Players need to bleed Blue and White

With the international break upon us, Vital Wednesday blogger Chris Mace takes a look at the Owls’ season of struggles so far.

‘Normal service is resumed.’

We’re feeling pretty down in the dumps as Wednesdayites at the moment. All the hope and promise of last season has gone and we find ourselves in the relegation zone in the Championship. It’s an all-too familiar place.

Eight seasons at this level in the last 12 years have yielded two relegations and four close escapes. We’ve returned to our rightful place as an under-performing Championship ‘big boy’ who are there for the taking, home or away. It’s a tragedy that last season’s 93 point winning squad has had so much money spent on it and ended up being so poor.

The players Jones has brought in are clearly talented footballers, and a definite improvement on last season’s squad, but something is missing. The team certainly haven’t gelled together yet, and this is making itself known with defensive lapses and games with a complete void of chances on goal in our favour.

We’re missing players that have that little bit extra, that aren’t just blessed with football skill, they have that hidden attribute that just makes them winners. I don’t know how to describe what that attribute is, but it’s along the lines of determination, tenacity, fight or backbone.

Megson signed a whole team of players that weren’t necessarily the most talented footballers, but they were players who would bleed for Wednesday. Rob Jones is the best example in my mind. He certainly would have struggled in the Championship, but can you really say his replacements in Taylor and Gardner play with the kind of commitment he did? How many times last season did Jones go off for treatment to a gashed head or a smashed nose? It felt like it was every game near the start of last season.

What should our expectations be then? We were generally quite optimistic before the season started, and with good reason too. The momentum has gone though, and it’s hard to see where our next win will come from. Wednesdayites are understandably upset as we’ve all had to come to terms with the fact that it looks like a long hard season of graft and near relegation again.

There’s no doubt that the division seems much stronger this season compared to the last time we were here, and that’s going to make our job much harder.

Jones is right when he says that we aren’t far away. We’re losing maches by the odd goal, and if that was happening once or twice then you could say it’s down to bad luck, but losing seven games out of eight is worse than just luck.

It’s far too early in the season to talk about changing the manager, but we need a big improvement quickly. If we’re still down here by December then I can see Jones going, but for now we need wins. To do that we need a proper captain on the pitch and players that will bleed blue and white.