It’s been a Wilder ride – and it’s not over yet!
BLADES BOSS SETS HIS SIGHTS ON CAPPING BRILLIANT SEASON WITH PLACE IN EUROPE
THE last time Sheffield United played at Aston Villa was in the Championship last season. Chris Wilder’s visiting team let a 3-0 lead slip in the last eight minutes and there was a fight in the dressing room.
‘We were cruising and they were never in the game,’ recalled Wilder yesterday. ‘Villa Park must have had 15,000 people in it. They had gone home.
‘Then one mistake and then another and another. Suddenly it’s 3-3. That one got sorted out in the dressing room.
‘Not words, actions. I am not condoning it but that is the emotion of the game. It happens.
‘I could have got involved but I let them deal with it. I know my players, I trust them.’
Wilder takes his team back to Villa Park on Wednesday. This time it is in the Premier League and the eyes of the nation will be on the first game of Project Restart.
‘I am used to us being seventh or eighth on Match Of The Day and I understand it,’ Wilder smiled. ‘This would have been one of those but it won’t be this time and we are delighted for the opportunity.
‘We are set and ready though all clubs will say that. Nobody is going to say they have players overweight, hesitant or not really wanting to come back from overseas.
‘They will all say they are ready. I suppose we will only know who is telling the truth when the bullets are flying.’
Wilder’s side are one of the stories of a Premier League season set to resume after a threemonth break.
If they win what is a game in hand, they will leapfrog Manchester United into fifth place, two points behind Chelsea in the final Champions League spot.
Since losing to Southampton in mid-September, only one team outside the top two of Liverpool and Manchester City have beaten Sheffield United in the league. They have every reason to be optimistic.
‘The carrot of what the players can achieve is dangling there,’ Wilder told Sportsmail on a Zoom call. ‘ We will be positive and on the front foot.
‘Nothing I have seen from the players physically or mentally has suggested we are going to back off or change our approach.
‘I always thought this would be a pause in the season rather than the end. So we have kept ourselves right and the players have made sure they haven’t fallen off the edge of a cliff.’
There are some in football who say they have enjoyed the relative peace and quiet of the lockdown. Wilder is not one them.
‘I have found it really difficult,’ he admitted. ‘I have been working since I was an apprentice at 16.
‘I have always been looking at the next fixture or season as a manager for the last two decades. Football people are planners.
‘Not knowing what was happening was hard. I am unashamedly hands on. I have my fingerprints all over the football club. I am not a head coach. I need to be involved. You try not to show it but I have found it desperately frustrating. There has not been an awful lot of leadership in the country, has there?
‘But now thankfully we are two or three days away from getting underway.
‘We want to compete and want it to be real. It won’t be real as the fans won’t be there. That’s the big downside.
‘Some big experiences are going to be taken away from us but that’s a small price to pay. The players recognise it as a brilliant opportunity. They are focused knowing they can turn an excellent year into a memorable one.’
WILDER is the Sheffield United fan whose dreams have come true. He played for his team in the old First Division in the 1980s and now lives close enough to Bramall Lane to sometimes run to work on match day.
‘I hate Saturday morning and can’t just sit about,’ he revealed. ‘It’s three and a half miles to Bramall Lane but it’s all downhill, down one of Sheffield’s seven hills. ‘So I get my hat and headphones on and jog past all these people on the way to the game.
‘I have done it loads of times. I come bursting into the changing room just before the e players are there and I have this his mad red face. But it gives me time to think and clear my head.
‘I once got stopped d 100 yards away from the ground nd by someans’ someone wanting to do a fans’ survey. I didn’t have the heart to say that I was the manager.’
Wilder, 52, was a right ght full back for Sheffield United, Rotherham, Notts County and Bradford. He was a good player yer but has excelled as a manager, ger, working steadily upwards through hrough the divisions with Alfreton, ton, Halifax, Oxford and Northampton. pton.
‘People always ask me whether at 23 or 24 I ever saw myself managing manited Sheffield United in the Premier League,’ he said.
‘I never want to be rude but the truth is that at 23 all I was thinking thinkext about was my next night out. That’s what players - of my generation n thought. Let’s get a good result and then go out.
‘So I never thought ht that. I have always tried ed to do the best I can for whatever club and I had a belief that would take ake me wherever it takes me.
‘I love managing and nd always loved being amongst players in a changing room. That’s at’s where I came alive. I buzzed off that. I still do.’ Literally speaking, Wilder’s first taste of management came when he was still a player, helping run his mate’s team in one of Sheffield’s Sunday Leagues.
‘If I had got a good result on the Saturday then Sunday would be an enjoyable day,’ he said. ‘I would go and see my pals play football and have a beer after. I helped out. I would take training on a weekday night. It was a relief from the stress of playing.
‘Michael Vaughan trained with us and a few other boys. Vaughany was talented but everyone wanted to boot him because he was a
Wednesday fan. We had the best balls and best kit. We played at Sheffield United’s training ground and wore their kit. All sourced by me obviously! We had a branded medical bag and water bottles and everything.
‘More seriously, it was my first introduction to making decisions. Not much changes really, whatever level you work at.’
Those who have managed him tell you Wilder has always been a very level individual. Mentally strong too. He puts that down to a spell spent as a teenager on Southampton’s books.
‘ I was born and raised in Sheffield but made at Southampton,’ he said. ‘Just like the Royal Navy advert. In terms of life lessons, it was perfect. It was tough, believe me.
‘My year was Matt Le Tissier and Francis Benali. Alan Shearer was a year below. Dennis Wise was the year above.
‘It was testing. How much did you want to be a player? What is your attitude like? Your discipline? Can you be selfless?
‘They worked us so hard off the pitch looking after the first team. Then they would stick you in a training session with them and you would have to prove yourself.
‘My discipline was all learned there. Of the 12 I was apprentice with, 10 went on to have careers.’ As a manager, there have been tough times, not least at cashstrapped Halifax in the Conference.
‘We didn’t have any money and had to move from place to place to train,’ he revealed. ‘We had Stevenage away one Saturday. They were paying their players two grand a week and had Tottenham’s first-team coach.
‘We were getting booted off our pitch because there was a dog show set up. All these hoops and poles. I was like: “What’s happening?”.
‘They said: “There is a dog show here today. Did nobody tell you?”
‘I hope I never get kicked off a training ground again as long as I am in the game. But you never really know do you?’
WITH his hand on his heart, Wilder says he has not even thought of what it would be like to take Sheffield United to the Champions League.
‘Maybe all managers are the same,’ he said. ‘The pessimism in us. If we are still up there with two games left, I will think about it.’
Regardless of what awaits them on the resumption of the season — they are also still in the FA Cup quarter-finals — Wilder and his players have made their mark on the Premier League.
Asked how he has done it, Wilder revealed it all stems from a conversation about how to lose.
‘There is no way of plotting your way through a Premier League fixture list,’ he said. ‘It gives you the shivers just looking at it.
‘But we did talk about the fact we could play well and get beat in this league and one defeat can turn in to three or four and then five and six. Where does your confidence go?
‘ So we did talk about our attitude to defeat. This team has been together since League One so we knew our win percentage would take a bashing.
‘We discussed how we would deal with that and how we would deal with losing and how would we get back up.
‘We are never going to get beat on attitude and that’s a big thing.
‘They have been brilliant and will have to be in the next nine games.’
Sheffield United’s last goal was scored by 34-year-old striker Billy Sharp in a 1-0 win over Norwich in March.
The clean sheet was kept by their 23- year- old Manchester United loanee goalkeeper Dean Henderson.
Wilder was famously unsympathetic to the young keeper after his error gave Liverpool a win back in September.
‘He was fine with it,’ nodded Wilder. ‘It shows what a man he is. This is elite football, an ultratough environment. It’s the lion’s den every week for these boys.
‘People perceive me to be hard faced but my door is always open. To be a manager there has to be a degree of empathy as a human being.
‘But, at the same time, we are not expecting big mistakes. We are not expecting them to slash it out of play and miss open goals.
‘If Dean wants to play and he wants to play for Manchester United and be England’s No 1 — the things he says to me — then he has to be able to deal with these situations and moments.
‘It happened in that game at Villa Park last year as well. But he was incredible after that and he has been incredible since the Liverpool game.
‘I knew Dean could take it. I am not daft. If I thought he would crumble I would have taken a slightly different approach. He is good, really good. Belief comes with the territory.
‘Some of the things he does maybe I’m not sure about but I really don’t want to knock that out of him.
‘He has an idea of where he would like his career to go and it would take a brave man to back against him.’
Henderson and his team-mates will need plenty of chutzpah between now and the season’s end but at least they have given themselves a chance of achieving something very real.
Wilder does not believe football’s transfer market will be suppressed for long but nor is he in a rush to replace those who have accompanied him on his journey.
‘I have a responsibility to leave this football club in good shape when I eventually go,’ he said.
‘I am not so sure other managers will feel that responsibility but I take it seriously.
‘People chase the dream. We haven’t done it so that brings recruitment and coaching and organisation into play.
‘If our owners say we can invest my first question would be: “Where will that leave us long term?”
‘I would love to take us to the next level and love to improve the training ground and stadium and the playing squad.
‘But that’s for the future. Let’s get this season done first.’