Flight of the Owls VII

Right it’s been a week since the Playoff semi final and the pain is still there...so I suppose now is as good a time as any to talk about it. In recent weeks I’ve been including facts and figures into my posts but I’m scrapping that today, instead I’m writing this short post from my heart.

On the 17th of May Sheffield Wednesday were knocked out of the play off semi finals by Huddersfield on penalties, condemning us to another season of Championship football. I’ll be honest and say I’ve never felt heart ache like this, even when Wednesday got relegated to League One… 

When Westwood saved that penalty I went mental! cheering my tits off, I woke my girlfriend up who’d drifted off to sleep through boredom. I was so confident we were going to go through. Sadly though Fernando Forestieri’s penalty was stopped by a cracking save from Danny Ward, killing off all hope...to go from that high to that low...it’s such a painful thing.

Before I go any further I want to give a huge congratulations to Huddersfield Town. They’ve defied all the odds in getting to the Playoff final this season and were a class above in both legs as well as for the majority of the season. Wagner has done wonders there and I would love to write a post about the German.

Anyways back onto Wednesday. All the players that played in the semis can hold their heads high, they battled admirably. When the teams were released I thought Carlos was insane but I’m happy to say he proved me wrong as he picked the perfect sides for both legs. I’m so happy that Carvalhal is staying on for another year at Hillsborough.

One question I do have of the Owls boss is why he replaced Steven Fletcher with Jordan Rhodes. On paper that is a good substitution but with how the game was set up, we needed that focal point and Rhodes didn’t match up to Fletch. I should also add that Rhodes hasn’t really hit the ground running since his move to S6. Obviously I’m not blaming our exit on this decision. The better team won in the end.

Speaking of Rhodes, he’s received a lot of criticism since the semi final game. Quite a number of newspapers have spoken about Jordan Rhodes’ “refusal” to take a penalty in the penalty shootout. Now for me the word “refusal” is a strong word, he’s just informed his boss that he wasn’t confident.

If everyone else had taken a penalty and there was only Rhodes left, he’d have to take one.

I think this is less of him refusing to take a penalty, more a refusal to take one of the first five...but I don’t want to make excuses for the Scotland international. For me you don’t realise you’re unconfident just before a penalty shootout. You realise in the buildup to the game.

In my opinion he should have told Carvalhal he wasn’t confident before the game and then Carlos could have given the chance to Sam Winnall who has had a lack of consistent first team football since his move from Barnsley. But it would be quite hypocritical of me to say that as I’d have probably kept  it quiet myself…

But I will say I have the utmost confidence in Rhodes. With a good preseason behind him and a run of games he could potentially score 20+ goals next season. I just hate when commentators say he has “improved his all round game” and he’s “not just a goalscorer anymore”...am I the only Owl who doesn’t care if he’s involved in the buildup? I just want him to score goals..

All in all I want to say how incredibly proud I am of how we’ve performed over the last couple of months. I think the contract talks with Forestieri at the beginning of the season put a lot of our players on edge but now all that is out of the way I’m hoping The Owls have a better start to next season’s campaign. And who knows, with a better start we could potentially push for an automatic promotion spot...a man can dream.

The last thing I want to say is that my heart goes out to all those affected by the Manchester bombings. To think that you’re not safe at a children’s pop concert is worrying. Now I’ve seen countless posts on Facebook regarding this and I don’t want to make this about religion, race or politics. I just wanted to say that even though I don’t know the full facts, I know that those children did not deserve what happened to them.

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Cheers for reading.