Off The Post Blog: Matias wonder goal deserves many more awards

By Terry Hibberd

An award winning goal, is that the start of something bigger at Wednesday?

This week Marco Matias was awarded with the Football League’s goal of the season, now obviously it’s not a huge accolade in the grand scheme of things but try telling our Portuguese number seven that!

We’re at the sharp end of the season and the focus is on the teams at the top of the Championship so goals will certainly be the prime currency over the next few weeks. Should we confirm our stay in the top six over the next four games, it could then come down to just a couple of goals or even penalties bringing in a multi-million pound reward the size of which, Wednesday have never seen.

However, if it were to be that promotion was to be simply decided on the quality of goals scored it would definitely be the Owls who were front-runners, as it could be classed as a vintage year for superb goals! Aside from the aforementioned goal of the season from Matias, Ross Wallace has netted a couple of contenders which some may argue were better than that of his teammate and Barry Bannan also smashed in a wonderful goal against Fulham in the FA Cup. As things stand there are only three other clubs in the division who have scored more than the Owls, but no one has scored more than us on their own patch.

This season we have seen some of the best football for decades at Hillsborough and on the road, Arsenal felt the full force of a perfectly executed plan by Carlos Carvalhal and the coaching staff, Nottingham Forest fans saw a Wednesday side systematically dismantle their defence at the City Ground which left some of them saying the Owls put on one of the best performances seen by an away side in years.

We’re at a crunch point in the season now, every point matters. With six points the gap between Wednesday and Cardiff that sixth spot in the Championship is definitely ours to take. Obviously the Bluebirds will be hoping we slip and they can still take advantage, and why wouldn’t they? We’d be doing exactly the same if the roles were reversed.

Pessimists would suggest that if we were to slip out of the top six then the season would be a disaster, let’s just put things into context.

Last term while we did rise to our highest placed league finish for quite some time, 13th place, in doing so we averaged UNDER a goal per game over the whole season and we won just five games at home…. Step forward to current events and with games still to play this season we’ve could score more goals just at home than we did in TOTAL all last season. Wednesday have won double the amount of matches on our own patch than we did in 14/15 and we’re only outscored currently by two other sides in the Championship overall with over 60 goals to our name as things stand.

With a few weeks to go in the regular fixture list, lets accentuate those positives. Show the footballing world what we’re capable of, this season has been a massive improvement on what we’ve experienced for arguably decades. We’ve already bagged the goal of the season, let’s bag the winning goal of promotion too.

Terry Hibberd has been a Sheffield Wednesday season ticket holder for the last 20 years and his all time favourite Wednesday player is Chris Waddle. Terry is the editor of OwlsOnline.