'Enough is enough': Barry Bannan explains why Sheffield Wednesday players boycotted Burnley friendly
Barry Bannan says it was a case of “enough is enough” following Sheffield Wednesday’s boycott of their scheduled friendly against Burnley.
The Owls were due to face the Clarets in a behind-closed-doors runout at Gawthorpe on Saturday morning, before Scott Parker split his squad to face Stoke City in a public friendly later the same day.
But amid an off-the-field crisis at Hillsborough, where the players went unpaid for the fourth time in the past five months, the Wednesday players essentially opted to go on strike and refused to play the game.
To facilitate an early morning kick-off, so that Parker and his staff could watch both games, Burnley offered to pay for an overnight hotel stay for Wednesday’s players.
But the game ended up being scrapped and Burnley opted to play an in-house game between their own players instead. At Stoke, meanwhile, Parker sent a strong starting XI while the bench was made up entirely of youngsters.
Explaining the decision to boycott the friendly, Wednesday captain Bannan told talkSPORT: "We pulled out of the Burnley game at the weekend, and that was simply because it’s happened too much now, and it’s a lot easier to pull out of a pre-season game than a Championship fixture.
"We’ve come in to training and just got on with it, and made it look to the outside world that we’re fine and getting on with it, so this was a choice to say ‘enough is enough’, really.”
Bannan, who has committed his future to the Owls by signing a new contract despite the ongoing crisis, insists the season opener at Leicester City will go ahead as usual.
“The lads have been brilliant since we came back,” he added. “I can’t complain.
"I thought it’d be hard to come back and keep the group going, but they’ve been ultimate professionals and come in and work hard every day. There are loads of excuses to pull out, but they’ve been amazing.
“But it’s hard, because we don’t know what to do. This never happens, it’s never happened to us, so we don’t know what the rules are or what we can do as a group of players.”