24 February 2015 -
Millwall 1 Sheffield Wednesday 3
My
mate Dave is a big Sheffield Wednesday fan. That is to say he's a
fan of the Owls who happens to be sodding enormous – clear of 6' 6”
I'd guess. He follows the team a bit, and he'll go and watch them
when he can work attendance at their game into his real hobby, which
is getting drunk with pretty women and silly men.
Somehow
he talked me into attending this one to fill the “silly men”
quota. So I dragged myself out to South Bermondsey when I could have
been watching Barcelona beat Man City, under the specious
rationalisation that I was scouting the sort of mediocre opposition
from which I expect City will need to take points next season.
(On
which point, by the way, I have few concerns. Despite Wednesday's
excellent performance in the second half, which owed a lot to the
genuinely fine attacking play of Jacques Maghoma, I felt that on
present form City would beat either team relatively comfortably.
We'll have no problems adapting to the middle of that division, I
suspect.)
I
went in the spirit of companionship and bonhomie, and as someone who
always enjoys live football, rather than because I was expecting the
team third-bottom of the divion and the team whose previous
seven-game form read D3 L4 to produce an encounter for the ages. And
the first half lived down to my expectations, a scoreless heap of
nothing in particular distinguished perhaps by the moment Wednesday
left-back Claude Dielna took a touch of the ball, found himself with
time to think, considered his options, and very calmly and
deliberately lobbed it over the left-hand touchline and out of play.
After
the break though things were different, and once the badly out of
form Yorkshiremen had scored the goal that gee'd them up whilst
demolishing the fragile confidence of Ian Holloway's men the game was
almost entirely played in one direction – right down the pitch
towards the voluble travelling support. We were up towards the back
where, at the Den as everywhere, the loudest and least inhibited of
the away support tend to congregate. I found myself almost entirely
sucked in by the frisson Wednesday's performance generated, and
celebrated the goals like I had swallowed Henderson's Relish
from the teat. It was exhilarating.
It
was also probably the most exhilarated I've been at any football
match this season. Since my team is top of the league, and I've been
to quite a lot of their games, that has to be a concern.
Part
of the reason I think is that I was caught in a very particular mood
felt by the Wednesday fans. Both behind me at the ground, and on the
train back home, I kept catching variations on the same theme. “Two
goals from open play!” a Wednesdayite would exclaim in great
surprise. “An away win...” sighed another lad in reverent,
mine-eyes-have-seen-the-glory tones.
You
know what that's like, don't you? When you come away from a game
thinking “we won. We actually went and bloody won!”
It's
the best feeling in football. There's satisfaction in winning a game
you ought to win by a nice, routine 2-0. There's great pleasure in
seeing your team demonstrate clear superiority when running goal
after goal past some hapless bunch of lower-league chancers. But
coming into a game you may not win, entering an uncertain situation,
scales balanced, nervous, turning up because it's what you do rather
than because of your scintillating run of form, then
scoring all the goals and claiming the points – that, my friends,
is the good stuff.
And
League One just doesn't offer that. Not when you've been there less
than a couple of years it doesn't, anyway. Sure, last time around,
when we'd had seven solid seasons before the glorious eighth, we'd
become accustomed to playing at that level and really didn't expect
to beat the better sides. So when we did it was terrific.
But this time is different, isn't it? It feels that way to me,
certainly. We've not been in the doldrums long enough for victories
to have the same meaning. We had two understandable wobbles in the
first season, a just-relegated-building-a-team one and a
new-manager-not-getting results one, overcome them, and been doing
absolutely fine thankyouverymuch since then. We'll get promoted this
season. We've been favourites, probably, since the opening day. The
game we played that day, at Sheffield United, may in fact have been
the most recent game we didn't expect to win, but did.
I've not once walked out of a game feeling utterly thrilled to the
core, that wonderful pinch-myself thrumming through me like a plucked
string. I've been happy quite a lot. I've thought “that's
absolutely fine” a fair bit, I've thought “didn't we play well”
from time to time. But overjoyed, no; not by winning a game
comfortably in this dreary League One.
Because it plainly is dreary. What came down was so much worse
than what went up that it was pretty clear this was a major
opportunity to get out of the division. I'd guess we have a bigger
budget than 21 other clubs. The two of a comparable size – Preston
and Sheffield United – are underachieving, not because
they're behind us but because they're scrapping with Bradford,
Doncaster and Fleetwood. That won't do for famous sides like those two.
And it's left the way open for us to run the division simply on account of
hitting par for our budget whilst they fail to do so.
There's also the fact that even our close competitors are failing to
give us a run for our money. The main reason we're seven points
clear of third is that in both of the last two weekends, we've lost
but so have Swindon. That's it. They could be a point behind us,
but they're not. That's because they're a League One club on a small
budget, so they'll be inconsistent and drop silly points. It's
perfectly reasonable but it hardly adds to the tension of it all.
And a break in tension is what creates real joy at football. It's
why a late winner feels so much better than a fourth goal midway
through the second half.
This time last year, our record – 67 points from 32 games, with a
goal difference of 31 – would have put us third in the table. We'd
have been level on points with Orient and Wolves above us, though –
a three way tie! - having played a game more than Orient and a game
fewer than Wanderers. Brentford would be a point behind us in fourth
with a game in hand. It would have been completely brilliant.
Imagine how vital every game would have felt. Imagine those clashes
in Wolverhampton, in East and West London.
But there we are. Instead we're competently navigating a mediocre
iteration of the division. We'll go up, great, but as far as I'm
concerned the real thing will only start then. Getting back into the
Championship and having to play well every week just to keep our
heads above water. Real competition. Parachute payments.
International players at the Gate. Difficult matches every week.
And once again, that most underrated of footballing emotions –
relief. The same relief, breeding the same delight, those Sheffield
Wednesday fans felt last night.
