A 7am bedtime and the unthinkable job - How Darren Moore roused Sheffield Wednesday to do the impossible
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The rest of the world was looking on at Sheffield Wednesday with pity, some with laughter. But having stayed up until 7am watching, planning and plotting his next moves, the Owls boss had risen from the pain of a 4-0 reversal at Peterborough United.
By 11am he was standing in front of his players explaining the way forward. Fast forward to Thursday evening and Barry Bannan was thanking him for turning around a changing room that had been broken.
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Hide AdIndeed, the club was broken not long ago and let’s be frank, it’s far from fixed. There’s Wembley to navigate and nobody is getting ahead of themselves.
But what happened at S6 in the second leg was the sort of occasion that takes clubs forward. More than a playing staff and a coaching staff did the unthinkable. It was the effort of more than 33,000.
“We’ve witnessed a historic game,” Moore said. “When we all stick together, that’s what we can achieve – it’s only been achieved tonight by us all sticking together.
“We had a rallying call for all the fans to come out tonight and be in full voice and they did that. We knew they had to drive the team over the line, they had to keep the players going, they were cramping up at the end – the fans kept them going.
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Hide Ad“The boys showed great character. After that first leg, we got back to Sheffield at half past one in the morning. I didn’t get to bed until half six, 7am. I was re-watching and de-briefing the game. We were in on Saturday by 11 o’clock and I showed them 65 goals we’d scored here straight away.
“We broke it down, it was short of three goals per game. We’d scored five goals here on three occasions and a four. We showed them all that. We had to break the mindset straight away.
“You can understand the emotions from the external, but we worked on the mindset and gave real good detail in training, we practised penalties every single game. There was so much detail.”