The players meeting and manager rhetoric that has helped inspire Jaden Brown’s unlikely Sheffield Wednesday comeback rally

Make no mistake, this was no crisis meeting. Few changing rooms are as calm as the one procured by Moore and his staff than that at S6.

But in seeking to draw a line under January and the circus of media distraction that comes with it, the message to the players from staff was simple; buckle up because no matter whether your surname is Bannan or Brown, you’re going to be essential to the promotion effort. Your club, he said, will need you.

Brown is the surname of course of left-sided wing-back Jaden, who up until the last 10 days had fallen deep, deep down the pecking order at Hillsborough and whose hottest contribution to the first team had come and gone in his first few weeks the season before.

With Marvin Johnson imperious and rarely-if-ever injured, with Reece James approaching fitness, Brown was quite possibly the ‘senior’ player in the room with the most reason to feel cut off from first team opportunity.

The behind-closed-doors meeting hammered home a rhetoric Moore had been sounding in the media for some time.

Two weeks earlier he’d said: “Every single one of the players know that they have a job to do and that they have to be ready when called upon.

“I said to them the worst thing that they can do is second guess me, in terms of thinking that the line-up is the same. It can change from week to week, regardless of whether we've been on a good run of games.”

With Aden Flint the only January addition to the Wednesday squad to the disappointment of many Owls fans, it was suggested by Jimmy Shan that a tight-knit squad can deal with more than a collection of players flabby round the edges, that squads with pockets of players that know they aren’t going to play can become splintered and that bad habits can seep in at just the wrong time.

Without the genuine nature of Moore’s message that he would be needed be it ‘this week or in six weeks’, with 75 minutes of league football in his boots by the time last weekend’s trip to Charlton came around, it would have been easy for Jaden Brown to see out the remainder of his Wednesday contract with such a demeanour.

The delight of his teammates when celebrating big moments enacted by Brown has been telling. Fringe he may have been for months on end, but there’s a togetherness and respect there for a player that in the mad, bad summer of 2021 rejected safer-bet approaches from clubs to wait on a contract with Wednesday before they had crawled out of transfer restrictions.

Without Johnson’s retrospective ban and injury – and then illness – to James, the fact is we may never have seen Brown in a Wednesday shirt again.

As it happened, he has been needed, and with at least three match-altering moments in his two tight 1-0 outings since, Moore’s prophecy has come true and that behind-closed-doors meeting feels like an inspired move.

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