Huddersfield Town came away from their trip to Teesside last weekend with a point, which is two fewer than they might have had if they’d have taken all their chances and defended a bit better but is a point more than they should have had, given the golden chance Boro spurned in the dying minutes of the game.
If you’re sensitive to footballing clichés, you may want to reach for the sick bag now as this game was “a good advert for the Championship” as both sides “went at it hammer and tongs” and pushed for the win. The players “left it all out on the pitch”, “gave 110%”, and in a “game of two halves”, “football was the winner”.
While it was a broadly positive away trip for Town, there were some obvious issues that still persist and a few new ones that popped up too. On the other hand, there’s something fun about the way Town are playing this season that I’m hoping will make following them a bit different to the usual death march to the relegation scrap. The way they’re having a go and pushing back against teams makes me think we’ll rarely be bored this season and, with a bit of luck, should pick up enough points from this gung-ho approach too.
Another good Town performance
Before getting too into the weeds about the specifics of the game, it’s worth taking a moment to say that this was another decent Town performance. Despite coming up against one of the league’s most fancied teams away from home, this was far from what most people would consider “Warnockball”. Town played mostly on the front foot, didn’t let Boro settle in possession and looked to get the ball forward quickly when we attacked to create chances (though admittedly we often rushed possession too much and didn’t get to the bit where we created the chance).
It’s not particularly pretty football that Town are playing right now, but it’s definitely not negative either. Both in attack and defence, we’re having a bloody good go at it and I think both the fans and the manager won’t blame the players if they come up short after playing with 100% commitment.
My personal belief about Neil Warnock is that he’s unfairly criticised for being a long ball manager. It’s more a case that he picks the style to suit the tools he has available and in many situations he’s parachuted into, simple and brutal football are what gets results when backs are against the wall but when he’s for the right resources he’s able to do things a bit differently too. The games we’ve seen from Town so far this season suggest he was telling the truth when he said he wanted the team to be on the front foot a bit more this season. Let’s hope the club gets him a couple more players that will help him with that style of football.
Middlesbrough probably should have won
I feel like I came away from many of Town’s games last season feeling like I’d watched two poor teams. While we were awful for much of the campaign, the teams we played were quite often nearly as bad too, which made our inability to avoid standing on metaphorical rakes and falling down drains all the more painful to watch. So it was nice to feel like, in this game, I’d seen two decent teams playing good football.
While I watch Town because I want to see them do well, I also like to enjoy watching a football game against competent and well-matched sides too. The Championship can be a mixed bag in terms of quality but anybody watching this game should have seen enough to feel entertained. It didn’t have the polish of the Premier League, where nearly every pass is perfect and most attacks lead to a chance but I thought both teams gave a good showing of themselves.
Trying to view the game from a neutral perspective, I think Middlesbrough probably bossed the game for longer spells than Town did and when they were on top they created better chances, which they then fluffed. The worst one being the late opportunity to win the game that Silvera spurned. While there were others, that chance alone suggests Town should probably be the ones feeling happiest about coming away with a point.
Top performers: Pearson, Sorba, Diarra, Rudoni, Nicholls
I think the bulk of the team played well in this game but a few deserve picking out for special praise. Sorba Thomas obviously created the moment we needed to force the error for our goal. It may even be harsh to describe if as an error and an own goal, a more charitable viewpoint would be to just award the goal to Sorba but I don’t think his in-swinging corner would have gone in without the heavy deflection off the Boro defender, Fry.
Thomas had a good game regardless of the goal, both in open play and with his other set piece deliveries. He’s looking more of a handful when he runs at defenders and seems to be understanding more about how Warnock wants him to play. He had another defensive lapse on the build up to their goal but over the course of 90 minutes it’s to be expected that players occasionally lose their man and a teammate needs to be on hand to bail him out when he slips up defensively.
Brahima Diarra had another good game and came close with a double effort on goal where one shot was blocked and the other hit the post. He was otherwise a nuisance to their defence, as always, and provided some clever skill and trickery going forward. He’s frustrating to watch in some ways, because with just a few tweaks to his game he could be devastating but currently he’s mostly harmless. With the right attitude and guidance, he might become our best player but it’s equally possible he’ll fizzle out and just be a bag of tricks with no end product.
Someone you would never describe as a bag of tricks is Matty Pearson but he was immense in this game nonetheless. He was an absolute rock at the back for Town and made some vital interventions to bail us out over the course of the game. He also showed a lot of character at the end when he got clattered and had the wind knocked out of him but the new time-wasting rules meant he just had to get up and get on with it despite the fact he looked goosed at this point. I worried that he was a liability in those closing moments but he closed the game out and we hung on for the point.
Of course, there’s also Town’s Man of the Match, Lee Nicholls who made some great saves. It’s expected in a way but it’s good to see him back to his best after he let one go through him last week against Leicester (while still making The Football League Paper’s Team of the Week somehow). After a dodgy moment with Helik for Plymouth’s opener too, it’s good to see he’s now back to unquestionably contributing to Town’s points tally.
Finally, Jack Rudoni also should get a nod as he’s doing some excellent work in the middle of the park. One of the best things that’s happening for him at the moment is that he’s being given a consistent run in his best position. Last season he was the solution to every injury crisis, so often plugged gaps and was shunted all over the place, playing on the wings, as a defensive midfielder or even off the main striker occasionally. Arguably he could be deployed higher up the pitch if Diarra wasn’t given so much creative freedom in midfield but otherwise I think Rudoni is in his best position and has been for a run of games now. This has shown in his steadily improving performances as he is asserting himself more and more on games and is becoming a key part of our attacking play.
Ward! Huh! What is he good for?
After being so positive about most of our team, it’s worth taking a moment to dwell on an area of the pitch I don’t think things are working so well: the striker position. I’d like to start by saying I’m not one of those people that thinks Danny Ward is rubbish in general but, in this particular game, he struggled to do much of anything that I can remember.
Ward can be tricky to fully appreciate, as a lot of his best work is subtle. Like a run into a channel to make space for Koroma to step in for his trademark right-foot curler, or battling away with two awkward central defenders, so he can win a header to flick on to a colleague. This isn’t highlight reel stuff when it’s coming off but lately, we’ve not been getting the “he doesn’t score but he does a lot off the ball” striker anyway. He’s just been off the boil generally.
According to WhoScored.com Ward went up for 15 offensive aerial duels (I don’t know why they can’t just say headers) and won just three of them. While you’d expect the defender to have a slight advantage, this is still a poor return. Despite only replacing Ward on the 87th minute, Kian Harratt won the same number of headers in his brief cameo as his more experienced colleague (I first saw this observation on Twitter but couldn’t track it down to give credit to the original Tweeter – apologies to whoever pointed this out first).
Ward played the end of last season through a fairly bad injury but because Warnock loves him so much, he patched him up and, in fairness, he delivered for the team. What’s happening now? Is he carrying a knock again and playing through injury and therefore not able to play at 100%? Is he just a bit rusty and getting going for the season? While Ward hasn’t ever been consistently prolific in his career, I think the three performances he’s put in so far this season have been lacklustre by the standard he’s set for himself at Town.
I worry that the issue is (lack of genuine competition for his place could have led to some complacency sneaking in. While many fans are clamouring for Hudlin and Harratt to be brought in to replace him, it’s worth remembering that Warnock sees all three strikers in training and will know how they stack up against each other. It’s possible that Ward is being selected because the other two just aren’t ready to start Championship games yet. While we all want these two young strikers to do well, bear in mind that Hudlin couldn’t get a regular starting role for Wimbledon or Harratt at Bradford last season. Both look promising but need to be carefully managed, starting either may be the equivalent of throwing them to the lions.
So, despite Ward being in poor form, I expect he’ll start again against Norwich at the weekend. It might not be such a bad thing either. It’s possible he might play himself back into form. Ork(kk(ki(( perhaps, and please don’t laugh at me, we might sign a striker this week who takes his place in the starting lineup.
Delano Bergzorg could be the answer to a different question
You’ll notice in the above section I didn’t float the idea of Begzorg as the potential replacement for Ward. As he came on to replace Koroma and judging from how he played, I think he’s more likely to be either a wide attacking player or a secondary striker rather than challenging to take on the main, lone striker role. If Bergzorg is going to play up front on his own then the rest of the team will have to change the way they play to compensate for the fact the striker is trying to run in behind rather than drop off to hold the ball up.
I was pretty impressed from the little bits we saw of Bergzorg on Saturday. His ball carrying looked very confident and almost casual, the way the ball seemed to stick to his feet as he ran at defenders looked very promising. He also seemed willing to work hard off the wall, tracking back well and taking a necessary booking to stop a Boro counter.
So I don’t think Delano has been brought in to solve our striker issue but instead, he’s been brought in to provide options out on the wings. This might seem like an area that doesn’t need immediate attention but when you consider that most of the plaudits for Koroma this season have been for his work without the ball at his feet and our next best winger is the injury-prone Jones, we were desperately short of wide attacking options. It’s natural for wingers to blow hot and cold too, so it’s good to have another attacking option so we can freshen up things in the final third. He also seems to bring a slightly different way of playing, which is no bad thing.
Timing of subs and fitness
Going back to moaning again, I thought that we got our substitutions wrong in this game. While I don’t agree with making changes for the sake of it when things are going well and the wrong change can unsettle the balance of a team we missed a chance to change the game in our favour. Town were obviously flagging in the second half and yet we only made two substitutions, Diarra for Bergzorg on the 75th minute and Harratt for Ward on the 85th. Too little and too late in my opinion.
It looked to me that there were some very tired legs out on the pitch and it worries me that Warnock doesn’t fancy the options he has on the bench, if he’d rather persevere with players that are clearly running out of steam rather than play the subs who are fresh.
Jones and Hudlin came off the bench in the cup match to set up a late goal in that game, so it might have been worth seeing if a late injection of pace and height might have made a difference.
As fans, it’s easy to think you’d do things differently as the manager and it may be there were reasons for keeping with the team that were holding their own on the pitch. But in the era of five substitutions, it feels like we’re at a disadvantage when the other team are rotating their team around more than we are.
While I’m talking about fitness, I’ve noticed a few comments saying that the Town players don’t look fit. The Premier League release stats on how far each player runs in each match but they don’t in the Championship, but my suspicion is that we’re looking leggy at the end of games because we’re pushing a lot harder in games this season than the last campaign and that means we’re doing a lot more leg work. So we are definitely looking worn out when the final whistle goes but I think that’s more a function of what’s being asked of them rather than any lack of fitness.
Norwich will be a thought test but it should be a fun game too
The games don’t get any easier for Town, as we welcome Norwich and David Wagner to the John Smith’s Stadium this coming weekend. The nice thing is that I’m going to go into this game expecting to enjoy watching Town and it’s possible that we may even see our first win of the season. Though, considering they beat Millwall 3-1 at the weekend, it’s probably not going to be easy.
I have a feeling that opposition teams won’t look forward to playing us this season either. If they watch our games against Leicester and Middlesbrough they will see that we don’t let any team walk all over us and we have a knack for creating chances even if the other team are on top. So I’m looking forward to a good game at the weekend and hopefully it’ll be similar to these last two games, where Town throw everything at the opposition and give it a really good go. As a fan, that’s all I ever really want.
Just to take the meandering ramble a bit off the last match. How ridiculous is the current yellow card situation. I want to see 11 play 11 and if every minor infringement is a yellow card, then there’ll be more 9 or 10 men teams playing than ever before. Giving out yellows ad hoc is like taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut. If a player takes a smidgeon too long for a throw in, that shouldn’t be a yellow card. I would like to see a more graduated approach with maybe a black and white warning card. 2 black and white = 1 yellow. 2 yellows = 1 red. For anything more serious then a straight yellow or red. Or maybe a sinbin should be tried. It works in other sports. The other thing which I don’t like is adding on minutes at the end for time wasting or other none game time. It’s so subjective and nobody has any idea until he board is shown. I would like to see a master game clock which is stopped if there are stoppages or time wasted deemed not acceptable. Everybody then knows at any point in the game how long is left. This will also take away the occasions when a referee, for no obvious reason, extends the match a few minutes longer than indicated by the displayed board. Sound a hooter or have the ref blow his whistle the next time the ball goes out of play and that’s the end. The only exception to this should be to allow a penalty to be taken if the last stoppage was a penalty offence.
I must have missed the three headers Ward won, would Hudlin have faired better, I think so, we won’t know unless he’s given more minutes. Ward seems to have lost that aggression a striker needs. Delano looks decent, there again if the three upfront are tiring put him on then, not 15 too late. Otherwise I enjoyed the game, but the division is going to be tough this year as Warnock said. So points soon please.
My starting eleven would be a 3,4,3. Nicholls, Edwards, Pearson, Helik, Diarra, Hogg, Rudoni, Nakayama, Thomas, Hudlin, Bergzorg. The bench is so big nowadays all the other likely suspects could be included there.
Nice piece as usual.
NW getting the best out of most players and hopefully we’ll get a win soon to to give the players further encouragement and confidence but I feel Town need a scorer to win more than we lose.