The returning Blades boss will not be on the MKM Stadium touchline this weekend
Oli McBurnie believes Chris Wilder’s touchline ban on Saturday will be a miss for Sheffield United, with the Blades boss set to watch the 12:30pm clash with Hull City from the MKM Stadium stands.
McBurnie’s former Bramall Lane manager was given a red card at half-time of the 2-1 home defeat to Southampton after frustratingly kicking a ball into the crowd.
Though Wilder was quick to apologise to the supporter involved, referee Adam Herczeg sent him off, and now he’ll serve a touchline ban this weekend, which McBurnie believes will have an impact on his former side.
“I think it’ll be a miss for them if I’m honest,” McBurnie told Hull Live. “Having the gaffer there is scary, so it makes you run more. I’m a bit disappointed because I would have liked him to have been there as well. I just saw a little clip of it, and I didn’t see what really happened.
“It didn’t look like too much of a red card to me, but, no, that’s the gaffer, he’s on the edge, but he’s the best at the motivation side of it.
“He knows how to get the best out of his players, so I think not having him there in that dressing room will be hard for them, but they’ve got some top, top players, so we know it’s going to be a really tough game.”
City will go into the Yorkshire derby against the Championship’s bottom side six points above the Blades, after coming back from 2-0 down to draw 2-2 against Paul Heckingbottom’s Preston, courtesy of McBurnie’s brace, taking his tally to seven for the season.
“We know what Chris Wilder’s teams are about,” McBurnie continued. “They’re similar to Hecky. Hecky’s a top manager as well, and somebody I and a couple of the boys have spent a lot of time with, got promotion to the Premier League with, and made a lot of good memories with. We knew it was going to be a test; we know Saturday’s going to be another test, but that’s the joys of the Championship.”
McBurnie revealed that skipper Lewie Coyle had told the players at the break to park what had been a dismal first half, and that it would be discussed later, once the dust had settled, before joking that Wilder just edged the who is more frightening stakes.
“I reckon the gaffer is the scariest one,” he said with a grin. “He’s just got that fear factor, but in a good way, but no, the skipper was right.
“It was just like, put it to bed. There’s no point dissecting what went wrong. We only have 10 minutes (at the interval) to get it exactly right. Nothing more needed to be said. We knew we were miles off it, and let’s see what we’re about in the second half.
“It’s that challenge, like I say, you find out a lot about yourself, and I find a lot about other players in situations like that, and I was more than happy with the reactions I saw.”
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