Farewell to Marvin Johnson – and a glorious, complicated Sheffield Wednesday career
“Flint in the mix. And that’s cleared by Peterborough but not for long. It’s Barry Bannan. To Johnson. Lifted in by Johnson..”
For the vast majority of elite sportspeople, there’s always one moment with which they’re inherently attached. Years beyond their involvement with a club or long into retirement, the mere mention of their name delivers a technicolour vignette of snapshot excellence.
It is in that moment; the calm, clipped, breathless cross that Aden Flint nodded down for Liam Palmer’s 98th-minute Miracle moment, that Marvin Johnson will live long in the blue and white minds of South Yorkshire. In that pregnant millisecond on May 29 2025, with Sheffield Wednesday locked at its core, the world stood still. And then it burst into a cacophony of chaos.
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To watch it back is to appreciate just how impressive it was. Let’s not stumble into hyperbole; it’s no Maradona run at the Azteca. It’s a clipped ball of 20 yards into the back post in a frankly unbelievable range of space that, given enough opportunity, any half-decent Sunday league player could pull off.
But it’s the scale of the moment, the ice-cool running of the ball across his body, the look up, the frozen-in-time clarity of thought. Better players at better levels have and would have panicked, overhit or simply chosen to smash the ball towards goal. We’ve seen it time and again.
The iconic vignette it may be, but the fact is Johnson’s four years at Sheffield Wednesday have returned so many moments of excellence, without which the club’s modern day story is so very different. Signed of a free transfer following his release from Middlesbrough, an also-ran in a loan stint down the road, 40 direct goal contributions in 169 outings surely prove him to be one of the savviest bits of business the club have pulled off . How many better free agent additions have there been in Wednesday’s modern history?
The fact is that in a changing room that achieved such breathless success in the last few years, the feeling is that perhaps he is not as widely lauded as some of his comrades. A few years from now, mental images of the side that earned that miracle promotion and followed it up with that miracle survival with return the mugshots of Bannan, Windass, Smith, Gregory, Palmer, Paterson, Moore and Röhl. To what extent Marvin Johnson? And if not, why not?
He’s a little more reserved than some of those names. In a 2023 vintage that held so many big, outward-facing characters, Johnson could be a touch more standoffish in his approach to interactions away from the microphone and his media engagements were rare. When he was up for press, he was polite and honest and a pleasure to speak to. But fans never really saw a great deal of him.
