A New(ish) Dawn

All change in Sheffield S2:

Yes. Thank you, Hecky.
Certainly landing comfortably within the Top Four of United managers in my lifetime: Warnock, Bassett, Wilder and now Heckingbottom.

And as one door closes:

I leave Sheffield United after three and a half years with many great memories created by many great people. 

I begin by thanking Prince Abdullah and the Board for entrusting me with managing such a special club. The challenges and successes have made for such a special couple of years, and it has been an honour to lead the team during this period. 

To the staff at Bramall Lane and in the Academy, your roles can never be underestimated or undervalued. You are the heartbeat of the club and will continue to be, regardless of who is in charge. Thank you. 

To all First Team staff at Shirecliffe, thank you for helping to create a fantastic place to come to work. It has been a joy! Your attitude and professionalism has helped us to navigate some potentially tricky moments and has kept us moving forwards, no matter what. 

To the players, those who have left, those who I have known a long time and those who I wish to have known longer, thank you. Working with you all is the best part of the job. The focus and spirit that you demonstrated allowed us to achieve special things. Our history-making season in the face of adversity, born out of a heart-breaking and emotional loss in the play-offs the season before, will forever be my highlight. A record 91 Championship points and FA Cup Semi-Final does not begin to tell the story. Well done and I hope to catch up with you all soon.

Finally, a message to the fans. Thank you for your support. You are what made the journey so special and many of my fondest memories are of the players and fans celebrating our victories together. Bramall Lane on a match day will always hold a special place in my heart. I loved it! When the dust settles, that is what will bring me back. I hope to catch up with many of you then. In the meantime, keep supporting your team.

Another door opens:

Yep. It’s the return of Chris Wilder to United (accompanied on the club’s social media by some Kasabian), and a re-baptism of fire with Liverpool visiting just 30 hours after his arrival.

If I seemed sceptical about switching managers in this post, it’s because I am. There are far bigger problems at Sheffield United than the manager. But it seems unlikely that the axe was ever going to fall on anyone of a higher pay grade.

And that’s not the fault of the manager (either of them) or the players.

And so, yes. We will continue to support the team and the manager and we will expect nothing less than 100% effort every game, no matter the position the team is in or the state of play on the pitch.
No right-thinking fan was ever expecting us to bring the Premier League trophy back to Beautiful Downtown Bramall Lane this season, but equally, no fan deserves to watch players not giving their all for 90+ minutes, each and every game.

Let’s begin (again) tonight.

Deckchair rearrangement imminent

As I write, Fabrizio Romano had tweeted this out over 5 hours ago.

And while at least the first paragraph is likely to be true, we’ve heard precisely de nada, dololo and nowt from the club so far. So why would I believe the second bit if the first bit does seem to have been down to some Italian gun-jumping?
Get the tweet out first, worry about the accuracy later. Celebrate your hits, ignore your misses.

Either way, with things clearly not working at the club at the moment, something has to change. But while I can see that Heckingbottom has potentially “lost the dressing room”, I can’t see that being the only problem we face at the moment. I think we’re all aware that whoever is managing the team, our issues will remain in the higher echelons of the business.

But hey, let’s ignore the gaping hole in the bow and the screams of the terrified passengers, and make sure that the deckchairs are all lined up nicely for absolutely the best view as we sink.

Post-match reaction

I always watch these videos. I never share them. But this one I am sharing, because it’s one that I will go back to from time to time.

Sheffield United manager Chris Wilder speaks about our 0-1 defeat to Manchester City last night:

Quotes of note:

You’ve got two clubs there tonight that are a million miles apart. One’s spent about a billion pounds and the other one is on its own journey, which I’m not embarrassed about… and we’ve gone toe to toe with them and left everything out there.

I thought they were excellent, outstanding. I thought every part of the football club was outstanding tonight.

And he’s right. It’s not often I feel this proud after the Blades lose. We went down fighting. We tried our best, but sometimes, your best simply isn’t enough and this was one of those times. Manchester City are undoubtedly the best team we’ve played or will play this season. The fact that the scorer of their only goal is probably worth more than our entire squad put together gives me some solace, even if it gives us no points.

A draw would have been wonderful, a win amazing. But we’ve clearly raised ourselves for this run of Big 6 games over the past month. We now need to keep it going as we head into a run of matches against the rest of the Premiership.

Onward and (hopefully) upward.

Outlay

It seems like only the week before last that I was saying just how good the Sheffield United manager Chris Wilder is. And with Aston Villa promoted to the Premier League this afternoon via the playoffs, this graphic made it on to my twitter feed:

Now, in no way am I saying that £8.6million is not a lot of money, but everything is relative and when you see it relative to how much others have spent (and you note that Leeds and Derby didn’t even get promoted), suddenly it doesn’t seem like that much of a lot of money.

In fact, compare it with the money flying around the top leagues of Europe and it’s less than 10% of a Paul Pogba (hopefully you don’t get the 10% with the mouth or the mood swings), and just 4% of a Neymar.
And that’s all we’ve spent in the last three years.

Wilder is clearly very shrewd when it comes to the transfer market, and very good at getting the best from the players he has. That’s a great skill to have in the lower leagues, but can it translate to buying the right players (here I am assuming that he has the right money to do so) to stay up in the Premier League? Obviously, I hope so. But I’m also a realist:

Just checking now, we’re the hot favourites to be relegated next season (4/6 on), with Norwich (4/5) and Villa (11/10) close behind. Burnley, Brighton, Newcastle and Southampton are considered the most at risk of those who survived this season. Given the recent record of promoted teams, that’s no surprise, but we’ve bucked the odds before and I’m sure we’ll make every effort to do it again.

Come on you Red And White Wizzzzzzards!