‘Never again’ – Sheffield Wednesday boss set for serious talks after disruptions that could have altered Portsmouth victory

The Owls made plans to leave early for their League One fixture over the weekend given the heavy snow in Sheffield, with Moore eager to get down towards Fratton Park as soon as possible so that his team could get settled. He even brought forward his press conference in order to do so.

But those plans went awry after there were external issues that left the team stranded at Middlewood Road for several hours awaiting a coach departure, meaning that they only arrived at their destination late on Friday evening.

All of this happened after the team had clubbed together to get everybody to the training ground in the first place, with Josh Windass picking up numerous players in his seven-seater so that they’d be ready to go at their original departure time.

Windass proved to be the hero on the pitch as well, scoring the winning goal that kept up the club’s remarkable unbeaten run, and he admitted afterwards that he was glad that the off-the-pitch issues didn’t affect the result.

“We’ve not had a great 24 hours,” he told the media. “So to come into this game today and get the win was brilliant… With our preparations, they didn’t go to plan with the snow and stuff like that – but we’ve come here and ground a win out and that’s what we came to do… I’m glad we won, otherwise it could have been used as a really bad excuse to get beat.”

And when asked what it was that didn’t go to plan for the Owls in the build-up to their Pompey clash, Wednesday’s revealed that travel issues saw them arrive in Hampshire several hours after they were meant to.

Safe to say he wasn’t at all happy about it.

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“What happened was that we didn’t arrive down here until 10 or 11 o’clock at night,” Moore explained. “The reason being was firstly the conditions in Sheffield, which we knew would make it hard to get out of Sheffield, and then there were a few issues with the company that brought us down here – so we had that.

“We arrived late, which wasn’t ideal. We should have arrived at sort 5 o’clock in the early evening, and that disrupted our patterns. But we had a meeting, got together as a group and spoke about controlling the controllables – and that’s what we’ve done today. That was on the pitch.

“We’ll talk to the powers that be at the football club about this never happening again, the players are right, but I’m glad that after dealing with that adversity it didn’t show on the pitch.”

It may well be that Wednesday now look to change the company that they use for transport to and from away games now after what happened with the Portsmouth travel – however that decision is likely to come down to what is said in the discussions ahead of their trips to Barnsley and Forest Green later this month.

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