The Owls may buzz off – to League One

LEAKY DEFENCE COULD BE COSTLY

BUZZING. That’s how goalkeeper Cameron Dawson described the young Sheffield Wednesday defenders prematurely thrust into action this season.

Matt Penney, Jordan Thorniley, Ash Baker, Connor Kirby; none of them anticipated being regular starters before a toxic combination of internal politics and financial meltdown cleared a path to the first team last summer.

“It’s given them a chance they might never have got,” said Dawson, himself a beneficiary of the clumsy attempt to turf Keiren Westwood off the payroll. “It can be a big burden at 19 or 20, but the lads are buzzing with it.”

Two miserable months later, those same lads are buzzing like an all-night raver at 2pm on a Sunday afternoon.

Pre-weekend, only bottom of the table Ipswich (33) had conceded more goals than the Owls (32). A goal difference of -9 is the joint worst outside the bottom three.

By last weekend, Dawson had simultaneously made more saves and conceded more often than any goalkeeper in the division, a bleak statistic that illustrates just how easily opponents find a way to goal. The poor bloke is like a tennis player trapped by a malfunctioning launcher.

Yet his predicament is hardly a surprise. Accepted wisdom says kids should be sparingly run, gradually blooded alongside steady hands. Wednesday chucked them all in at once and hoped the nursery would govern itself.

It didn’t, leaving manager Jos Luhukay desperately patching holes with out-of-position veterans like Danalready iel Pudil and terrace targets like Morgan Fox.

Though injuries have played a part – don’t they always at Hillsborough these days? – last weekend’s 2-1 defeat at home to Derby marked the 11th different defensive line-up that the Dutchman had deployed in the first 18 Championship games.

Blunders

The Owls succumbed to a brace of blunders, a depressingly familiar story for the overcharged and underwhelmed of S6.

“It doesn’t matter about tactics or formations,” moaned Luhukay afterwards. “If you make these kinds of mistakes, you cannot hope to win games.” True, but mistakes are inevitable when your selection process is based on the hokey cokey; in, out, shake it all about.

Luhukay is under tremendous pressure and his failure to settle on a regular side, let alone a steady back four, is justifiable cause for criticism.

You’ve got more chance of guessing this week’s lottery numbers than the next Wednesday team sheet, an issue that infuriates supporters and radiates a lack of trust.

Worse, it has demonstrably failed; the Owls have kept only three clean sheets all season. However limited your players, letting them gel can only help the cause.

Limited

Yet if Luhukay, who took charge last December, could have managed the situation more smartly, it is important to remember that it is not one of his own creation. In that sense, at least, criticism of the 55-year-old is disproportionate. It was not Luhukay who bought Jordan Rhodes for £10m when the club owned an army of strikers. It was not Luhukay who signed ageing players on Premier League wages – David Jones, George Boyd, Almen Abdi – in a reckless gamble on promotion. In three years under the ownership of Dejphon Chansiri, Wednesday have amassed one of the highest wage bills in the division - yet all they have to show for it is a transfer embargo and an injury-prone squad full of kids and has-beens. That is the root cause of everything going wrong at Sheffield Wednesday; a chronic failure of recruitment overseen by Chansiri and former manager Carlos Carvalhal. Now, with FFP biting, Luhukay has been left – some might say ordered – to play unripe youngsters in the hope they’ll flourish and attract a big fee. Or forced to ostracise well-paid players like Westwood, then deliver disingenuous ‘injury’ updates on a guy everybody knows is being elbowed out. Not only has Luhukay been left with a dearth of seasoned pros, he cannot even play the ones he has. A new manager would face all the same problems and, until Chansiri takes a step back and hands the reins to someone who knows how to run a football club, change is probably futile. But if Luhukay is to have any future he must either stick or twist with his young defenders. Because if Wednesday keep conceding at this rate, they are going down. And nobody will be buzzing then.