Sheffield Wednesday v Southampton: Owls are keeping up the hard work, but they need to be smart

Only last week Pedersen was proudly trumpeting the effort his players put in against Millwall, but on Wednesday at Norwich City, three days after relegation to League One was confirmed, they beat it.

"We made a new running record against Norwich for the amount of kilometres (covered)," he says proudly. "We ran nearly 119km and it's the best in the whole season."

They are not alone in grafting.

"It starts with the coaching group," explains the manager.

"On Friday morning the first one came in at 6.45am with me. The next one 7.15 and then some few little bit later, the last conversation I had with one of them was quarter past 11 the previous evening.

"They're working a lot of hours and we need to. We are lucky that we love what we are doing."

But you only need look at the Championship table to see there is more to it than just hard work.

Keeping things fresh can be important too, with Pedersen making more than one reference to how tired his players were after Norwich.

With Jaden Heskey taking a kick to his Achilles at Carrow Road, options to rotate are few. Dominic Iorfa will aim to build on 45 minutes on his midweek return from injury, and Nathaniel Chalobah could feature but positional changes may play a part as well.

"Sometimes if you make small changes you move the focus a little bit and maybe they forget they are too tired to play,” says Pedersen.

"For Svante (Ingelsson) to play three times in a week as the left 10 (inside-left) with a lot of deep runs, he'll do it and he loves to do it but to mix it up can help him.

"We cannot only be defined by our running stats, but what we always can do to make a top performance is run as much as we can.

"Then it's how you're running and when you're running.

"But 118km in the first game after you're relegated, it's just telling me that we have a very hungry group who are really ready to do everything for this club.

"To compete with a team like Norwich, Sheff United, Millwall or Southampton we need to invest a lot of metres. We also need a lot of high-intensity metres.

"If we always play with the same speed, we will never create chances.

"To create chances we need to speed up the game. To speed up the game, we need good one-on-one players and vertical runs.

"It's all about how can we compete in the game and how can we be effective."

Further eating into their energy on Wednesday was the news that the club is back on the market after preferred bidder James Bord withdrew his offer to buy the club.

Pedersen has spoken to joint administrator Kris Wigfield since and said: "He's working very hard to find a new preferred bidder and he is hopeful he can speed up the process.

"For the players it's what can we control? This is a part that we can't control and we have to use all our energy to prepare for Saturday."