Southampton (H) 1-2 reaction
This is how it felt like playing us last season. But: The rumours of our death - or even worse, relegation - are exaggerated after all.
We kept our nerve. We kept our shape. We kept enough belief to equalise. We nearly kept a point too. And we have more hope of a season with survival than we had before this game.
As others have noted, this was a Premier League team against a League One team, let’s be real. For all the talk of Russell Martin’s extreme and zealous playing style, this tonight wasn’t, for me, a win through playing Russell Martin’s football, but a win because they had superior quality to us.
This, then, is how many a team in League One will have felt last season having played us: Overwhelmed not by brilliance, but by quality, not just in the starting eleven but from the subs bench, with Saints bringing on EPL quality players in Stuart Armstrong, Joe Taribo and scorer of the winning goal, Che Adams (who was assisted by a player, in James Ward-Prowse, who played for England a year ago and the subject of a recent £30m rejected bid by West Ham).
And that’ll be a challenge this season for us as fans: To realise we’re not ‘the famous Sheffield Wednesday’, but we’re more the Morecambe, the Exeter, the Cheltenham of the Championhip than we are the Southampton, the Leicester and the, yes (as much as it pains me to say), Leeds United.
That underdog mentality can be hard to gain and maintain. Especially when we were the ones crushing teams with quality not that many months ago. Xisco Muñoz is no zealot like his counterpart in the away dugout tonight, but he is a believer in trying to drain the maximum from what he has to work with. Hence why we saw unusual selections tonight in Famewo at left back (who was largely excellent defensively despite a tricky task), Paterson at right back (struggled in his one on ones at times, but gave his all and made two crucial clearances, one of them off the line) and Reece James coming in to play as a left midfielder.
This game was a free hit. It’s not the type of games we should expect to win. It’s the type of game we should be happy to draw (as I was pre-match) and, well, we so nearly did. Despite being far from the finished article yet.
Set piece goals will have to do a lot of heavy lifting for us this season to get us to 50 points, so the willingness to use them to a plan - both from feet and hand - was another encouraging feature of tonight.
I feel like we know a bit better now what Xisco Muñoz’ Wednesday could be like and it isn’t just a pretty painting of attacks in a museum; there’s grit and tenacity to marry the swashbuckling.
The personnel isn’t there for it yet. Some of them not signed yet and some of them not fit enough to play for the entirety tonight. And we’ll likely remain a work in progress for at least a few months. But I feel the bar, which was admittedly low in my mind, was raised tonight as was the ceiling of this team - deemed to finish bottom three by plenty of pundits - that could’ve gone to bits under the barrage of 4 yard passes from Southampton and their fortunate early opener.
We didn’t, but rode out the storm, kept belief in our ability to keep Saints away from clear cut chances, and, from the start of the second half, also injected a lot more belief into how we moved the ball forwards and started finding the spaces Southampton - perhaps snoozing under the hypnosis of ther metronomic passing - didn’t recover quick enough when they lost the ball.
Delgado faded over the 90 minutes, but showed plenty of both garra charrúa and quality on the ball to make it seem likely he could acclimatise to Championship level football quite quickly.
Bakinson had what was likely his best game as a Wednesday player, shoved into replacing Byers in the middle and often dropping into a shielding two with Vaulks out of possession. He had plenty of good touches on the ball and more than Bannan did tonight, for instance, showed an understanding for timing and executing passes to set up counterattacking opportunities.
This season won’t be won or lost on games like tonight. But after tonight I feel more confident going into the type games that will decide our season: The game at Hull in eight days time, the home game against Preston a week after and, another week on, going to a direct survival rival in Cardiff.
We’re Sheffield Wednesday, and we’re as long a way away from being back as I feared we would be. It feels good to be back in the Championship, after all :-)
A common sense take on Wednesday on the internet - whatever next! Excellent piece of writing too, I look forward to reading more
Excellent, Peter, summed it up perfectly