Sheffield Wednesday talent tipped for 'very good career' after eventful breakthrough season

The Owls youngster, who turned just 19 on Thursday, has had a very big season.

It started with a goal-laden stint in the under-21s and the pressure of talk of potential senior involvement by Xisco at a time his side simply couldn’t score goals. Then came the call-up of interim boss Neil Thompson to the first team bench and, after just four games of Danny Röhl, his debut in a miserable 4-0 home defeat to Millwall.

It all came in a flurry; starts, the odd fluffed chance, three goals in four matches, a nose bleed and press conference outbursts that described him as ‘the future of our club’. A senior contract was signed in the lead-up to Christmas and while Röhl and teammates were steadfast in their pleas for patience from an expectant and excited fanbase, there was a time Cadamarteri was the sole poster boy for positive reinforcement in what then looked likely to be a doomed campaign.

"I’ve been impressed, but I do think that everyone needs to calm down a little bit," a smiling Will Vaulks told reporters back in December. "And I mean that in the best way ever. We don’t want to put massive pressure on this 18-year-old to be the one to lead the line for us and keep us up. Like I say, I mean it in the best way possible.

"He’s a young lad, he’s still got so much to learn, but he’s taken to it really well. He’s shown that he can be in the right place at the right time, and he’s got loads to work on in his game like we all have.”

As January turned to February, a knee injury was carefully managed by a limit on game time and the arrival of Ike Ugbo slowed it further. His fresh challenge was to impact games from the bench and that he did, picking up his first international cap and goal with England under-19s after being subject to a grapple with an impressed Jamaican senior side.

He finished the season with five league goal involvements, four of which were in games Wednesday picked up vital points. In some way or another, every Wednesday player played a vital part in a great escape few thought possible in the weeks before Cadamarteri made his debut; the Yorkshire-born forward certainly did. It was a fascinating breakthrough season that delivered a wave of experiences some young players wait years for.

And along with Vaulks, fellow striker Michael Smith had sage words for his younger colleague. In a changing room packed with thousands of professional appearances, the feeling is that Cadamarteri served as a little brother. As finishing schools go - no pun intended - it wasn’t a bad one for him to be involved in.

Smith said: “I try and speak to Bailey, especially before he is about to go out on the pitch when he has been starting. It’s just (giving) little nuggets of experience about certain centre-halves I have played against over the years - who he was coming up against.

"It was just about what to expect and things he could try and do to win a free-kick or run off the back of him.”

From main man to impact player, Cadamarteri was faced with a fresh challenge mid-season after a meteoric feeling of up-and-up. In a side suddenly thrown into the ultra-sophisticated defence from the front and meticulous tactical instruction, Cadamarteri was asked to take on information some players never experience. Wednesday boss Röhl expressed his delight at the youngster’s progression as recently as March.

“Bailey can be very happy with how he has improved in the last months,” Röhl said. “It's a massive improvement. He can take this development and this improvement into the next weeks and months. As a manager it is just great to have more and more players who can score, either off the bench or on the pitch from the start. It is so helpful.”

For all the instructions and technical improvements made, it is the attributes whispered about in the corridors of Middlewood Road for years that make Cadamarteri stand out as a hot prospect. Hundreds of goals were scored from a young age, but it was his success in rising through the levels of football that impressed. Size is on his side, but so too the natural instincts that perhaps run in the genes of a young man whose old man is a former Premier League forward.

“I’ve watched him walking into the ground and he’s not built like a 17 or 18-year-old and he’s filled out an awful lot and he has got a real chance in that sense as well,” Smith said. “He can look after himself and he’s got ability and that knack of being in the right place at the right time, which - as everyone says - is uncoachable. You have either got it or you haven’t.

“He’s done really well and seems like a really level-headed lad and you can see he’s got the experience of his family to lean on as well as those in the dressing room. I am pretty sure he will have a very good career.”

Once the dust settles on all the excitement and entrails of a dramatic survival effort, Wednesday will have every confidence Smith is right. Cadamarteri’s exciting challenge resumes in pre-season.