6 reasons to feel optimistic about Huddersfield Town’s chances this season

The Championship season is due to start on Saturday and it feels about the right time to put together a preview of Huddersfield Town’s chances this time around. As has become a tradition on this blog, I am writing two completely contradictory previews – this is the positive, happy-clappy one. The miserable one will follow later this week. (As an aside, the miserable preview in previous years has usually had over double the number of views as the optimistic one. Which tells you everything you need to know about Town fans!)

Regardless of the typically dour outlook of many Town fans, I’m going to try and make a case for why we should feel at least somewhat optimistic about this season. Prepare for the sound of barrels being scraped and levels of optimism that are bordering on sociopathic!

Everyone is writing us off this season

The pundits have been circulating their predictions for the season ahead and Town have featured prominently as the “experts” choice to be relegated. The bookies are in agreement with this assessment too, with only Derby shorter odds for the drop (and they can barely scrape together a team at the moment). 

Huddersfield Town were famously written off in the 2016/17 too and we still managed to make it to the promised land. I’m not saying that Town are going to do that again, as that season involved a perfect storm of things coming together for Town but there are some parallels that can be drawn. 

When Wagner first arrived at Town it was obvious he had a different way of doing things and we saw glimpses of what his team could produce but we weren’t amazing in the 2015/16 season after he took over from Chris Powell and ended the season just above the relegation spots. It was only in the second season, once Wagner had managed to get his ideas across and bring in the players that he wanted that things started to happen.

So I’m not too concerned about the doom-mongering predictions for Town this season. I think I’ve seen enough of Corberan to believe that he’s got potential to produce something special at Town (more on this later). That doesn’t mean he’s guaranteed to achieve the spectacular but it’s possible.

Our defence looks A LOT better this season

Town had the worst defence in the Championship last season, nobody conceded more goals than us. This isn’t a huge surprise, as we threw away many games with crazy mistakes and terrible decisions from the defence and goalkeepers. The recruitment we’ve carried out far this season has shown that it was understood that we needed to bring in some new players to avoid these issues. 

While players like Matty Pearson and Tom Lees arriving on free transfers don’t set pulses racing, they could give the kind of defensive solidity and Championship experience that will add a bit of steel to the back line. The one defensive addition that is genuinely exciting is Levi Colwill coming from Chelsea on loan. He’s highly rated at Stamford Bridge and it’s easy to see why based on his early outings for Town. He looks like he has the ability to help progress the ball upfield and avoid those situations where the ball gets stuck in defence and we just roll it around the back line.

It may be a bit early to declare our new recruits as an improvement on last season but the early signs are very positive. That’s before you consider the fact that we’ve got vastly more experienced backup options for Pipa and Toffolo in Turton and Ruffels. In fact, Turton seems like he may be genuine competition for Pipa at rightback, offering a different set of skills, which might be preferable when we want to choose defensive solidity over attacking flair. 

There’s potential for goals in our forwards

I’ll admit that the word potential is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the subheading for this section, but there are players in our squad that have the ability to bag plenty of goals this season. There are doubts about all of them but it only needs one or two to hit double figures to mean goalscoring stops being a concern.

Josh Koroma is probably the most likely source of goals in our forward line at the moment. When he was fit last season he showed a Karlan Grant-like ability to score virtually the same goal with startling regularity. The cut-inside-onto-his-right-and-curl-it-in-at-the-far-post goal may be something teams get wise to eventually but it’s still hard to stop because he usually only needs one opportunity to score. Not to mention Toffolo’s ability to exploit space when defenses double up on Koroma. 

If Koroma can just continue the form he showed last season he could easily get twenty goals this season, providing he stays fit. That’s the biggest worry about him at the moment, can he actually stay fit long enough to be the difference maker. He’s already missed a bit of preseason because of a minor injury and isn’t quite at full speed yet. 

Jordan Rhodes is another player that could come good and score a hatful of goals. OK, his last few years haven’t been great for him but anyone that remembers his previous spell at Town will know that he’s a natural poacher and his movement in the box is among the best I’ve ever seen in person. I’m not sure how he can fit in our system though, as I can’t see him doing the same job as Frazier Campbell usually does of chasing down every lost cause. Maybe the system can be adapted to field two strikers or Rhodes can change his game.

The other most likely candidate to be Town’s top scorer this season in my eyes is Danny Ward. This may be pushing the limits of Town fans’ credulity but his record at Cardiff and Rotherham shows that he can be a regular source of goals. Whether we can provide him enough chances to convert is another matter, as is his ability to stay fit under our current training regime. By his own admission, last season was a nightmare for Ward but that may have been a necessary adjustment period that bears fruit for him this season.

Looking through the rest of the squad shows that there are other sources of goals too. Sorba Thomas looks like he could break through this season and make a real impact. Aaron Rowe was showing huge potential towards the end of last season. I’d expect Duane Holmes to chip in with a few goals too. Then players like Pipa, Toffolo, O’Brien (if he stays), High and Campbell are all players with potential to get on the scoresheet from time to time. 

Carlos might be a special coach

Most football managers are able to talk a good game, it’s how they manage to repeatedly get into decent jobs despite most of their CVs being littered with past failures. Only a very small number of managers genuinely help their clubs to over achieve. David Wagner did it for Town in the promotion season and the first year in the Premier League before the magic faded in that disastrous second season.

We saw Carlos struggle at times last season but there were also times when we saw him deliver a brand of football that we’ve not seen at Town before. Some of the team goals we scored early in the season were superb and hinted towards the type of relentless, attacking football that Bielsa has brought to Leeds.

With a less congested fixture list, fewer injuries and better quality backup players it’s not that hard to imagine that Carlos may be able to get his team playing football closer to the way he wants. Last season ended with external factors requiring Carlos to betray his instincts and play a more pragmatic style to get us over the line and avoid relegation. With a clean slate this season I suspect we may see something closer to his original vision.

Carlos starts the season under a bit of pressure because of how poorly our second half of last season went but that can change very quickly with a few positive results. In fact, the whole mood around the club can change in the space of a few games. Going back to Wagner and our promotion season, nobody fancied us at the start of that season but a brilliant win away at Newcastle and The Hef scoring a last minute equaliser with his rear end at Villa was all it took for some fans to realise something special could be around the corner. 

Town’s finances are stable, which is more than be said for many other teams in our league

Sensible financial stewardship doesn’t sell many season tickets and can even be quite frustrating for fans when other teams are splashing the cash. However, Phil Hodgkinson has repeatedly alluded to how other Championship clubs are more or less ticking timebombs when it comes to their finances.

I regularly listen to the Price of Football podcast and they frequently comment on how bonkers the typical Championship football team’s accounts look. It’s pretty typical for teams in our league to spend significantly more on player wages than they receive in income year after year which is completely unsustainable. There are some owners that treat the Championship like it’s a slot machine and promotion to the Premier League is the jackpot. Unfortunately this can lead to reckless amounts of spending for those teams that don’t manage to gain promotion.

I don’t have any special insight or expertise in this area but as a casual observer it seems likely that several teams in our league could blow up this season and risk points deductions for their precarious financial positions. Derby are obvious candidates, given they’ve already got a suspended points deduction for not paying their players on time.

Not that I’d ever want to see other clubs go down because of off-the-field issues but it’s worth acknowledging that our financial situation is at least stable even if we’re currently saddled with a large debt to our previous owner. 

Expectations are very low

The secret to a happy life is low expectations, and I’ve heard from very few Town fans that are hoping for anything more than survival this season. Which means most fans would be perfectly happy with a mid-table finish this season. 

When the bar for success is set so low it means it’s much easier to feel satisfied with our progress this season. We don’t have to be perfect, we just have to be better than last season. Which really shouldn’t be too hard to achieve.

I know it’s a bit unambitious to aim for just being average but I’d be delighted if Town finished 12th with a positive goal difference. After the last three years of disappointment I’d be more than happy to have a season where we win as many as we lose and play some decent football along the way. That doesn’t sound like too much to ask for.