Both handily placed to push for the play-off places at the beginning of last month, Sheffield United host Coventry City on Saturday afternoon with both sides having thrown away any chance of a top-six finish.
Bramall Lane will be the home of two sets of unhappy supporters as the Blades take on the Sky Blues in the Championship.
For the home side it seems the end of the season cannot come quickly enough.
Manager Kevin Blackwell has had to deal with a host of injury problems during the campaign, compounding the sale of some top talent during his reign, both of which have forced him into the temporary transfer market on a number of occasions.
He told BBC Radio Sheffield this week: ‘You can’t build a team on 17 loans. That’s an absolute nonsense.
‘We’ve got to start from scratch and bring in players who are Sheffield United players because we’re jumping from crisis to crisis.’
Sympathy for Blackwell has only been limited however with regular calls from a sizeable minority of fans for him to go, lack of tactical nous and a defensive attitude to away games (where the Blades have struggled) being cited as the main reasons.
United were better in their previous outing, a battling defeat against newly-promoted Newcastle however and have lost just 3 in 21 on their own patch.
For the Sky Blues, the optimism generated by January and February’s good form has been dissolved by a run of 7 games without a win, culminating in Monday’s first-half horror show at Reading.
Hopefully that will prove to be something of a watershed, with Clinton Morrison in particular being very vocal in his criticism of both himself and his team-mates.
Speaking to the Coventry Telegraph this week, he said: ‘It is a disgrace the way we played.’
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