Liam Palmer says he is enjoying going back to school when it is Danny Rohl doing the teaching.
Palmer’s Sheffield Wednesday go into a new Championship season which for them starts at home to Plymouth Argyle on Sunday with hopes high since manager Rohl kicked off the summer by signing a new contract.
They built on it with nine early additions to their squad and are increasingly confident of bringing back striker Ike Ugbo – on loan last season – from Troyes as the tenth.
Despite Rohl’s almost instant impact at Hillsborough last season, Palmer has warned it will take time to get his methods across fully, but he is very confident about what is to come when he does.
The German has quickly forged a reputation as one of the most exciting young coaches in English football for the way he saved the Owls from relegation last season.
They were bottom of the Championship with three points after 11 games when the then-34-year-old took on his first senior managerial job in October. They finished 18th.
Rohl served his apprenticeship on the coaching staffs of RB Leipzig, Southampton, Bayern Munich and Germany, developing an analytical style and acute eye for detail which 32-year-old Palmer has taken to.
“He comes from an analysis background and having worked at top clubs he’s seen how the best operate and that’s something he’s looking to instill in us,” said Palmer. “It’s going to take more than six months, more than a year, so the longer he can stay at Sheffield Wednesday without a doubt the club will have success.
“It’s just the way he works (that is so impressive), the amount of detail he gives not only game to game but within different periods of the game, whether it’s building up from the back, how we’re going to press, sometimes you can have two or three formations within certain parts of the game.
“The detail nine times out of 10 is spot on. He’s still a young manager, he doesn’t get everything right but he’s always got a contingency to change and adapt and we saw that last year in certain games where he wasn’t afraid to make bold changes and use different personnel.
“Every day’s a schoolday.
“He does love the meeting rooms and I kind of enjoy learning that way. A lot of people learn through doing but I love the classroom.
“Sometimes you come out and think, ‘Wow, it looks so easy when you see it like that.’
“We analysed the goal I scored at Sunderland (in May) and looked at every element we’d worked on for the last six months all coming out in that one goal.”
But tactical acumen alone would mean nothing without developing a strong team spirit. That seemed to be lacking as Wednesday struggled at the start of last season under new coach Xisco Munoz, and clubs rarely recover from such poor starts – never in the history of the Championship.
Rohl needed six matches to get to grips with things – a home win over Rotherham United the only exception to a run of losses in that time – but was able to create a unity in a squad which saw a new batch of largely overseas players grafted onto the British players who won the League One play-offs in 2023. It paid off.
“Everybody within that last six months had their story to write and everyone played their part, whether it was players who didn’t play a lot, like Jeff Hendrick, who scored a last-minute equaliser against top of the league (Leicester City),” argued Palmer, left out by Rohl in the early weeks.
“Everybody really bought into it even though there were a lot of players out of contract, a lot of players on loan, a lot of players who had been in the team, out the team, I think everybody was pulling in the right direction.
“That was down to him.
“He’s very honest, very direct in how he wants to work. He’s not afraid to stop a session and physically move you into the right position
“But what he’s really good at is giving detail or showing us if we set up in a certain way, how well it works. If we’re just missing a certain position or we press from the wrong angle, how it can all come unstuck.”
Last season ended so positively the fear was that the secret was out and the Owls would struggle to keep hold of such hot managerial property. But they convinced him of their ambitions and tied him down to a new contract before a stint covering the European Championship for ITV further advertised his knowledge.
“Him signing first in the summer was the domino effect for me and Baz (Barry Bannan) and quite a few others who were keen to get pen to paper and get down to work,” said Palmer, who along with talismanic captain Bannan, Di’Shon Bernard and Josh Windass agreed a new contract too.
“We’re definitely better equipped than this time last year. We’ve seen what a bad start can do and we want to flip that on its head and start really strongly.”
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