It has been just three days since Sheffield Wednesday fell to a demoralising 6-2 defeat against Watford, and with such a quick turnaround in games, Danny Rohl has had little time to fix the prevalent issues within his team.
The Owls hosted the Hornets at Hillsborough on Saturday afternoon, and by half-time, were level at 1-1. However, a second-half collapse saw Watford run away with it in the end.
Rohl would, naturally, love to spend plenty of time on the training ground working on the things that went wrong in the Watford game, but the Championship schedule simply does not allow for such luxuries.
Wednesday host Norwich tonight, once again in front of a home crowd, and a big reaction is very much needed and expected.
But, Rohl has had to offset his desired training plan due to the relentless nature of the fixture list and has revealed that his players have actually not spent that much time on the training pitch in the period following the Watford defeat.
Sheffield Wednesday don’t have time for training
With 46 league games to fit into the season, plus any cup fixtures the club might be involved in throughout the campaign, teams in the second tier will more often than not have a game at the weekend and another midweek.
So, how does Rohl prepare his men with so little time to both react to the previous result and look ahead to the next game?
“We don’t really have time for training,” Rohl told The Yorkshire Post. “I always try not to make [meetings] too long but it’s difficult for me, my meetings are 25, 30, 40 minutes sometimes. At the moment it’s a big part of our training weeks.
“It’s important there’s a structure in the meetings and then we go into details. Our basic patterns are right, we know what we have to do so now we really speak in detail about body positions and small things.
“When I arrived it was not easy for the players to focus over 30 minutes or 25 minutes but now they are used to it.”
Meetings are key for Danny Rohl
Fans may be shocked to learn that the Sheffield Wednesday squad are not on the training pitch as often as they thought, but Rohl emphasised the importance of the meetings the players are involved in with himself and his coaching staff.
He added: “Sometimes I compare the match plan to what we did in the game, sometimes it’s about our principle, what we can do, then it’s about the four phases: with the ball, without the ball, the two transition moments. There is also set pieces but this is normally a second meeting.
“Beside the team meetings we have individual meetings and feedback meetings with me or my assistants. This is important when they don’t train so much on the pitch.”
In the modern game, statistical analysis and interpreting of data can be just as useful as the more traditional, practical methods of training.
Rohl is a great man-manager, and his communications with players will be key to them truly understanding and employing his unique tactical demands. But, Wednesday fans will likely be a little concerned that the players aren’t putting this into practice on the training ground.
It’s all well and good dedicating a lot of time to this classroom approach, and Rohl insists the players are focused during those long meetings, but if fans see a repeat of that Watford debacle again, big questions will begin to be asked about what is happening behind the scenes.