FAN’S VIEW 22/23 – No.24: SHEFFIELD WEDNESDAY AWAY

Get ready, I think it’s going to be a long one.

Our opponents

Wednesday are one of the many “big” clubs that now reside in League One. The mix of such clubs and the minnows like Accrington, Morecambe and Forest Green makes tier three such a fascinating competition. Travelling away to places like Sheffield where we get to watch football in a large ground with history, good and very bad, in front of a big passionate crowd is something very much to look forward to. As are trips to the Arenas Wham and Globe plus Nailsworth of course in their own way.

The down side to having Wednesday, Ipswich, Pompey, Derby and Bolton at this level is that it makes it so very hard to finish in the top six let alone top two especially when yo-yoers such as Rotherham are regularly also thrown into the equation.

SWFC used to be an established top flight club. Having had over a decade in Division One (Premier League in today’s money) they dropped into Division Two (Championship) in 1970 and five seasons later went down again to the level they now find themselves at so it’s not that they are currently in unchartered waters. They then spent five seasons in the old Third Division and will be desperate not to have such a lengthy sojourn this time.

They were back in the top flight for the 1984/85 season and when they got relegated in 89/90 bounced back immediately. Probably a greater feat in those pre parachute payment days than it is now. On their return to the top flight they finished a very creditable third but that turned out to be their peak although they survived fairly comfortably in the Premier League until going down at the end of the 1999/2000 campaign. They’ve not returned since so it’s 20 years and counting.

They’ve been mostly Championship level ever since but did have two seasons in L1 in 2010—2012 and are now experiencing their second season back there again having narrowly lost their play-off semi-final to Sunderland last May.

They’re currently third, just three points behind table toppers Ipswich which looks rather healthy and have an impressive home record of six wins, three draws and only one defeat. Compare and contrast to a certain team from OX4. They’ve kept clean sheets in over half of their league games. Again compare and contrast. That’s why they’re where they are and we are where we are. We might be going into this on an unbeaten run of nine games in all competitions, which is admirable, but we’ve still lost more league games than we’ve won.

The bookies don’t fancy us. Bet 365 are offering 4/1 for an Oxford win but even though our opponents have not lost in the League since October 4^th and have registered five wins and four draws since, they couldn’t win away at Exeter last Saturday. We’ve hammered the Grecians twice. Take those odds?

To get a much better grip on the true health of a football club one needs to look beyond what’s happening on the field of play and delve into the murky world of finance and ownership.

Wednesday’s latest published accounts are to year ending 31 July 2021 which was, as the strategic report rightly points out, very much impacted by Covid. It was also of course the season they got relegated from the Championship and provides so much evidence to prove what a basket case financially tier two is.

Wednesday lost almost £500k a week throughout the season. Playing behind closed doors meant that turnover fell by £9.2m to £11.7m. Their total operating loss was £25m, an increase of £1.3m on the previous year, bringing the P&L reserves figure up to £124m. Taking account of called up share capital of £46.5m and the share premium account figure of £19.7m, total equity is minus ££58.2 million.

All this after the club tried to reduce losses. Their previous wage bill of £30m was cut by £9m to £21m in this accounting period. Player sales helped in this regard but that meant the value of their squad, which is shown as intangible fixed assets in the accounts, went down from £19m to just over £2m.

As things stand the Owls rely on owner Dejphon Chansiri for their continued existence. Something that is repeated across most football clubs I suspect but here he seems to be very much a one man show. To me that is terrible.

Chansiri took over from Milan Mandaric, a man with history at Pompey and Leicester City, in 2015. It was initially thought that it would be a family thing with the Thai Frozen Group (TFG) – a business with an annual revenue of around US$8 billion a year – controlling Wednesday. However it soon became clear it would be just Chansiri and none of his relations. Chansiri appears to be the only active director of the club.

In 2017/18 Wednesday posted a profit of £2.6 million but only because Chansiri sold Hillsborough stadium to Sheffield 3 Limited (a company in which he holds 100 per cent of the shares) for £60 million. Without this, the club would have posted a loss of £35.5 million, following on from the previous year’s £20.7 million deficit and were trying to avoid breaching financial fair play rules (profitability and sustainability as it is now known).

I obviously don’t know the full ins and outs of this but do know that separation of ground from football clubs is a bad thing, a very bad thing. It’s also a known that they did get a points deduction at some stage and look where they are now. Something to do with when the sale of the ground actually took place? A bit dodgy perhaps?

The accounts show the Hillsborough lease commitments within one year being £1.5m, between two and five years ££7.25m and over five years £67m. They seem big figures to me but I bet that’s better vfm, given what Hillsborough is and its size, than that which we’re getting for the rent and service charge we’re paying Mr K.

But where is “Tuna Man” as Blades striker Billy Sharp recently called Chansiri, taking Wednesday? He has confirmed that sufficient financial support will be made available to enable the Company to meet its obligations as they fall due for a period of not less than 12 months from the date of approval of the financial statements. A period which had now of course passed. Amounts falling due to creditors within a year came to £37m which included tax and social security payments of £9.7m.

Amounts due after more than one year totalled £60.6m of which £51.1m is a loan from the “controlling party” which has no set repayment date or interest terms. Sheffield Wednesday Football Club Ltd’s immediate parent company is SWFC Holdings Ltd a company registered in Hong Kong. The company’s ultimate parent company is Sheffield 2 Ltd which is owned by Chansiri.

The way I read all this is that he can’t keep going on like this unless he has a bottomless pit full of cash which I suspect he hasn’t. If TFG were going to come on board they would have done by now. Chansiri will end up taking a massive hit. With the debt the size it is how attractive is the sale of the club unless the loans he has made are written off? And where does promotion get you? To the Championship where almost every club is gambling like there is no tomorrow to then get into the Premier League which may be a land of milk and honey but costs even more than Wednesday have spaffed to stay there.

What a cautionary tale. So, do I as an OUFC fan want to see us get into the Championship? You bet. What’s the point of playing football matches otherwise? I would though like to see us progress in a prudent and sustainable fashion. Is that possible? Now, where are we with that move to Stratfield Brake or area close by? (Something I’ll no doubt come back to).

Sheffield Wednesday 0 Oxford United 0

The number of United fans in the crowd of 22,285 hasn’t yet been announced but I thought the turnout was very good given the time of year, the weather, the financial challenges many families are facing and the fact we’re in the bottom half of the table. The backing given to the team by those present was very commendable. It really is noticeable how many younger supporters we now seem to have. Mid to late teens to early 20s which is something I think may have changed post Covid lockdowns. This is a real positive as long as behaviour is of an acceptable standard and hopefully they will do us proud by following the team up and down the country for decades to come.

I didn’t see anything untoward here. One youth was marched away during the game and as he was being taken out quite a large presence of stewards materialised to watch on. I have no idea what he had done wrong.

The reason I have noted the above is that there does appear to be more cases of the younger element causing trouble at football around the country in the last year or two than has been the case for a very long time. Closer to home I have to say I think Thames Valley Police are currently being given a much greater headache by young locals from an Oxfordshire town with a cross in it than anything they face with a run of the mill OUFC game.

For all the singing and atmosphere coming from the upper tier in the Leppings Lane end I have to strongly disagree with the sentiment of “Sheffield is a shithole, I wanna go home”. Yes I know that’s just what football supporters come up with. We get it about our wonderful city from visitors to the Kassam.

Sheffield is anything but. If not the best then definitely one of the best cities for pubs in the country. I challenge any lover of decent beer to name a better duo of pubs within approximately 100 yards of each other than the Fat Cat and the Kelham Island Tavern in the Kelham Island area of the steel city.

Both pubs are absolutely perfect. Both traditional buildings with history. Both independently owned. Both serving a wide range of ales from smaller breweries not only from the local area but all around the country. Each pint faultless. Prices very northern. Value for money unbeatable. And the pork pie consumed in the Fat Cat was probably the best I’ve ever had. A decent size and it only cost two quid. Some of the glasses the KI Tavern were using to serve their beer in were the 2019 Oxford Beer Festival ones. Small world or did they get them in specially as we were visiting?

So, we’re now eight league games unbeaten. Sounds great except we’ve only won two of those meaning we’ve picked up twelve point from the 24 we’ve played for. Four wins and four defeats would have brought the same reward except for the confidence that unbeaten runs bring. The same rate of collection of points through to the end of the season would see us ending up with 63 or 64 which obviously isn’t good enough to achieve a play-off slot.

Draws need to be turned into wins if we are to get climbing up that table. This draw should very much have been a win. We were the better team and there was a huge amount to like about our performance but our lack of ability to take gilt edged chances left a feeling of immense frustration. If we don’t improve on that front we’ll go nowhere.

At least defensively we’ve made massive strides forward. A clean sheet here, only our third of the season, was huge. Only six teams now have a lower ratio of goals conceded per game than we do. Our figure is 1.05 but the best in the division is held by our opponents, 0.78 but if we’d not been downright useless in front of goal that would have increased to about 0.9.

One of the many things that was pleasing about this game was that we stopped Wednesday scoring without Elliott Moore in the side. That’s certainly no slight on our captain and I do not for one moment think we can do without him for any lengthy period of time but what it does show is that perhaps our strength in depth is rather more than I’d previously concluded we had. Simon Eastwood in goal was professionally excellent. At left back Ciaron Brown was his usual solid self. Does he ever have a bad game? Does he ever drop below a 7 out of 10? And if you take a close look at his game he’s now joining in attacking wise more than when he first appeared for us plus there’s some real quality of technique there too. What a signing. I’ve perhaps been a little harsh on Stuart Findlay previously but in this he was a proper defender who defended properly; blocking and putting his body on the line as everyone did to be fair. Moore’s replacement was Sam Long and what a game he had. Evidence perhaps to support the view that centre-half is his best position even though he has done sterling work for us in the RB berth.

The RB position has recently been occupied by Djavan Anderson.  “He’s not a right-back” has been said many a time already. I’d go along with that but it’s worked so far. No team thus far has put a winger up against him that has exposed our Surinamese international in such a way as to cause us grief and boy he brings a lot to the party attacking wise, including pace. In two of the last four times he’s played in that position we’ve not conceded. That’s 66.6% of the times we’ve achieved that so far this season.

As ever I feel obliged to say that it is not just the back line that stops the opposition scoring. It is down to the whole shape of the team and the closing down of those in front of the rear guard – and we’ve become good at that. The steady work of the midfielders Cameron Brannagan, Marcus McGuane and Lewis Bate can easily go unnoticed but it is integral to where we’ve got ourselves. Now that the latter has become more tuned in to what L1 is all about he looks a real asset with a little bit of Premier League stardust in his locker.

Our first very good chance not taken came quite early on. We’d battled and won the ball in midfield. Long, Bate, Marcus Browne and Matty Taylor were all involved in the crowding. Taylor brought it under our control with a pass to Brannagan whose first time ball picked out the run of Browne whose alertness had spotted something was on. He took it on and cut across a defender. This was all excellent stuff. Right in front of goal just outside the six yard box facing only keeper Cameron Dawson what he did next was the total opposite of excellent. All he had to do was shoot left footed but oh no, instead he tried to roll the studs of his right boot across the ball in some flash nonsense and made a right cock up of it. I like a lot of what he does but this was shite. He’s a decent player but he could be so much better. If I was his manager I’d be demanding to know what he was doing. He’s only scored one goal for us this season. No way is that good enough.

Our next chance came from Brannagan who was fed by Billy Bodin after Taylor had moved a high Eastwood clearance on to him. Brannagan hit it well enough but it was straight at the ideally placed Dawson.

Although the hosts were getting some chances too they weren’t as good as ours and we were playing the better football. Barry Bannan, who usually makes them tick, was missing with a hamstring problem and that showed. The home fans, who I thought never really got behind their team, weren’t impressed with what they were seeing and there were some boos at half and full time. The way we played had a lot to do with that.

Another good Oxford move was stopped when Browne was cruelly scythed down by Tyreeq Bakinson. At the end of many games now I come away with the impression that Taylor isn’t the goal-scoring machine he once was and that he’s something of a spent force. He’s only netted two league goals in 2022/23 thus far. It’s questionable whether he is worth a place in the team. Then I look at the highlights and note that he’s involved in a lot of the play when he drops deeper and we’re moving the ball around. So who knows? It’s all down to Karl Robinson to create the structure of the team that is as effective as it can be with what he has at his disposal and currently he is doing a lot better than he was a few months back.

The free-kick following that foul was really well worked but nothing came of it of note for us but the home side broke and Marvin Johnson went close. I can’t believe he is 32 now and it is already five years since he left us. He’s another of those players who I think could have been better than he turned out. I’m possibly once more expecting too much. I am though worried that Browne might end up with the same kind of stats at the end of his career. Johnson scored three league goals for us in 35 starts. In his four years at Middlesbrough he only started 57 league games, albeit at Championship level, scoring five times. He’s now started the same number of matches for Wednesday but has found the net just three times.

The second half continued to be one of those fairly entertaining goal-less games.

Early in the second half Brannagan put a shot just wide from way out after he had won a sliding challenge to retain possession for his side.

This though was very much a game that could go either way to use that blatantly obvious cliché. Not that we needed reminding of that fact but Michael Smith did so when he very nearly got his head on the end of a cross.

Just before the hour mark an injured Brannagan was replaced by Josh Murphy and with about a quarter of an hour to go Browne and Bodin went off with James Henry and Yanic Wildschut entering the field.

Immediately these two were involved. Wednesday gave the ball away. Wildschut picked it up and moved it along nicely to Bate who played a great pass to Murphy advancing down the right. He played a wicked ball in which resulted in a desperate defensive header which Wildschut was onto. His second touch was a shot which Dawson had to go down low to his right to keep out. Taylor was lurking unmarked on the corner of the six yard box. All he had to do surely was hit it first time with his left foot. Another very good chance. Instead he brought it back onto his right and to be fair almost scored with that but the shot was blocked on the goal line. I still think he took the wrong option but that shouldn’t have mattered. With the blocker down on his arse, the ball came to Henry a few feet out with nothing to prevent him from scoring. It was not just a very good chance. It was a very very very very good chance. With it being almost impossible to do he blazed over the bar. In the nearly 60 years I have been watching OUFC I think that is the worst miss I’ve ever seen from one of our players.

Buoyed by our ineptness in front of goal, Wednesday set about making the hurt even worse but, unlike the forwards, the defence continued to do their jobs. A good save from Easty and a block from Findlay ensuring the game still had no goals.

In the last five to ten minutes we continued to play our football when we were in possession and I thought we looked a very good side. One of the pleasing things was that it provided another example of the strength of our squad – provided they are fit and KR has a close to full complement to pick from. Not long ago without Brannagan and Browne we’d probably be fearing the worst but Murphy and Wildschut looked the part and we’re told that Sam Baldock could be back in January with Kyle Joseph being weeks not months away. My level of optimism is bubbling along steadily and without getting carried away I have my hand poised over the heating settings ready to give serious consideration to turning it up to max.

But football is a pisser. We had that hammered into us in the last minute of added time when we were rightly awarded a penalty. Well done Seb Stockbridge for giving it and what a pass to Gatlin O’Donkor, bent to him with the outside of Brown’s boot.

What happened next does my head in. Penalties are supposed to give a huge advantage to the side that has been on the receiving end of the foul play. The longer it takes between the awarding and the taking of the kick the more pressure it puts on the taker and reduces the chances of them converting. So why do referees take an age to lecture goal-keepers about staying on their lines and the other outfield players on the need to not encroach before the kick is struck? They don’t give the taker of a throw in a run- down of the laws every time play is restarted in that fashion. Just get on with it and if there is a transgression deal with it afterwards and don’t let the defending team delay the kick being taken or allow them to get at and hassle the taker as happened here. Two Wednesday men got very close to Murphy. All of this is a general bugbear of mine and I was shouting at the TV almost every time a penalty was awarded in the World Cup.

Back to this one though. Did we know who was going to take it? Without Brannagan on I was expecting it to be Henry but if he couldn’t hit the target from a couple of feet perhaps the reasoning was that no way would he do so from 12 yards.

Dawson’s save was a fairly good one and as keepers now mostly do, he left a foot on his line as he threw himself to the ball. But at the moment Murphy hit the ball Wednesday had men in the box.  Liam Palmer was well in. It was he who cleared after the save. It should have been re-taken. With both referee and assistant close by why wasn’t this spotted? And I must ask why we didn’t have players lined up amongst the blue and white shirts ready to compete for any rebound? I’d call that a lack of professionalism. Fine margins win football matches. For all our much improved play we’re still missing something and on the evidence of this penalty incident it’s not just finishing.

Every picture tells a story

This might be the longest FV ever so definitely time to sign off. To all fellow yellows, players and staff at OUFC plus any football fan anywhere who may be reading this for whatever reason, have a great Christmas and get some relaxing time away from the game we love but drives us mad. I’m trying to forget about the emotions I’m likely to go through at Ipswich on Boxing Day for now but am looking forward to it already.

Finally one person I’d like to wish all the very best to is Alex Gorrin. At times football is a very cruel game and to get injured again after what he has been through just isn’t fair. But as he’d got back once why not a second time. He seems to be a young man with strong mental determination.