A Sheffield Wednesday Season Preview - Waiting For Not A Lot

It’s that time of year again – the telly is blaring out pictures of beaming fans cheering (rather than miserable away trips), Jeff Stelling is receiving his final waterproof coating, and fans of clubs in the ‘FL72’ as we’re now called - like a flu virus, are preparing for joy, despair and the narked indifference of predictable home 1-0 defeats.

Yet for Wednesdayites the clichés of wanton optimism and dramatic anticipation just don’t fit. Kids won’t proudly be marching through Hillsborough Park with the name of that new striker we needed stamped across their back for one simple reason – there isn’t one (yet). Until recently there wasn’t even an away kit.

For the source of frustration one only has to look at the front of our shirts, which bear the legend ‘Azerbaijan Land of Fire’. In May it adorned the shirt of the Champions League finalists Atletico Madrid, and in June it seemed that the man behind that move, Hafiz Mammadov was set to take-over at Hillsborough.

Reflections On The 25th Anniversary Of The Hillsborough Disaster

Liverpool fans who lost their lives remembered at the Leppings Lane End at Hillsborough yesterday (12/04/2014)

The next few days will be about Liverpool Football Club and those who tragically lost their lives at Hillsborough on 15 April 1989. As a Wednesdayite it invokes terrible feelings despite my being too young to remember the event. That stand I sat in for my first game had seen horrors I still can barely imagine. My club, who I love, were complicit in the needless deaths of 96 people.  As a football fan and human being it invokes disgust and shivers.