Madness this way comes. For Sheffield Wednesday, a trip to Stoke City has become something of an event.
Not through any sense of rivalry or kinship, but - you can only think - by pure coincidence. There’s always a story. In recent years, the bet365 Stadium has become something of a castle of chaos for Wednesday.
On Boxing Day 2019 Garry Monk’s Owls arrived third in the table to the backdrop of Adam Reach proclamations that they were chasing down Leeds United and West Bromwich Albion in the automatic promotion race. They were god awful, but when Morgan Fox and Tom Lees bundled dead ball opportunities home the feeling was going into the 90th minute that actually, this team had a bit of ‘win ugly’ contenderism to it.
In the 93rd minute Tyrese Campbell scored to level-up and four minutes later Sam Vokes won it. They won only four of their remaining 22 matches, the Stoke result kicking off a spiral in form that saw them enter a global pandemic.
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In December 2023 Danny Röhl’s rock-bottom Wednesday arrived with only a couple of wins to their name after 19 attempts. The German had lost five of his eight matches to date. Anthony Musaba broke away in injury time to spark chaos in the away end and a run of form that saw them secure survival in the most remarkable fashion imaginable.
In the April of the season after, Röhl gave an extraordinary post-match press conference in which he accused his players of ‘not able to play his style of football’. In the room, it felt like a shifting of blame and that the quotes would hit the changing room hard. We later received information to suggest angry players had to be talked out of angrily confronting their manager on the bus home.
Clearly emotional Röhl, separating himself in his speech by referring to ‘the club’ rather than ‘we’, also stated he felt Wednesday would be subject to a difficult season in 2025/26 in which he felt they could be relegated. It seems he was on to something.
In amongst all that was a 1-0 behind-closed-doors defeat during Covid that precisely nobody remembers. The internet suggests Steven Fletcher scored.
Wednesday head to the Potteries this afternoon. In this of all seasons, what madness this way lay?
Henrik Pedersen expects a battle. “Stoke is a very well-organised team, and defensively a compact team, and the front four have a lot of dynamic for the offensive transition,” he said. “It's a big, big strength from them that they have a lot of offensive quality here on the ball.
“Yeah, it's, again, a well-organised team who can play the very vertical, as they did against us last time, but it's also a team who can have a lot of passes and then be good enough to speed up the game. So it's a well-organised and strong team we have to play against, and we are looking forward to this challenge.”
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