7 reasons to be pessimistic about Huddersfield Town’s chances this season

Yesterday’s article looked at all the reasons to feel positive about Huddersfield Town’s chances this season and by the time I’d finished writing it I’d almost convinced myself that we might be OK this season. So much so that I was tempted to not bother to write a more pessimistic preview of the season. 

But most Town fans will have experienced the wild mood swings that following can provoke. A decent win on a Tuesday night and you look up the table and think another three more victories could put us in the playoff hunt and then a defeat on the following Saturday leaves you wondering if this sorry team will ever win a match again. 

So I’m going to indulge my negative side in this article and look at all the reasons why it’s probably best to not expect too much from Huddersfield Town in the 2021/22 season.

We’ve not improved enough

Town have been absolutely shocking in 2021 so far. We’ve won three games out of twenty odd and only managed to survive last season because of the relatively good results we secured in the first half of the season. If we continue in this new season as we finished last season we’ll be all but down by Christmas.

So it would be reasonable to think that we would be looking to make changes after such a torrid time recently. Yet the majority of our transfer business has been to provide backup options for the first choice eleven. Only Matty Pearson looks like a genuine improvement on what we had last season, with the rest either untested at this level or, in the case of Rhodes and Lees, several seasons past their prime. Maybe Colwill is another improvement but he’s played a grand total of one professional games, so it may be worth tempering expectations for him.

It’s hard to imagine that we’re going to get significantly better results this season when the squad of players we’ve got available isn’t much better than the one that finished 20th last season. In fact, if Mbenza, O’Brien and Bacuna all leave then you could make a decent argument for our squad being significantly weaker.

Carlos is in over his head 

I sang Carlos’ praises in my optimistic article yesterday but for all the hype, he’s not delivered on the initial promise he showed yet. It was a huge gamble to remove the Cowleys from their post and replace them with a head coach that had never done the job at anything close to the level Town play at. So far this gamble hasn’t paid off.

The first few months of Carlos’ time at Town showed what he’s capable of, the team made plenty of mistakes but played with intent, pressed hard without the ball and attacked in numbers when we went forward. That faded as the season went on and by the end of the season the “Carlosball” approach was abandoned completely and we switched to a pragmatic style that neither the coaches nor the players were suited to. 

I like Carlos as a head coach and want him to do well but it’s hard to overlook some of his weaknesses that he’s shown already. His training methods lead to too many injuries, his tactics are hard for players of Town’s standards to execute, his team selections too often involve square pegs in round holes (how many times did O’Brien play leftback despite being poor nearly every time?) and we threw away far too many points from winning positions. I’m sure he’s learned a lot from his mistakes last season but Town aren’t in a position where we can repeatedly drop points due to mistakes from the head coach.

Individual errors are baked in to our tactical system 

Expanding a bit more on one of the points I made above, the tactics we currently play mean that nearly every game there is an individual error that leads to a goal-scoring opportunity to the opposition (often it’s three or four). Other teams got wise to this last season and knew they didn’t need to create chances themselves, instead they could just keep forwards high up the field and wait for a Town player to cough the ball up to them in a dangerous area.

It’s easy to blame the individual making the error in these situations but a host of combinations of defenders and goalkeepers have all suffered from the same problems. Like Trigger’s broom (or the ship of Theseus if you prefer more high-brow references), if all the elements change it isn’t still the same thing, so multiple versions of our backline have struggled with making silly errors, which suggests it’s the tactics not the players. 

Playing out from the back is the main reason we make so many errors; the more passes defenders and keepers have to make in a game, the more likely it is that they’ll mess one up. We make this problem worse by inviting pressure onto our defence, which is a deliberate tactic to try and draw teams out and create space further forward. This is a good tactic when you’ve got defenders that are comfortable in possession and capable of accurately passing to those players further up field but disastrous if you don’. 

The benefits of playing this way are far outweighed by the costs, or at least they were last season. We actually stopped being quite so suicidal in possession towards the end of last season but I suspect that was only a temporary change.

The attacking exciting football we were promised ended up being tepid and dreary 

There were spells within games last season (though not a full 90 minutes to my recollection) when Town played some very lovely football. It was fairly common for opposition team’s fans to compliment us after games for how well we played against them. These good spells usually involved slick passing around the edge of the box, overlapping runs from the midfielders and fullbacks to flood the final third and lots of chances being created.

Sadly we didn’t produce this kind of football on a regular basis and it was more common to see us struggle to even get the ball out of defence. Long spells of games would descend into dreary, safety-first passing around at the back while defenders waited for something to happen in front of them before passing back to the keeper and starting again. 

There’s nothing wrong with patient build up play when there’s a plan to actually get the ball forward eventually but when Carel Eiting was out injured we didn’t have anyone with the vision or passing range to really open up teams and unlock defences.

The murderball training regime crocks players without noticeably improving fitness 

I was really hopeful that Corberan’s training methods, closely modelled on Bielsa’s approach at Leeds, would bring about the kind of fitness improvements that our West Yorkshire rivals have seen under Bielsa. So far that has not materialised. The training regime has just meant more and more of the kind of soft tissue injuries that come from overworking players. 

In fairness to Corberan, last season’s fixture schedule meant that there was always a high chance of more injuries. However, I remember Harry Toffolo being asked about how he feels about playing three games in a week last season and he replied by saying he likes playing proper matches midweek as it means they have fewer murderball sessions. It was meant as a joke but I think there might be some truth in this too. If the training sessions are more intense than the games you play then it’s not a huge surprise we had so many players out with hamstring injuries (and more who played through injuries that held them back).

It’s possible that we’ll see more benefits from the intense approach to training this season and most players’ bodies will have adjusted to the new demands being put upon them. Or maybe some players’ bodies simply can’t cope and we’ll see the same players missing huge chunks of the season due to injury. James Vaughan allegedly left Town shortly after Wagner’s arrival because he knew that he couldn’t cope with the double training because of his recurring injury issues. A few players in the Town squad may be facing similar decisions.

We’re saddled with debt

I don’t like writing too much about the club’s debt to Dean Hoyle because it’s such a divisive issue. My opinion is that Hoyle is entitled to ask for his money back and it’s good that he’s being flexible about the repayment schedule. Not to mention that it’s all interest free too, which is saving the clubs millions of pounds. On the other hand, most owners that put money into clubs don’t expect to see it again and I have a vague memory of early statements from Hoyle saying that he wouldn’t look to take the money back in the future. 

The real issue is that we squandered the money from the Premier League on rubbish players that trousered huge wages and didn’t perform well enough to be sold for a fraction of the fees we paid. Had we invested more wisely then we’d have been able to fully replay Dean Hoyle from the fees we received from selling players and most likely had some left over to reinvest in the squad. Bear in mind we were linked with Alphonso Davies and Adama Traore in the transfer window we brought in Diakhaby and Mbenza, either of those two former players are now arguably worth more than the debt we have to Hoyle.  

Regardless of how you feel about the current or previous owner, the reality is that there is a significant debt to Hoyle and this will limit our potential for the next few seasons at least. For example, Lewis O’Brien could  be on the verge of a £10m transfer to Leeds but I suspect the bulk of any fees we receive will go into paying down debt rather than replacing one of our most influential players. 

The long term plan is already unravelling 

At the point the Cowleys were sacked we were presented with a new long-term vision for Huddersfield Town. It was basically to be an attacking team that plays nice football and gives a chance to their youth players. 

A year on and this plan isn’t really being followed. The commitment to a certain style of play went in the bin when we were staring relegation in the face (quite rightly) so it’s hard to believe that there’s a lot of faith in our style of play when sticking to it last season would have almost certainly seen us relegated. 

Giving youth players a chance didn’t go too well last season either. In fairness, Rowe came in and did well, as did Edmonds-Green, but too many others were given chances when it was clear they weren’t ready.

The fact that one of last season’s success stories from the academy has been allowed to leave on loan shows that there are likely to be fewer opportunities for the youngsters to play in the first team this season. I’m not against this, it’s important to only play youngsters when they’re ready as I’m pretty sure games like the Bournemouth away drubbing last season damaged the confidence of the youth players that were thrown to the lions. 

I’m always quite skeptical of long-term plans from football clubs. How can you think beyond a few months when losing four games in a row will almost always lead to fans calling for the manager to be sacked. I’ll be genuinely impressed if we’ve not scrapped the current plans and gone in another direction by this time next year.

My honest opinion about Huddersfield Town’s chances this season

I’ve been overly negative in this article just like I was too positive in my optimistic preview yesterday. As usual, the truth of how I really feel lies somewhere in the middle. I will say that I found it far easier to think of things to write in this article than yesterday’s. 

Before a season starts it’s impossible to know what’s in store. While there are plenty of facts that point towards the likelihood of another season of struggle for Town there is always hope that things could be different this time around. 

I’m really hoping that we get off to a flying start but I’m not expecting too much either. A few decent signings before the end of the transfer window could change things but if we sell key players without replacing them we could be in real trouble. 

We’ll have to wait and see. The moaners will have something to grumble about regardless and the happy clappers will unquestioningly get behind the club no matter what the reality. The rest of us will no doubt swing from one extreme to the other, which is part of the fun of supporting a mostly rubbish (but occasionally marvelous) football team.