SHEFFIELD WEDNESDAY v SHEFFIELD UNITED CHRIS WILL GO WILD IF THE BLADES WIN!
CHRIS Wilder doesn’t go in for artful diplomacy especially when it comes to the Steel City derby.
With a title on the line and promotion within reach, plenty of managers would seek to smother the flames of a passionate rivalry under a blanket of platitudes.
Play the game, not the occasion. Just another three points. Carlos Carvalhal, the erstwhile Sheffield Wednesday manager, did just that on the eve of a 4-2 defeat at Hillsborough in 2017.
“I didn’t get that,” says Wilder, a born-and-bred Blade who played over 100 times for the club and is now in his third season as manager. “And the other guy, Luhukay, who said he’d played in bigger derbies - I didn’t get that even more. I’m not saying that to have a pop. I’m saying it from the heart. For us, for Sheffield, this is top. One hundred per cent.”
In Wilder’s eyes, neither man ‘got’ what it meant for supporters of both clubs to see their ancient enemy suffer. “You have to revel in that,” he explains. “It’s what rivalry is, for better or worse. I’m not being funny, but, hand on heart, do I want to see Sheffield Wednesday go up? No. Do I want to see them winning games? No.
“I’ve said before about running around my mum’s front room when Andy Linighan scored that late goal for Arsenal when they beat Wednesday in the FA Cup final. She was going ‘What are you doing?’. But that’s the emotion.
“It was the same a couple of years ago when they lost the play-off semi-final against Huddersfield on penalties. Our supporters were jumping for joy when the keeper was pulling off all those saves.
“If we don’t go up, they will enjoy that just as much. Yes, they’ll want to win the game for themselves. But they’ll also want to put a dent in us and that’s how it should be.”
Not many sides have made an impact on Wilder’s finely-tuned outfit this term. A fixture in the top-six since August, the Blades have lost just one of their last 12 matches, won three on the bounce and are currently on their longest unbeaten run of the season.
United also have the best goal difference in the division and, of the four sides battling for automatic promotion, only Norwich boast similar form.
It is all a far cry from this time 12 months ago, when a blistering start following promotion from League One morphed into a tired trudge to a tenth-placed finish.
Blistering
“You know, it really rattles me when people say we fell away last season,” says Wilder. “It was our first time in the division for six years. Six years! And we had lads who’d played no Championship football. Did we have any right to be up there at all? “Look at it this way - if we’d done a Millwall and came on a run at the end, nobody would have asked us about the start of the season. So to criticise the group is wrong, in my eyes. We took the likes of Enda Stevens, who’d never played in the Championship before. John Fleck and Jack O’Connell the same. “Out of that group last year, very few had significant experience. Billy Sharp and Leon Clarke a bit. Chris Basham a bit.
“We weren’t strong enough, but it wasn’t a failure. It was part of a learning curve - for me and for them.
“This season it was about moving things on. Improving certain things, like game management and seizing big moments. We’ve done that again and again.”
Recruitment has also been key, with seasoned summer signings like Ollie Norwood and David McGoldrick bolstered in January by astute acquisitions in the shape of Gary Madine, Scott Hogan and Kieran Dowell. No longer do the Blades look a League One squad punching above their weight.
“We came into the division with probably 13 or 14 players who could really handle it,” admits Wilder, who this week tied influential defender Jack O’Connell to a new four-year deal
“Now we look at the squad and we’ve got 21 or 22 who can handle it. We’ve got different options, different combinations. If we lose a Basham or an O’Connell, we’ve
got Marvin Johnson or Maro tin Cranie to Johnson or Maro doesn’t affect us.
Evolution
“That’s the evolution of the squad, the work we did in the windows sand the experiason ence of a sea in the Chamr pionship.”
One player who the Blades can ill afford to lose is Billy Sharp, the talismanic cap2 tain whose 22 goals have powromotion ered their promotion push.
With 226 career goals, the 32-year-old is currently the
It’s rivalry. Do I want to see Sheffield Wednesday go up? No
leading English scorer of the 21st century but only one of those has come against Wednesday - the winner in a victory for Doncaster way back in 2009-10.
“Billy’s obviously caught all the headlines because he’s the goalscorer and the captain,” added Wilder. “He important to us, of course, but there’s been a lot of influential players.
“We’re not a club who put individuals on a pedestal and I think if you speak to Bill he’d be the first to say it’s a group effort. Recently, we lost Basham, lost Baldock, lost O’Connell.
“But other players came in and we went win, win, win off the back of it.
“It’s a collective, and if we do achieve something this season, it won’t be down to the lads who’ve played 46 games. It won’t be down to Billy Sharp. It’ll be the lads who’ve come in and kept the ball rolling at crucial times.”
That ‘something’ is a return to the Premier League for the first time since 2007. Win at Hillsborough today and that objective will be just 11 games away.
“There’s some powerful clubs up there,” says Wilder. “But we go along with what we have, get the maximum out of our resources.
“We’re in the race. There’s no getting away from that with 12 games to go. But we need to forget about that, keep our heads down and play well on Monday.
“Because that’s a tough game against a team who want to spoil things for us. And in Steve Bruce, they’ve got a manager now who gets that.”