FAN’S VIEW  2025/26 – SHEFFIELD WEDNESDAY AWAY

Wednesday have long been in financial turmoil under the ownership of Dejphon Chansiri. The day before our visit to Hillsborough he finally relinquished control of the club and placed them into administration. With that came a 12-point deduction putting them fifteen behind us before kick-off.  

As soon as the season begins I and many other fans are on the lookout for three teams who are likely to finish below us. From day one Wednesday were the biggest contender by far. Relegation now seems almost a certainty. When it comes to match day though that is neither here nor there. There’s three points up for grabs and we need those in the race to keep at least two other teams below us in the table.

For us the fear coming into this match was that there would be a euphoric party atmosphere around the club to add to the underdog backs against the wall approach they already had and we could be on a hiding to nothing.

They’d done well against high flying Middlesborough in the previous game even though they’d lost.

Chansiri bought Wednesday for £40m in 2015. He’s put money in. Apparently he is owed £114m but all he’ll get back now is £28.5m under EFL rules. Creditors only get 25p in the pound. If a buyer of the club agrees to pay over three years that 25p becomes 35p, but why would they?

Chansiri doesn’t seem to have behaved in any logical way over this whatsoever. He’s turned down offers for the club that have been quoted as being around £60m. He wanted £100m apparently. Now he’s going to get a lot less than that.

Begbies Traynor, who dealt with Wigan in 2020, are the administrators. They are now in charge of day-to-day operations at Wednesday but of course not the running of the team. Their role is to get as much money as possible to pay the creditors and of course themselves. I suspect they’ll come out of it quite nicely. They earned over £2m at Wigan.

The first to be paid anything owed will be players, managers and staff as well as other clubs who Wednesday may be indebted to under the football-creditors rule. Next in the pecking order are the club’s secured creditors, followed by unsecured creditors like HMRC and, finally, shareholders. Chansiri’s loans are not thought to be secured.

The 2017-18 accounts for Sheffield Wednesday Football Club Limited show that Hillsborough was sold for a profit of over £38m. This obviously contributed to their pre-tax profit of £2.5m.  This move was to get round the EFL’s profitability and sustainability rules. But a ground can only be sold once. Once it’s gone it’s gone, well for a while at least. And we all know what problems separation of club and ground can bring, although it’s never quite as straightforward as some would like to believe.

The company that purchased Hillsborough was Sheffield 3. It had just the one director. His name is Dejphon Chansiri. Sheffield 3 has also been put into administration meaning any buyer should be able to acquire club and ground debt free. It will be a very low base from which to build again but with the right people in charge an institution the size of SWFC should surely be able to rise again.

Heart says I wish them all the best in the future; head obviously says nothing of the sort on match day.

Anyway, enough of them.

Having driven to Wrexham the train was very much calling for this trip up north. I know a few who play the split ticket game. Splitting the tickets made a saving of over £20 on this journey. Bicester North to Warwick Parkway. Warwick Parkway to Dorridge. Dorridge to Derby. Derby to Sheffield. The only change being the usual walk from Moor St to New St in Birmingham. Madness, isn’t it? How did it come to this? Still, got to beat the system and be a few quid up.

It’s rarely straightforward though even with a plan in place. Legs one and two no problem. Both Chiltern Railways. Tickets bought and downloaded to wallet. Leg three though was Cross Country (CC). Whenever I click on the link from national rail to CC to proceed, I always get the message from CC that the tickets are no longer available. They are, it’s just that I have to log in using my CC id and password and start again. Only this time I was told I needed a password reset. I went through that process and was told a link would arrive by email. It didn’t. I then tried to buy the ticket as a guest using my email address but because I already had an account it was having none of that either. Eventually I found a workaround. Mrs FV has not got a CC account so I used her email address and got a code to pick the tickets up from the station. Digital wasn’t an option. I’d left it late. This was Friday evening. I walked up to the station to make sure I’d got the bloody thing. The final part of the journey was with East Midlands Railway who I’ve not purchased from before. That was relatively easy to get tickets and an account.

After all that I was very much thinking better be bloody worth it. And it was of course.

The journey out was so smooth. Left Bicester at 8:22; arrived in Sheffield about three hours later having had a seat all the way on trains that were far from being crowded.

Kelham Island is the place to go for beers. As I left the station Google maps wouldn’t play ball and tell me how to get there with its constant re-routing. No matter, I approached two policemen and asked the one who wasn’t on the phone for directions. His reply: I’m from Oxford I don’t know. “I’m from Oxford too, that’s why I’m asking”. He asked his partner who was local. His response surprised me. “It’s a long way, best you get a taxi”. Incredulously I responded “It’s only about a mile. I like walking”.  He replied “it’s too difficult to explain but it’s in that direction” and pointed. Off I went and soon Google was helping. No wonder we’ve got a health crisis in this country if people are being encouraged to take taxis for short journeys instead of walking. Mindsets need altering.

There are six pubs in Kelham Island listed in the 2026 Good Beer Guide. Whenever I go there, I always intend to try some I have never been in before but the Fat Cat and the Kelham Island Tavern are so good I don’t get beyond those two. Same happened on Saturday. Both these establishments serve quality local ales. Hardly anything to choose between them. Proper pubs. I wasn’t paying that much attention but prices seemed about £4 a pint and there’s simple basic rolls and pork pies on offer that don’t cost an arm and a leg. The only slight complaint would be that some pints could have done with a top up after pouring. Good company too, mates, fellow Oxford fans, some I know in passing, some chatted to for the first time. It’s what helps make away days what they are.

From the Hillsborough tram stop it is still just under a mile to the ground but that’s where we alighted which was sensible. It’s right outside a JD Wetherspoon, The Rawson Spring. Always good for the toilets in a Spoons. Like most of them it was huge and rammed. Had a beer. Be rude not to at those prices and with a CAMRA discount too. Plastic glasses, beer was of the quality I expect from this chain. Not a patch on the previous two establishments visited but they meet a demand which is massive.

None of this being held up to enter the stadium with over-the-top multiple pat downs and body scans as experienced at Watford and Wrexham. Just a sensible cursory search from older, more friendly, more human, stewards.

I thought we had a decent turnout but I can’t find the numbers recorded anywhere. Football fans are always interested in what gates a football club gets and probably even more so “how many do you take away?”.  Last season the match report on the official OUFC website usually included not only the total attendance but the away following too. Less so this season. I wonder what the reason for this is. Bring back Martin B?

That said I can’t find any such stats on the Wednesday site either. And of course, attendance figures have to be treated with a great big pinch of salt when season ticket holders don’t turn up or there’s a mass boycott. The official attendance for Wed v Boro was 21,578 but according to reports there were only about 3,000 there. A glance at the highlights show it was definitely well short of 21k.

Anyway, the Yellow Army made plenty of noise in the upper tier of the Leppings Lane. Old school grounds tend to keep the atmosphere in and nicely keep us in our own little world. So much so that it is easy to conclude we’re the ones making all the racket and the opposition are quiet. I have to say I may have fallen for that as I expressed my surprise that there wasn’t more buoyancy amongst all the Owls in the 27,261 gate. At one stage our lot sang “He’s gone and you still don’t sing”.

Back to the clips of those highlights. They show something of a different story. “Hi ho, Sheffield Wednesday” was blasted out with some gusto and their response to us going 1-0 up was “Chansiri’s gone, Chansiri’s gone” as if that was what mattered not their team going behind. Which truth be told is actually the case.

In the last FV I categorised our performances as follows. Cat C (Poor/Very poor. Relegation on the cards). Cat B (Just about okay. Nothing to shout about but might just about keep us up). Cat A (Good/Very good. This is more like it. Up the table we go. Play-offs in sight?) I returned to this after Saturday’s win.

First half we were Cat A but with a caveat that we should really have been further ahead at the break and bearing in mind the opposition. The second half wasn’t far off Cat C. We lost that half 1-0 and if we’d conceded again and dropped a point it certainly would have been. But we survived to come away with three points which was the objective no matter how that was achieved. So, over the 90 plus minutes Cat B.

In the first period I thought it was a case of men against boys not only as far as physicality was concerned but understanding of the game and how to win football matches. It goes without saying that manager Henrik Pedersen has a very young inexperienced squad to work with. They looked like decent little footballers, or potentially decent footballers, but when it came to controlling the game, keeping the ball and shape, I thought we were vastly superior.

After we’d gone two up it could/should have been a case of filling our boots and boosting our, already not too bad, goal difference.

Our starting line up didn’t include any of our out and out wide men. The lads with chalk on their boots: Stan Mills, Shemmy Placheta and also to some extent Siriki Dembele. Did this help our shape by making us more compact? One thing it did do was allow both Filip Krastev and Nik Prelec to start.

I would like to have seen the stats after the first 45 minutes because those at the end of the game stunned me.

Wednesday had 67.2% possession and 17 shots with five on target compared to our 11 and four. They had more touches in our box than we did in theirs, 34/23 and a better passing accuracy, 81.2%/66.8%. We only had three corners, they had eight.

Prelec had already had a shot pushed away by keeper Joe Lumley before we took the lead in the 12^th minute. Cameron Brannagan was in the middle of the Wednesday half with all the space in the world. He received a pass from Prelec, stopped it then played a wickedly curling ball into the box. They are very difficult to defend. Brodie Spencer threw himself headlong at it but didn’t connect. After one bounce it was Will Lankshear’s turn to go headlong. He did connect and in doing so scored his fourth goal of the season.

We should have doubled our lead when Krastev robbed a Wednesday defender just outside the D. With only Lumley to beat it looked like he should have been able to quite easily slot the ball home, or knock it to his left for Lankshear to do so. Instead, he ran towards the keeper who refused to buy any dummy or shimmy and the chance was gone.

The second came 24 minutes after the first. We had a free kick way out. So far out it was questionable whether the hosts needed a wall. They decided they did and that two men would be sufficient. A Bran blaster put the ball past a sprawling Lumley close to his left-hand post. Sweet.

With it being 2-0 (a dangerous score apparently) at the break it was imperative that we didn’t concede early on. This is stating the blatantly obvious.

So, eight minutes after the re-start we had let that goal in. We’d only got ten men on the pitch at the time with Brannagan off for the mandatory 30 seconds after receiving treatment. Wednesday got into the right-hand side of our penalty area having thrown many men forward. When the ball came across, we couldn’t get it away although I though Currie should have done so.

From here on in we were nowhere as near being “at it” as we were in the first half. Brannagan’s immediate departure may have had something to do with this, not that his replacement, Will Vaulks, did badly. Our captain had been having a good game.

Our other enforced substitution had been Sam Long replacing Spencer as early as the 22^nd minute. Hope it is nothing serious but Longy fitted right in as to be expected.

Oh, about time I mentioned Barry Bannon. He’s the opposite of the callow footballing youths around him. The string puller. A man who rarely gives the ball away. He was instrumental in all that Wednesday did kicking towards their own fans.

If, son of Danny, Bailey Cadermarteri, had got on the end of another ball in he would definitely have scored. Thankfully he didn’t and other efforts were straight at Jamie Cumming.

In the 76^th minute off went Krastev, Prelec and Lankshear. Their replacements were a couple of Harrises and Placheta. The pace and determination of the latter got him through on goal but when facing the advancing Lumley put the ball just wide. That would have sewn the game up.

And then there was that Mark Harris chance. How the expletive did he miss that?

It didn’t matter because the points were ours.

We’re now averaging a point a game which probably wouldn’t be enough to keep us up but we seem to be moving in the right direction.

We’re 13^th or joint 13^th when it comes to goals scored, goals conceded and goal difference which say something although the key stats are undoubtedly points on the board and position in the table come the end of the season.

We’ve played seven away games and have already got two wins. That was the total we achieved last season when we picked up 21.74% of the points up for grabs. On our travels in 2025/26 we’ve upped that to 33.3% which is currently the rate we’re on at home too. That is disappointing compared to last season when we achieved 55.07%.

Clearly our form at the Kassam needs to approve forthwith. Millwall come a calling this Saturday. They’re third and are one point shy of having double our total. They’ve won their last four, have conceded in only one of those games and are unbeaten away. A very tough game then.

But they’ve only let in two fewer goals than us and scored just one more than us. So how come they are so far ahead? Hoping that gap will soon be closed.