Alex Miller: Dutchmen, nebs and wood in t'ole: Fun and games ahead of a big one for Sheffield Wednesday
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It was a quiet puzzlement, the sort you’d imagine on the face of a Amazon tribesman handed an iPad for the first time and asked to launch a Zoom call.
“Put wood in t’ole,” laughed Cameron Dawson a few minutets before warbling the first line of an Arctic Monkeys tune. “Like, it’s cold in a room but the door’s open..”
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Hide AdThose of you who are yet to see the video posted by Sheffield Wednesday’s media team this morning need not adjust your reading glasses. For context, the task was set for the Sheffield stopper to teach Dutch pairing van Aken and Joey Pelupessy a phrase or two of Yorkshire dialect and hilarity ensued.
“Mate you’ve been here three years and you don’t know what a ‘brew’ is?” Dawson asked, exasperated after it was suggested that it was an expression used by White Rose folk to describe going to the toilet.
All fun and games, but yet another example of the changes the club have launched forwards in presenting themselves as a strong, together group. The sort needed in situations in which they find themselves.
It’s the sort of activity players from way back when might scowl at, but in this day and age, especially with the very physical separation drawn between club and fans at current, these videos are important. There’s been an enormous deal of goodwill built up since that kamikaze race down the league table last season and while committed performances count above all else in that regard, there’s a human side to this PR game that has not been properly explored in seasons past.
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Hide AdYou’d do well to fake the spirit shown on these videos and recent weeks and speaking to some of the Owls players this season it’s clear it is genuine. It’s understood that while rumours of ‘bad eggs’ in last year’s changing room are overshooting the mark a touch, there were cliques. After a number of years together, that’s only natural.
Garry Monk has made clear that this is a changing room ready to fight together, to embrace the extreme pressure they find themselves in during what he himself has described as the biggest challenge of the club’s modern history.
The video snippets are all well and good, the camaraderie shown in clips at Middlewood Road hugely encouraging, but it is over the white line that it matters, continuing with the visit of QPR to Hillsborough tomorrow.
It feels like a big one, the last hurrah entering the chasm of a two-week international break in which momentum can snowball or concerns enlarge, both in-camp and among a fanbase.
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Hide Ad‘Keep calm and carry on’ will be the message from Monk and his left tenants, but you suspect he’d give a Yorkshire fortune for three points that would throw them further towards point parity.
“This doesn’t even look English, this word,” a puce and perplexed Pelupessy squirms when faced with the task of decoding the term ‘lug ‘ole’.
Seriously, watch it. It’s 11 minutes of liquid gold.
Let’s hope the Owls aren’t feeling mardy come 5pm on Saturday.