Sheffield Wednesday were beaten on penalties by Huddersfield on Wednesday evening to end their Premier League dreams in the play-offs for the second season in a row.
As the Owls move into their 150th anniversary year owner Dejphon Chansiri has shown no signs of relenting in his bid to get the Owls into the top flight for the first time since the turn of the century.
Most of the Owls main 1st team players are tied down to long-term contracts and so wholesale transfers are unlikely and any moves for the Owls top players would attract significant transfer fees.
The main topic of discussion in the immediate fall-out from the latest play-off heartbreak is likely to concern the manager. Carlos Carvalhal has been very popular during his 2-year spell at Hillsborough and he boasts one of the best winning percentages for a manager in the entire history of the club. However, the Portuguese boss has a pretty nomadic managerial history and 2 years is one of the longest spells he has spent in charge at a club.
Despite his good record at Hillsborough and his popularity as a figurehead at Hillsborough he has come in for more criticism this season. The Owls picked up 7 more points this time around compared with 2015-16 and finished 2 places higher in the table but their play-off campaign ended at the first hurdle and his approach has been called into question.
The first-leg tactics were clearly to keep a clean sheet at Huddersfield and although this was achieved the failure to see the job through at Hillsborough has inevitably led to talk of what might have been had they been more adventurous. The Owls has been more conservative in general this season and while Carvalhal may point to the fact teams have set up more defensively to combat Wednesday his critics will point towards the abundance of attacking options that the club have acquired to deal with this over the course of the season.
Even before the play-offs kicked off the rumour mill had gone into overdrive with talk of Alan Pardew coming in to replace Carvalhal this summer, regardless of the outcome of the campaign and so it will be interesting to see what transpires.