WEMBLEY AGONY CAN SPUR BLADES
FACT: The players of League One Sheffield United possess more Wembley experience than those of Premier League Hull. Relevance to today’s FA Cup semi-final? Well, that really depends whether you count having your heart broken and your dreams crushed as a learning experience or a millstone.
It is not yet two years since the Blades suffered the most agonising of play-off defeats, an epic 8-7 loss on penalties to Huddersfield that saw all 22 players step up to the spot. Steve Simonsen, the United keeper, blazed the last one over the bar in what would turn out to be his final kick for the club before he joined Preston.
It was a defeat all the more galling for the fact that United had spent the entire season in the top two, losing out to bitter rivals Sheffield Wednesday only on the final day of the season.
“A complete nightmare,” said Chris Porter, a second-half sub that day who scored in the penaltyshoot-out.“I can’t imagine a worse way to lose, especially after they missed their first three penalties.
“I thought we were guaranteed to win. And with me on the fifth one, I was thinking ‘I could end up taking the winning penalty here’. In the end, I had to score just to keep us in it. It was an awful way to go down.
“The dressing room was the worst I’ve ever seen, totally quiet. Everyone was gutted, nobody knew what to say. The complete opposite to what Huddersfield’s must have been. I couldn’t hear them celebrating but imagining it was bad enough.
“A lot of the lads who played that game are still here – definitely about six or seven still in the squad. That’s a lot of Wembley experience and hopefully it will count for something.
“When we were in the play-off final, we were seen as the big team in League One.We were the ones expected to win. This time, we’ll be under no pressure so we’ll be able to enjoy the occasion a bit more.”
If Porter, who is again likely to start on the bench this afternoon, and his pals did feel suffocated by expectation last time out, they could have been forgiven.
Following relegation from the Premier League in 2007, chairman Kevin McCabe and the United board formulated a business plan ‘to maintain both the level of investment and the salary level the club had supported in the Premier League to underpin its key business objective of promotion’.
In other words, they went for broke, resulting in a £32m debt and catastrophic annual losses.
Failure to win promotion was bad enough, but when the Blades were relegated to League One in 2011, the wheels really did come off.
Despite bullish talk from the boardroom, in reality United had just one chance to bounce back to the Championship. And the price of failure went far beyond football.
“Someone here was telling me that two years ago in the play-off final there would be redundancies if the team didn’t win,” said Sheffield United boss Nigel Clough, who took charge in Octo- ber. “They lost and I think 20-30 people did lose their jobs as a result.
“The money in the Premier League is so great that it dwarfs everything else by comparison, so teams have no choice but to say Premier League survival is the priority and everything to the club.
“That’s why I can understand when people like Paul Lambert (the Aston Villa manager) say they can do without the Cup. It’s sad, but it’s the reality of the situation.
Investment
“People will lose their jobs if they get relegated, so that has to be their most important thing for them.
“But that’s not the case for us going down to Wembley. At Sheffield United, we should be doing everything we can to go as far as we can in the FA Cup.”
And United – now with new investment and a drastically reduced wage bill – have done just that, with victories over Aston Villa, Fulham, Nottingham Forest and Charlton justifying claims they have nothing to fear from supposedly superior opposition.
“It’s a one-off game and anything can happen,” said Ryan Flynn, who also played in that fateful play-off final defeat.“You might never get this chance again, so you definitely have to try to enjoy the occasion. But it’s also true that you enjoy football more when you’re winning.
“It’s going to be a really difficult task. Hull are in the Premier League. They’re doing really well and they’re comfortably safe.
“They’ve got some top players but you never know. It’s the FA Cup and it’s gone well for us throughout the competition.
“We went to Villa Park, where no one gave us a hope. We didn’t just win, we deserved the victory. Hopefully we can do that again at Wembley.”
And if victory would represent redemption for the likes of Flynn and Porter, it would also be a chance for Clough to banish his own Wembley woes.
A striker for Forest, he played in the 1991 Cup final against Spurs, a game now remembered as the point at which Paul Gascoigne’s career hit the skids.
The England star should have been sent off for a chest-high challenge on Garry Parker in the first minute, but escaped with a ticking off. Gazza then launched another wild tackle on Gary Charles, rupturing his own knee ligaments.
Though Stuart Pearce scored form the resulting free-kick, Spurs came back to claim a 2-1 victory in extra-time.
“I think we have a better referee this time, so that’s good,” said Clough.“I would hope if there was a tackle remotely like either one of Paul Gascoigne’s, that player wouldn’t be around long on the pitch.
“But I don’t use it as motivation. It’s just a sad memory of losing on the day, and of Gazza never being the same player again.”
Nor does Clough – who has lifted United from 23rd to 11th in the last 18 games – have much truck with suggestions that United will simply enjoy the day.“I’m not having any of that ‘day out’ nonsense,” he says. “We’re going to try and win the game, and we believe we can.”