Wilder seeks leaders to reinvigorate broken Blades
SHEFFIELD United will give more details on Tuesday of the players who will be leaving Bramall Lane in the summer, and finding strong characters to replace them will be one of Chris Wilder's top priorities.
There were plenty of leaders at Bramall Lane for the final match of a record-breakingly-bad Premier League season but too many of them were in the stands.
Chris Basham, Oliver Norwood and George Baldock were saying their farewells after playing crucial roles in Wilder's first spell as manager, which saw him take the Blades from League One to a peak of ninth place at the end of the 2019-20 Premier League season.
Their departures, along with Wes Foderingham and Max Lowe, were announced in advance but the full list of players whose contracts will not be renewed will be published on Tuesday. Others under contract will be sold, with Ivo Grbic's future looking questionable after he did not even make the bench for the 3-0 defeat to Tottenham Hotspur.
Captain John Egan was also missing, his season ended by injury in September.
The absence of those leaders was evident against Spurs and across the season, and is something Wilder, pictured, knows he needs to address.
Yet again, the Blades conceded two goals in quick succession, which Wilder felt was symptomatic of the issue.
He said: "The atmosphere in the ground was first class and we started off on the front foot but any sort of adversity – the second goal goes in and it's a fabulous finish but quickly the third goal goes in (scored by Dejan Kulusevski six minutes after Pedro Porro doubled the lead). One team tried to keep it at three and the other team wasn't really bothered because they knew they'd done enough.
"It is Spurs and it is Son (HeungMin) and Kulusevski and (James) Maddison and (Pape) Sarr and Porro and (Micky) van de Ven and (Cristian) Romero, I get it, but I've just been brought up a little differently. "We are the underdog but I never feel we're going out there to inevitably lose.
"Yet again we're having to make physical substitutions and certain players can only do certain minutes, technically we're not taking big moments but most importantly from a mentality point of view. "When adversity strikes we've not got enough to dig ourselves out of it.
"I'd love to have had Chris Basham available, I'd love to have had George Baldock and John Egan available.
I've got to say, I don't think I'd had been saying the same things over the period I'd been here if we had those boys in the team.
"That is going to be the challenge for me, we need a good team from a technical point of view and a coachable team but from a mentality point of view we need strong characters and leaders so if one mistake happens Baldock makes that tackle or John Egan makes that block."
On selecting two goalkeepers in Foderingham and substitute Adam Davies who are out of contract in the summer ahead of £2m January signing Grbic, Wilder said: "That was a decision I made regarding Adam Davies. I thought he deserved the opportunity to be part of it and I believed Wes deserved to play."