struck and Srnicek was found by a neighbour having collapsed while out running in Ostrava on December 20 2015.

At the age of 47, his life support machine was tragically turned off nine days later – five years ago today – having suffered irreversible brain damage.

Wilson said: “From day one he was excellent and what immediately struck me was that he was an absolute gentleman off the pitch. He was somebody you could not fail to get on with both as a person and as a player.

“I was so, so sad to hear he’d passed away. Out of everybody I came across in football, Pavel was someone I thought would have lived until he was 150. He looked after himself so properly. It was a real shock.”

A passionate supporter of all the clubs he’d played for, his brother later confirmed that Pavel Srnicek had been found that fateful day wearing a Newcastle United sweater. On another day it could well have been that of Sheffield Wednesday.

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