Chris Wilder exclusive: My Sheffield United players want to finish what they've started
The Premier League season restarts on Wednesday; Watch Aston Villa vs Sheff Utd live on Sky Sports Premier League and Main Event from 4.30pm; Kick-off 6pm
Thursday 18 June 2020 06:29, UK
As his side prepares to lift the curtain on the Premier League's resumption, Sheffield United boss Chris Wilder tells Sky Sports why football's return matters and how his high-flying squad is physically and mentally ready to "finish what they started".
Everyone Chris Wilder has met during a period of 100 days without football in a suddenly bleak new world has asked the same questions. The Sheffield Wednesday-supporting postman. The builders who gradually returned to work on his new house. The passer-by who spotted him letting off steam on two wheels up and down the Sheffield hills as lockdown slowly lifted.
When is football coming back? Are your players ready?
The Premier League, finally, is about to resume and, yes, Sheffield United are ready.
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The gravity of the situation has never been lost on the Blades boss but the return of the game that has consumed him since the age of 14 as a Southampton trainee, a round of golf his only usual release these days, is a gift, a potent symbol of optimism.
"It's made me just appreciate life - not being able to walk down the street or see your mates has been so difficult - but this is the business I've been brought up in, lived in," he tells Sky Sports on the eve of his side's trip to Aston Villa. "I've been so used to being in this environment that I love; planning for the next training session, the next game, the next season, the next transfer window.
"Football underpins so much - it's what talked about in shops, in factories, on building sites; the good stuff, the negative stuff, the stuff about your club, the England team, the game in general. It's the lead-up, having a beer, the walk to the ground, the experience of that 90 minutes, talking about it afterwards - and then it all starts up again.
"Things have happened in the world you don't ever want to see again but football coming back, in a small way, feels like we're on the road to recovery. It's going to be manic, it's going to be hectic but we can't wait to get back out there."
It feels in some way appropriate that Wednesday's curtain-raiser will allow a global audience a sense of where one of the stories of the Premier League season - seasons, in fact - might go from here. Win at Aston Villa and Sheffield United will climb two points off fourth-placed Chelsea into a position that, pending Manchester City's appeal against a European ban, could bring Champions League football to Bramall Lane.
They deserve their shot at the unthinkable.
Since slipping up at home to Southampton in September, only Manchester City and Liverpool have beaten Wilder's modestly-assembled newcomers. Only the champions-elect have a better defensive record. They have played beyond all predictions, a patchwork of players carefully sourced, improved and revived in a system that has hummed with understanding; technically challenging to play against as well as mentally draining.
And yet uncertainty abounds. Will the enforced break check the momentum that had delivered 10 points from the last 12, as well as a place in the FA Cup quarter-finals? Will the absence of a Bramall Lane crowd to rouse and taunt and embolden deprive Wilder's side of a vital adrenaline buzz? Just how punishing will the schedule - four games in 12 days for starters - be on a squad where rotation has only usually been preserved for the front two?
The Blades voted against an increase in substitutions because they felt it would benefit the league's traditional heavyweights, though the experience of a gruelling Championship schedule is still fresh for a conditioning team that has largely staved off soft tissue injuries.
Wilder admits he expects some "strange results" but his players have come back "in brilliant condition" and he says he is proud of the way a tight-knit staff has dealt with unprecedented challenges "without the multi-million-pound training grounds, facilities and infrastructure that everyone else has."
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George Baldock and Ben Osborn have described the lockdown programme as tougher than a regular pre-season. Captain Billy Sharp has come back "ripped," according to goalkeeper Simon Moore. The home Wattbike sessions and socially-distanced drills arranged "with military precision" finally culminated in warm-up games of incremental duration - against Huddersfield, Hull and Barnsley - at Bramall Lane last week; an attempt to acclimatise to echoes and empty seats.
"It was key just to go through what it would be like. It's incredibly difficult to be without the supporters, even though in the grand scheme of things, it's a small price to pay," Wilder says. "I know what they're all about and they know how much they've driven us on. It's a connection we're going to miss, no doubt, but other teams will miss it too - Man Utd playing in front of 70,000 when they're going well.
"In a way, playing away from home in the first three games means we can pick things up which might work for other clubs. But it's all so different; three coaches travelling to games, being in the hotel by ourselves, players not getting out of their cars and signing autographs… it's going to be a whole new experience."
And so the mind as well as the sinew matters, perhaps more than ever.
Wilder was particularly taken by Liverpool on a wet January night where his side were rarely well beaten; not by Anfield's pre-match rituals, nor the thrilling counter-attack up close, but how the fundamentals underpinned the hosts' 2-0 victory.
"They ran forward, they ran back, they defended as a team," he said in reflection. "You look at the appetite and desire of everyone in the football club and there's a feeling of relentlessness about them. They were bang on it from a mental aspect."
The Blades boss has been moulding his own mentality monsters ever since he took the job at his boyhood club.
He dabbled with sports psychology to help his players over the line in League One but has closed ranks this time, retaining a penchant for pinning disparaging soundbites to walls and summoning myriad experiences from his side's breakneck journey to the top tier - like last season at Villa Park, when a 3-0 lead surrendered in the final 10 minutes prompted a scrap in the changing room but proved pivotal in the run-in.
"You trust that the players will show the mentality they have done over the past few seasons; how they've coped with disappointments, how they've handled success, what drives them, what motivates them - and you keep reminding them of all those things.
"We can't suddenly think we're something we're not - that's certainly been a reminder from me.
"It's been about getting the same intensity and tempo in training and delivering the same messages - there's always clarity in terms of the message; I've always felt that when players have a clear head, when they can relax, that's when you get the best results.
"A lot is talked about managers and their influence but if you haven't got good players with a good mentality, you can put the best manager in the world in there and he's going to struggle. It has to come from within. It certainly comes from within for me and it comes from within for them.
"I'd be disappointed if they hadn't come back with the same mentality. The boys are absolutely together and I'm not surprised they've come back wanting to finish what they've started."
If you haven't got good players with a good mentality, you can put the best manager in the world in there and he's going to struggle. It has to come from within.
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The time for full appraisal will come later but lockdown has been an opportunity to hunt for marginal gains tactically, too. The underlying stats in attack and defence have matched Wilder's eye test when squaring up his side against unlikely rivals Manchester United and Tottenham - both with key players returning - as well as Wolves, afforded time to regroup after their Europa League exertions.
There is confidence to be drawn, he agrees, from the fact his side are unbeaten against those sides, and if Bundesliga results have suggested home advantage may be diminished in the Premier League, a team only behind Liverpool when it comes to fewest defeats on the road might be even more hopeful of taking reward at a sparse Old Trafford as well as Villa Park.
With record signing Sander Berge's full integration a longer-term project, Wilder is plotting only tweaks; training ground footage from the club's social media channels has shown players familiarly working on wide patterns of play. But one area ripe for improvement is the goal return from the likes of John Egan at set-pieces and assistant Alan Knill, a free-kick connoisseur, "is always up to something," Wilder says with a chuckle.
"The video analysts and the coaching staff have been looking at bits and pieces; with the delivery that we've got, we should certainly be scoring more from the centre-halves. That's been a little negative from our point of view, the amount of opportunities that we have and the positions that we get into. But tactically we're not going to change much. We're fine-tuning."
The most partisan supporter would have struggled to envisage this, with 10 games to go. Just surviving in the top flight has been remarkable; a top-10 finish would be an even more impressive achievement. Yet wing-back Baldock is still driven by the "burning desire to prove people wrong". Oliver Norwood, who has signed a new deal ahead of the restart, has dreamed of being part of what just might become Sheffield United's "greatest ever team".
Wilder insists his focus is firmly on Aston Villa, locked in a different type of battle at the other end of the table, but the manager, like his influential midfielder, knows that opportunity knocks.
"What the players have achieved coming into the Premier League has been amazing but it has to continue if they are going to achieve what was unthinkable when we first stepped into the division.
"The players have upped their game to get the results they have; they know they can do it but the key is to keep doing it. We can't take our foot off the gas. We have to pick up where we left off.
"We have the opportunity of turning a great season into a truly memorable one. If we do, it'll be right up there. We want to climb a little bit higher. We're going to give it everything."
The Premier League is back and however this story ends, Sheffield United are ready.
