Forty minutes before kick-off, the grey clouds parted over Hillsborough Park and the sky temporarily burst into blue and white. By the time the derby started, rain was sheeting over the pitch and those uncovered Sheffield Wednesday supporters on the Kop were sodden and cold. As metaphors for the day go, it’s up there.
Sheffield Wednesday have made progress off the field, admittedly from the lowest ebb in their history. Administrators have confirmed that there are six or seven bidders whose interest is genuine and workable, but the principal factor surrounds who is not here. Dejphon Chansiri’s name is no longer on the seats and no longer above the door.
Just as special was how the community came together as one. On Sunday, the badge of the official supporters trust was positioned on the bottom of the shorts for the first time and will remain there on all three kits. The trust’s work in supporting the club – helping to raise over £77,000 at the time of greatest need – saved the club. It is a small gesture, but an important one: we are one and the same now.
That made this a derby day with a difference for Wednesday. Nobody is foolish enough to believe that myriad organisational challenges do not lie ahead, but if this wasn’t the first derby of a new era it was certainly the first after the end of the old one.
And football clubs exist for these games. Players, managers and seasons come and go, but the old enemy will always be the same. They have played this match for 134 years and it became a serious possibility that it wouldn’t be played again.
That was the pre-match message: celebration of unity. On the pitch before the game, supporter Chris McClure used the stadium microphone to put football into context. Fear and nerves are not losing a derby, but working in a ticket office and telling your family that you can’t pay the mortgage because you don’t know when you’re next being paid. That is what supporters did by raising so much, so quickly. They ended fear and they showed the country what Wednesday stood for.
And then the football started.
Too often (and I am absolutely guilty of this), we trick ourselves into believing in saccharine moments of serendipity, be it karmic balance or Hollywood ending. Most of the time, reality kicks the ball harder than your own desperately hopeful interpretation of fate.
Sheffield United were several classes above. They had everything that Wednesday didn’t (and everything they have lacked themselves too often this season): energy in midfield, the ball sticking up front, an obvious plan to create chances, smart passing out from the back that mitigated risk rather than invited it. Wednesday’s own plan consisted of direct balls down the channels that either went out of play, turned over possession or supplied a player who still had three men to beat.
By the end, the clanging irony: this was the day to fill the stands again and come together, and by full-time three sides of Hillsborough were barely a quarter full. We’ve all been there: you can believe in unity without watching Chris Wilder hold up his fingers to the away end to detail his unbeaten derby run. There comes a point when self-preservation takes over.
On some level, maybe this was the celebration. Nothing about this club has been normal for too long, but what is normality if not screaming at your striker in the first 15 minutes for not holding up the ball, hollering at the referee for the non-award of a throw-in and being half a mile away from the ground at full-time because you can’t abide hearing their oles?
If so, it is also a reminder of the scars that gross mismanagement and scandal leave behind. Everything will change, or that’s the hope, but never all at once. This team still had no proper pre-season. It contains players who aren’t good enough for the level, but then the bench is only full of teenagers and an ageing central defender who has answered the emergency call.
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For all the goodwill that a new owner will bring, the league table still shows Wednesday on minus points. The players know that they are going down, they don’t know what happens next and a new owner (even one who pays their wages on time) creates subconscious uncertainty anyway because so much will change.
That is the unforgivable aspect of Chansiri’s behaviour and the long goodbye to S6. Not the things he did or said, didn’t do or didn’t say. Not the lack of investment, nor even the people who struggled to pay their bills while he insisted that the issues would not be repeated. It is the residual hangover, the things that make life either more difficult or more hard long after you have gone. You become a poltergeist.
Sunday’s derby was supposed to be a line in the sand, the grand insistence that things were changing. Therein lies the problem: changing is different to changed. Chansiri did so much to ruin what matters most. It will likely take many months and many more chastening afternoons.
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