Sheffield Wednesday find their transitional season to be more of the same

Sheffield Wednesday had a turbulent summer, but life in League One isn’t proving to be much better following their relegation from the Championship.

As Sheffield Wednesday supporters dribbled away from Home Park following their FA Cup first-round replay loss to Plymouth Argyle, there was one small piece of irony that could at least provide some gallows humour. ITV and the BBC had made the bold decision to announce their pick of live matches for the second round of the FA Cup before the replays had been played, and someone at ITV had put all their money on Wednesday winning. With their huge support and appeal to broadcasters, Wednesday would be a big draw for any broadcaster in the second round, but now ITV will be showing Rochdale vs Plymouth instead. You can’t rely on this edition of Sheffield Wednesday for anything, and more fool the broadcaster who believed otherwise.

For the second time this season, Sheffield Wednesday had just lost 3-0 to Plymouth. In September, this 600-mile round trip had ended in their heaviest league defeat of the season so far, and now they’d been dumped out of the FA Cup by the same team. But if those Wednesday supporters who make these day-eating trips over hundreds of miles understand anything about their club from their experience of the last few seasons, it’s that you can rely on Sheffield Wednesday to be unreliable.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Relegation from the Championship had hurt the club, but the one small consolation to be taken is that things should then get better. But Wednesday’s agony has continued. Pre-season was marred by a transfer embargo which was only released a few weeks before their League One season started, and manager Darren Moore was left with the unenviable task of having to build a team that would be expected to compete near the top end of the table in just a few weeks. Fourteen new players arrived.

The relief that came with the lifting of the embargo prompted a wave of optimism to flow through the club, all the more so when they won three of their first four games of the season, including derby wins against both Doncaster Rovers and Rotherham United which put them briefly top of the table. But since those heady days of summer, Wednesday have reverted to their recent mean. They’ve only lost three league matches since that golden start, but they’ve contrived to lose three and have slipped to eighth place in the table.

Injuries haven’t helped. Marvin Johnson, Dennis Adeniran, Sam Hutchinson, Dominic Iorfa, Josh Windass, Lewis Gibson, Lee Gregory, Massimo Luongo and George Byers are all in the treatment room now, an injury crisis which Moore has described as the worst he’s seen in 30 years in the game. These injuries have led to an unsettled team and even the claim that Moore still might not know his best starting XI or formation, but criticism is mitigated by that injury list and the fact that this season’s Wednesday squad is so very different to the one that finished last season, while Moore’s own good nature and his struggles with Covid-related pneumonia initially brought him a lot of goodwill.

But football is impatient, and club owner Dejphon Chansiri has been in the past too. He’s been the owner of Wednesday since January 2015, and Moore is the seventh manager in less than seven years. Experienced hands such as Tony Pulis and Garry Monk have been among those who’ve failed to deliver at Hillsborough, and the club’s Championship play-off appearances of 2016 and 2017 already feel like a very long time ago. Chansiri has been no better than tolerated by Wednesday fans since the sale of Hillsborough to cover FFP losses, and an owner feeling the heat of their bad decisions is not usually a good sign for the manager, especially with the January transfer window – that last chance to change the make-up of the first-team squad for the second half of the season – looming in just six weeks’ time.

This season was always likely to be a transitional one for Sheffield Wednesday, and in a more literal sense than might normally be considered. The large number of new players created a problem that optimism alone couldn’t resolve. Fourteen new players is a lot, and all the training and friendly matches in the world will not truly show how the team might perform in the bread and butter world of league matches. But perhaps there can be no such thing as a transitional season anymore, unless that transition is rapid and results improve, and this may especially be the case at a club like Sheffield Wednesday, where the current position isn’t one that suits anybody but Blades.

And it’s hardly as if the team’s form has been disastrous this season. They remain in eighth place in the table and just five points behind third-placed Rotherham United in a congested top half of the table, and with the team having drawn eight of their 17 matches so far, the problem seems to be an inability to kill off matches. Wednesday have only scored 21 goals in the league, and scoring goals is always likely to be more difficult with a group of players who’ve only just been introduced to each other. There is still time for their recent run of indifferent form to be reversed.

Whether Darren Moore is the man to do that is a difficult question to answer. A growing number of Sheffield Wednesday fans believe they already know the answer to this question, and it’s a negative one. But in the event that Chansiri pulls that trigger, who’s next? Ironically, Ryan Lowe, the manager of the Plymouth team that has already handed out two shellackings to Wednesday in the first four months of this season, might be just what they need, but why would Lowe leave Plymouth, who are top of the League One table, to join this particular merry-go-round?

So Sheffield Wednesday, a club with a history so grand that they were simply The Wednesday for the first 64 years of their history, find themselves rooted in the third tier and looking longingly towards the hopes of better days again. But that change isn’t coming, and there aren’t too many signs of anything different on the horizon.

Following their FA Cup loss to Plymouth, there may be some solace in the idea that perhaps the lack of distraction from the FA Cup will benefit them. It’s the best that can be said for a dismal evening in Devon and a season that is not exactly going according to plan.