Sheffield Wednesday 6-0 Leeds United: Shaking the Throne
Well, you know the result by now. And you know too that for the second time in a week Brian McDermott had to fess up to his worst moment in football.
Before this game I wrote that what happened at Rochdale already felt like something that happened to some other team, from some other time.
The signings of Cameron Stewart and Jimmy Kébé had done the trick with the mood; they seemed so much like exactly what we needed, and what Brian McDermott wanted. It felt like we could regard Rochdale as the end of something; Sheffield Wednesday would be the start of something else.
Well, you know the result by now. And you know too that for the second time in a week Brian McDermott had to fess up to his worst moment in football. He's lucky that he wasn't here for the Preston, Blackpool, Forest or Watford games, but even by United's standards in recent seasons, this really was something else.
There are other things you can look at, other directions where you can point an accusing finger. McDermott had woken up by half time, and perhaps 4-4-2 with Mathieu Smith would have brought us back into the game like a rerun of Watford at home. Smith barely lasted a minute, though, charging his shoulder across Johnson's head and getting a straight red card; Johnson had delivered a forearm smash to the back of Kébé's head in the seventh minutes but not got so much as a telling off. So we can point at Lee Probert for robbing Leeds of the chance in the second half to put the first half right.
We can look at individual players, too, although it could take a while to get through them all. It perhaps makes Marius Zaliukas's brilliant form since he arrived even more amazing, now that we know he can be this bad. Rudy Austin has been getting worse with every passing game, and at the moment you almost hope the game does pass him by, for fear of what he might do when he does get the ball. Our once fearsome midfield warrior was brushed off in tackles, a bystander when Pearce took over ball-winning duties in midfield, and a total liability when he and Zaliukas got close enough to combine and set up Wednesday's second goal. Lee Peltier must take the blame for playing Johnson onside for the first goal; Danny Pugh could maybe have bailed him out if his first thought had been tackling rather than appealing, though.