Furman focused on Latics mission

TAKE THAT... Dean Furman scores against Charlton Athletic. The midfielder is hoping for three points at Hillsborough tonight.

THE FABLED Manager of the Month ‘curse’ has well and truly struck Sheffield Wednesday boss Alan Irvine.

Since scooping the August gong ahead of Athletic boss Paul Dickov, the Owls manager has seen his side not so much slip in form as tumble down a mountain.

Prior to the start of September, relegated Wednesday looked like taking the division by storm. When Hartlepool were punished to the tune of five unanswered goals on Saturday, August 28, Irvine’s men sat proudly top of npower League One with a record of three wins and a draw from four played.

After that? Well, Notts County were dispatched 2-1 in the first round of the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy. But in the league, the South Yorkshire club — who can reasonably be described as relative giants at this level — then lost four league matches in a trot, dropping to 14th in the table.

In three of those four games, Wednesday have failed to score. That is quite a statistic bearing in mind the club boast attackers with the pedigree of the likes of Marcus Tudgay, former Liverpool frontman Neil Mellor, ex-Ireland international Clinton Morrison and Paul Heffernan, who had a loan spell at Boundary Park.

Athletic will head into the game themselves looking to halt a run of back-to-back losses away from Boundary Park.

Midfielder Dean Furman is more concerned with the way he and his team-mates approach the game than Wednesday’s current woes.

“With a team like Sheffield Wednesday, especially coming down a division, there is a lot of expectation on them,” Furman said.

“It shows the quality of a division where anyone can go on a run and anyone can beat anyone else.

“Like Sheffield Wednesday are finding out, anyone can go on a bad run too.

“Losing four games on the trot is never a good sign, but we won’t think about that.

“We have to worry about applying ourselves as we have done in most of the games this season and put in a good account of ourselves.”

With a capacity of just under 40,000, Hillsborough is League One’s biggest ground by some distance and is likely to be just under half-full for Athletic’s visit.

As an arena, it could hardly be further removed from Brighton’s make-do-and-mend Withdean, and Furman is looking for a performance to match in order to banish memories of the last-gasp winner which inflicted defeat on the South Coast.

“I haven’t been there before but I have heard it is a great place to play,” said the former Chelsea, Glasgow Rangers and Bradford City player.

“As a team you want to go to these places and play in front of big crowds.

“We are looking forward to it. We’ve been working on putting things right from Saturday, and we go there with a lot of confidence as we weren’t disappointed with our performance against Brighton.

The two teams last met at Hillsborough six years ago, playing out a 1-1 draw with Jermaine Johnson scoring for Athletic.

The last away victory at the ground for Athletic came way back in 1924.