Rams squeeze win over 10-men Owls
An impressive run of results in January came to a halt with a dissapointing result against Derby County, a team who must enjoy their games against Wednesday. The Owls haven't beaten Derby in the league for almost 10 years.
Danny Wilson made the changes most has expected before the game. He brought in Dejan Stefanovic for the suspended Danny Sonner and Andy Booth made his first start since an ankle injury kept him out of action, he replaced Ritchie Humphreys.
With both teams having excellent defensive records this season the game, as perhaps expected, had little goalmouth action in a boring first half. Infact, the first real chance of the game fell half an hour into the game as Tony Dorigo headed terribly straight to the inform Beni Carbone, who's shot from 12 yards out went just over.
Moments later there were chances at both ends. First of all Wim Jonk's long range powerful shot was deflected over by Derby's Argentinian defender Carbonari. From the resulting corner Andy Booth missed a close range effort. Derby also messed up a good opportunity to score when Carbonari was in the thick of the action again as his 30-yard free-kick was superbly saved by Srnicek. Amazingly from Derby's resulting corner Carbonari missed a golden chance - with an open goal to shoot at he blazed over.
Half-time: Owls 0-0 Derby
Just 10 minutes after the restart Derby opened the scoring when Harper hooked in a cross and Prior was on hand to head home his first goal for almost 3 years - it was the first goal the Owls had conceded in 310 minutes of football.
Three minutes later any chance Wednesday had of making a comeback was going to be that much harder when Pavel Srnicek was sent off. Kevin Harper chased a through ball and there seemed to be little, if any, contact between the Scotland Under 21 and the Czech who was racing off his line. Harper stayed down and Mr Elleray gave Srnicek his marching orders and gave Kevin Pressman his first taste of action since November. Incidentally it was Mr Elleray who sent off Wednesday keeper Matt Clarke on his debut v Liverpool a few seasons back.
Petter Rudi's shot in injury time seemed destined to go in after somehow making it through a crowd of players before shaving the post and wide. The Owls fought hard to gain something from the game but it was Derby who came away with all three points.
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Eranio - Baiano (77 mins)