Count on an Owls flap with Chansiri

FOR six days in August, supporters of Sheffield Wednesday could just about pretend that everything was alright.

- Chris Dunlavy

Top of the Championship. Hillsborough rocking. A 4-0 demolition of Plymouth safely stashed in their back pockets.

“This is the football I want to see,” declared manager Danny Rohl after that opening-weekend extravaganza.

Naturally, catastrophe was lurking just 75 miles up the road. A week later, Rohl’s men bounced into the Stadium of Light and were annihilated 4-0 by Sunderland.

Defeats quickly piled up, followed with grim inevitably by a registration embargo - two words that have become as synonymous with the Owls as Barry Bannan, Chris Waddle and David Hirst.

Then came last weekend’s omni-shambles, when Wednesday conceded two penalties, shipped five second-half goals and somehow allowed Watford’s Vakoun Bayo to score as many times in half an hour as he had in the previous 13 months. At home.

Hi-Ho Sheffield Wednesday? More like Hi-Lo Sheffield Wednesday. Few sides in modern times have so consistently squandered optimism and opportunity, and gravitated so magnetically towards crisis.