5 reasons why Lee Grant is on thin ice at Huddersfield Town

Huddersfield Town’s capitulation against Bolton marked a new low point in this season which has already had far too many setbacks. Town have now lost five games in the league, an alarming number when the overwhelming majority of teams that have historically achieved automatic promotion from League One lose ten or fewer games on their way to going up. So Town will have to put together an extraordinary turnaround to get their top-two hopes back on track. 

The question most Town fans have been asking themselves lately is whether Lee Grant is capable of being the manager to oversee a turnaround in fortunes. I personally think it’s too soon to give him the boot but there are some fairly solid arguments available to question our manager’s performance so far. 

Here’s why I think Lee Grant is on thin ice now, even though he’s only managed 12 league games so far at Town…

The results are bad

Even though Town are only just outside the playoff positions in the league, I think it’s fair to sum up our start to the season as disappointing. It’s not just that we’ve lost five of our first 12 games, it’s the nature of these defeats that causes some real concern. 

Every defeat has felt particularly painful for various reasons…

• Blackpool away – A mad few minutes where we conceded three goals, followed by a red card for them which allowed us to have nearly all the possession but our toothless attacking play produced very few meaningful chances.
• Barnsley away – An Owen Goodman disasterclass saw him give away a goal then get sent off for one of many ill-judged interventions. 
• Bradford away – After hyping up this local derby after a long hiatus, Town failed to show up in front of a huge away following. Bradford played better than us but the real disappointment was how they so easily outfought us on the day.
• Stockport at home – Another game where we couldn’t cope with the opposition going down to ten men. Only this time, we couldn’t even dominate the game with the man advantage and Stockport outplayed us during the period they were a man down. 
• Bolton at home – A depressing choice to sit on a 1-0 lead opened up the chance for Bolton to snatch all three points in stoppage time with two quick (and quality) goals. The first goal was a disappointment but the second was indefensible. To be so open after just conceding is crazy, though not a new problem. Both the Bradford and Blackpool defeats saw us concede mutliple goals close together because we were far too open after conceding.

The above summary is really just to show that these haven’t just been regular defeats, they’ve all been very frustrating to experience as a Town fan. And that’s before you consider the limp goalless draw against Burton at home or the defeat to League Two Harrogate in the EFL Trophy. 

Another worry is that the current trend is downwards for Town, with some decent results at the start but our only recent victory was against Exeter, who themselves were absolutely woeful. 

The style of play isn’t working

Bad results wouldn’t be quite so hard to stomach if there was evidence of something interesting happening on the pitch. We’ve seen managers like David Wagner and Carlos Corberan take a bit of time to get settled but with both of them it was obvious that they had some interesting ideas that might come together if given time. I just haven’t seen enough of that so far with Town this season.

If Town played like Lee Grant describes how he wants us to play then this would be a genuine reason to give him plenty of time. Trying to play exciting football in League One that is also successful is very hard to get right and so far there’s not a great deal of evidence to suggest Lee Grant knows how to deliver this. 

I find this very frustrating because it seems to me that Lee Grant was given this job because he promised a bold type of football that would both suit the sensibilities of Town fans and be effective at this level. The Northern Football idea was laughed at when Kevin Nagle first discussed it but Lee Grant’s explanation of a high-pressing, high energy, fast-attacking type of football is exactly what fans like to see. But either he’s not trying to do that anymore or he’s trying but is failing to deliver on his promises. 

There feels to be one big issue with Town’s style of play but I actually think it’s lots of little problems that are adding up to this overall feeling that it’s not working. 

To quickly summarise: 

• When we play out from the back, the defenders struggle to move the ball up the field
• The goalkeepers are under such a lot of pressure with the ball at their feet that mistakes are much more likely
• Our central midfielders sit far too deep and struggle to drive us up the pitch
• The fullbacks get out of position too easily, either getting pinned down by decent wingers or venturing too far forward and balls going in behind them.
• The two wingers and the number ten struggle to get involved in the game and don’t link up effectively.
• The lone striker could be renamed the lonely striker, they have so few teammates anywhere near them in a typical game.

Other than the above issues, it’s all going great! Though, trying to offer some balance, we have looked decent in patches of games. The problem is that when it all slots together and we get close to delivering Lee Grant’s vision on the pitch, it only takes the slightest setback or alteration in the opposition’s approach for it all to tumble down like a house of cards.

He’s not getting the best out of his squad

One of the most notable factors in Town’s recent slump in form has been the large number of players that have dropped off in form compared to their start of the season and past season’s performances. 

It would probably be quicker to list the players that aren’t in a slump but Joe Low, Ruben Roosken, David Kasumu, Ryan Ledson, Ben Wiles, Marcus Harness, Joe Taylor and Alfie May have all underperformed lately. There are others that could be in here too.

Add to that the long list of injuries and it does make sense that our decent start to the season has tailed off into disappointment. With key players missing, too often the replacement that comes in isn’t able to get any momentum and struggles. Herbie Kane and Marcus McGuane’s absences have been felt much more acutely because David Kasumu has come in and has, on the whole, disappointed. Around this time last year, Kasumu formed a trio with Kane and Wiles that played nearly every game of the 16-game unbeaten run for Michael Duff, so we know he can do it but he isn’t doing it right now.

Ledson arrived at the club with a reputation of being an all-action, tough-tackling midfielder who could also pick a pass at times. Lately he’s been a ghostly presence in midfield, floating around the periphery of the midfield battle and rarely making his presence felt. 

And the most obvious case of a player being mismanaged into poor form is Alfie May, who has been shunted all over the place at times or left completely isolated when played in his preferred position. In my mind, goalscorers are like pedigree horses, they need to be treated well and given the perfect conditions to perform. To get Alife May scoring he needs to be fed the right chances and surrounded by creative players that know his game. The way Grant has used May like a utility player that can cover multiple gaps has been a large factor in why he’s not in his regular goalscoring rhythm yet.  

The injuries probably involve a big slice of bad luck and the players themselves have to take responsibility for drops in form but I think Lee Grant has had a hand in these situations too. After all the fanfare and hype that surrounded Lee Grant’s arrival, it’s disappointing that he’s been unable to keep the majority of his squad fit and in decent form. 

He has no track record

One of the reasons that the knives are out for Lee Grant quite soon in his tenure is that he’s got no track record to fall back on. Michael Duff had recent experience of getting a team promoted out of League One. So did Darren Moore. Neil Warnock is one of the most successful ever managers of teams outside of the top flight. When things got tricky for these managers, at least there was the counter argument that they had experienced success in their past managerial roles. 

Lee Grant has had excellent experience at Ipswich as a coach and even during his playing days at Manchester United will have learned a lot. But he hasn’t been the man in charge before and despite what he says in his press conferences, my impression is that he’s struggled with the step up in responsibility. 

Having success in prior managerial roles gives a bit of a buffer when things start to go bad, with Grant being appointed purely on his potential, it’s a lot harder to be patient when there’s no previous evidence of him turning around a tricky situation. 

Inexperienced managers have a higher likelihood of failing but they are given a chance because it’s also possible that they will be brilliant. We’ve experienced both sides of this coin with Wagner and Corberan being massive overachievers and Siewert, Fotheringham and Schofield being absolute clunkers. We don’t know where Lee Grant will fall on this spectrum but the early signs aren’t all that encouraging. 

Grant isn’t connecting with fans

Early on in his tenure, Lee Grant’s slightly too polished, and slightly too jargon-laden chat was an interesting quirk and maybe even pointed towards an advanced football brain. After a few months of it, it’s starting to grate. He talks about “The Group” constantly, banging on endlessly about learning lessons (yet still making the same mistakes repeatedly) and sounding a bit too much like dozens of middle managers I’ve come across in previous careers.

Sounding like a corporate drone in interviews isn’t a big problem and it would barely merit a mention if things were going well. But when things aren’t going well on the pitch, managers can either encourage faith or sow doubt with fans with how they talk in the media. Grant’s garbled explanations and soundbites are most likely the exact thing young coaches are media trained to do when completing their badges but managers that speak plainly and honestly tend to connect a lot better with Town fans. 

Neil Warnock’s press conferences were a joy to watch, as he can captivate an audience with his stories and manipulate the media to do his bidding. Even Michael Duff, in his own dour way, spoke in a clear and honest way which I always listened to, even if he could be a bit dull. With Grant it feels a bit too much like listening to official propaganda rather than an honest assessment of what’s going on. 

But it’s not time to sack him (yet)

In this article I’ve laid out quite a lot of reasons for why Grant is failing at the moment but I still don’t think it’s time to sack him. We’re still early enough in the season to turn things around and it’s too soon to bin Grant off. We’ve been rattling through managers at the rate of about two a season in recent years but it’s not got us anywhere. I think we need to stick with Lee Grant long enough to give him every chance to succeed. 

There’s a risk to keeping the faith with a manager, as continued poor results could see us slip out of contention at the top end of the table but I still think Lee Grant is the most likely to get a tune out of the squad that he was allowed to build in the summer. Changing managers now could effectively right off this season and mean we’ve got to wait another year in League One before we mount a proper promotion push.

Before the season started I was full of optimism about the upcoming Lee Grant era. The shine has unquestionably worn off that optimism but I still believe there’s a decent chance he can turn things around. He arrived with a very good reputation in the game and was expected to succeed. He’s now got to show that he deserved all that hype.

I’ve added the “yet” at the end of the heading for this section because there are always limits to how long a manager has in a job. If we were to lose our next three games we’d be drifting toward the bottom half of the table and out of all cup competitions, so then there would be some serious questions to ask about how far the reality of this season is diverging from the expectation. But if Town can put together a few wins and start to find some fluency in their play then it’s quite possible Lee Grant can turn this situation around. Let’s hope so, anyway.