Promotion with my Wednesday would be career high – Megson

Megson and his players are currently preparing to host Yorkshire neighbours Huddersfield Town who they have recently pushed out of the top two in the League One table.

Both clubs still have 26 games to play but, at this stage of the season, things could hardly be going better for the Owls.

Megson, appointed by chairman Milan Mandaric 10 months ago, has united Wednesday supporters and put the club he supported as a child back on a path to former glories.

His lifelong association with the club is the biggest reason why it matters so much.

Yet Megson, who was cruelly dumped from his last post at Bolton Wanderers, may also be proving a point.

Unapproached by Premier League clubs last season, he took a massive pay cut and stepped down to League One football for the first time since 1999.

He still insists that he is more talented than many in the Premier League.

Financially, he feels the Owls are the ‘poor relations’ going into this weekend’s fixture – relying too heavily on short-term signings and free transfers to sustain a promotion push.

“If you have money, it makes life easier, but go through our team at Oldham Athletic last weekend and there were five loans and two free transfers,” he added. “We are still trying to hang onto the coat-tails of the big spenders in this division, ie Huddersfield and Charlton, and we have to cut our cloth accordingly.

“Every job you take in football involves some sort of pressure but I’ve never been able to go to a club and be one of these ‘happy clappy’ managers who just goes in and everything is sorted – where all you have to do is play in the five-a-sides and have a laugh and joke and all the work is done.

“Invariably, every club I have gone to has been in massive trouble financially or down at the bottom of the table.”

When Megson replaced Alan Irvine last season, the Owls had just completed a mini spending spree designed to re-ignite a fading promotion push. The players at his disposal, however, were still not deemed good enough by Megson and there has subsequently been a further shake-up in personnel this season.

Tellingly, the Owls side that beat Oldham last weekend featured not a single survivor from the side that lost to Huddersfield at Hillsborough in the league last season.

“If you don’t change anything, nothing will change, and I didn’t feel the team last season was capable of doing what I wanted to do,” he reflected.

“We got the opportunity to bring players in but I think we have spent about £400,000 since I have been here.

“This has not been a case of just pushing money at everything – and I wouldn’t want to do that because it doesn’t always work. This time last year, Wednesday were in a similar situation but the January window seemed to have more of a negative impact on the team than a positive which was a strange phenomenon.

“It is absolutely vital that you bring in the right personalities and the right characters. At the lower levels, if you sign someone on a two- or three-year contract and find out that you have made a mistake, there is not a great deal of likelihood of being able to move them on again.”

Although Mandaric has pledged to help with team strengthening next month, it remains an uncertain time at Hillsborough.

“For want of a better phrase, we are all s******* ourselves because half the team are not our own players,” Megson said. “We have to ask for favours, borrow players from elsewhere, and try to bring them on which is not ideal. I want to get away from that scenario as quickly as we possibly can so that we can start moving on.”

On his own involvement, Megson said: “I wouldn’t be working in League One for any other club and I think I am more talented than a lot of the managers in the Premiership. To this day, my contract is still un-opened in a drawer at home. I have never looked at it – although I do know what I earn and I know the circumstances.

“I’m here for one reason and one reason only and that’s the supporters. I am trying to do what’s right for them.

“I don’t work for Milan. I don’t work for anybody other than the supporters.

“One of the things about football that makes me laugh in football is when they say managers are ‘judged on results’. You are – but there are a lot of other things that go into it too.

“My chairman has a reputation for booting managers out – but not if you keep winning games.

“We have a lot of good people but because of the circumstances that have existed at the club, and probably still do although not to the same extent, we are miles behind where we should be.

“Because this club is so big, it will always be a work in progress until we get it back to what it was in the Premiership – but you have to start somewhere and this, hopefully, is a beginning for us.

“We have done fine recently but we are not even at the halfway stage of the season and have got to keep plugging away,” he stressed. “There are other teams on runs as good if not better than us. There are five teams on fantastic runs including Sheffield United.

“People talk about ‘style of football’ but, in my view, football management is about getting the best from what you have got.

“I have never played how I would want to play because I have never had a squad with the kind of individuals who can get results playing that way.

“But even if you have the best team in the world in terms of style and quality, you still have to have those threads of honesty, endeavour, hard work, and commitment running through the team. You won’t be able to get there on talent alone.

“If we won promotion, it would give me more satisfaction than anything else I have achieved,” he confessed.

“It would mean more because it is Sheffield Wednesday. This is my club, my city, and my people support Wednesday.”