Danny Rohl has explained his team selection during Sheffield Wednesday vs Leeds United on Friday night.
Sheffield Wednesday welcomed Yorkshire rivals Leeds United to Hillsborough on Friday night.
But Leeds would bring the Owls’ five-game winning streak to an end following a 2-0 win, courtesy of goals either side of half-time from Patrick Bamford and Wilfried Gnonto.
Sheffield Wednesday showed spells of dominance in the first half and then towards the end of the game.
But on the night, Danie Farke’s Leeds just had too much quality at either end of the pitch, taking all three points and leaving Sheffield Wednesday in the bottom three ahead of the weekend.
Danny Rohl explains Sheffield Wednesday team selection for Leeds United game
When the teams came out an hour before kick off last night, many were surprised to see that Dominic Iorfa, Will Vaulks, and Michael Ihiekwe had been dropped from the XI.
All three had been impressive in the Plymouth game and Vaulks and Ihiekwe in particular had been in good veins of form.
Speaking to BBC Sheffield after the game, Rohl explained why the trio were taken out of the XI:
“When you look in the last weeks, when we’ve had a lot of games, that at the end of the week you could have a bit, tired, and it was the reason why I wanted to have some fresh legs. I think it was not the issue today, from my side.”
Bambo Diaby and Akin Famewo came into the XI in place of Ihiekwe and Iorfa, and didn’t perform overly poorly, whilst Liam Palmer came into the midfield in place of Vaulks and struggled to cope with the pace of Leeds’ midfield.
Defeat is a defeat, moving on
At the start of February, Rohl and indeed most Sheffield Wednesday fans would’ve simply wanted wins from the games that were winnable.
And Sheffield Wednesday picked up wins in those games to leave themselves just a point from safety and with a whole new bunch of teams now in the relegation picture.
Nobody expected the Owls to beat Leeds. But after doing so well in recent weeks, there’s now an air of disappointment that Wednesday didn’t take anything from the game.
And whilst Rohl’s team selection may have raised a few eyebrows, it would’ve been better to have names like Vaulks and Ihiekwe fit in the games where Sheffield Wednesday had a better chance of winning, than in the games against the likes of Leeds where they’d have been expected to lose.
That’s not to say that the Owls didn’t put up a good fight on Friday, because they did in the first half especially, but going up against a team with so much more investment and depth was always going to be difficult.
Sheffield Wednesday are next in action against Ipswich Town next weekend.