O’Grady backed to focus on target of earning Tykes points and not revenge

The ex-Owls forward, who moved permanently to Barnsley in a £300,000 summer move, locks horns with his former club in a lunchtime televised Oakwell derby.

After being sparingly used under Jones at S6 last term, O’Grady found sanctuary with the Reds, initially on loan.

But Barnsley manager Flitcroft says the 27-year-old is chanelling all his energies into getting his performance right tomorrow and not settling scores. O’Grady is top-scorer at Oakwell with seven goals this season.

Flitcroft added: “He is focused on himself. I have told him to focus on Chris O’Grady and not on anything around him that is happening.

“Chris has got a way about him which means he has to centralise on one thing, which is performance.

“We will make sure Chris doesn’t turn it into an occasion. It will be a definite ‘game’ in which he has to play.”

Flitcroft believes that the workaholic target man is the best of his type in the Championship and that the Owls’ loss is very much Barnsley’s gain.

O’Grady, who ironically notched the only goal of the game in last season’s Oakwell fixture for Wednesday in mid-December – joining the Tykes just over six weeks later on January 31 -– said: “I know where Chris is at and what makes him tick.

“We had to fight off a lot of clubs to get Chris’s signature in the summer, like we did when we got him on loan.

“But he was only ever going to come to one place and he’s one of us – he’s becoming Barnsley through and through and we saw that in his loan performances.

“His ceiling is that high, he could be anything he wants to be. I think he is the best at what he does in this league. The guy’s an ox, a machine – and he just gets better and better.”