Jose Semedo’s Sheffield Wednesday admission: “I fell in love in another shirt!”

Now at Vitória de Setúbal in Portugal, Semedo spent some very successful years in a blue and white shirt, helping the club achieve promotion into the Championship and to the brink of the Premier League, leaving a huge mark on the Wednesday faithful over the course of his six seasons at S6.

His love affair with the club started six months or so before he was snapped up by Gary Megson though, with a 2-2 draw in South Yorkshire leaving him so smitten that he was already dreaming of a life in Sheffield.

“When I started to think about Sheffield Wednesday I was still a Charlton player,” he told the Star from his home in Portugal. “We played at Hillsborough – I’d played there before, but for some reason this time was different – and we were 2-0 up early in the first half. We drew 2-2. The atmosphere, the stadium itself, it was on fire. It was what I was dreaming to play for… I fell in love even when I was in another shirt, and I didn’t expect that. It was something higher than myself.

“It was in January and my contract was up at the end of the season, and since that game it never went out of my mind that I wanted to play in the blue and white shirt. I said to myself, ‘This is the crowd I want to play for, they’re similar to me’. They live for these moments, the only thing that matters in that moment is Sheffield Wednesday.”

So what happened then? Semedo went on to play almost every game for the Addicks as the 2010/11 season came to an end, but when his agent came calling with a message from a chap called Gary Megson, the Portuguese midfielder listened to what he had to say…

He said, “The season kept going, and there was a delay in my Charlton contract, but I got a call saying that Gary Megson was interested in me. I didn’t know he was at Wednesday, I only knew him from Bolton. When my agent said he’d taken over at Wednesday, I asked him ‘They’re the ones in blue and white?’ and as soon as he said they were I said, ‘My friend, if you can make this possible then I want to go!’.”

“Very quickly, like three days later, he said Megson was in London and wanted to meet. I asked where and what time, I didn’t think twice. I went there and he talked to me very passionately – I researched after and found out he and his father played for the club – and I just thought it was a good fit. I knew it was what I wanted in my life.”

The rest, as they say, is history, and Semedo went on to play more than 160 games for the club under four different managers, working his way into the hearts of Wednesdayites everywhere as he did so.