The bit after the season ends and before the next season starts is always a slow period for Town related stuff. But now we’re entering into preseason the trickle of Town news is now starting to accelerate. So to celebrate, I thought I’d do an article to summarise my thoughts on the recent Town-related goings on.
There isn’t really a theme to all this stuff, it’s just everything that I’ve nearly, but not quite written a dedicated article about in the last week or two. Now we’re into preseason and the transfer market is hotting up so there should be more to write about in the coming weeks. But for now, here’s my roundup of all the recent Huddersfield Town news.
Alfie May… or may not sign for Town
I had a whole section written about Alfie May’s potential transfer being up in the air but that’s now out of date as last night there was a report that we’ve had a bid of £750,000 accepted and the transfer is progressing. While there is nothing official about this, it does seem quite promising. A lot can go wrong at this stage of a transfer, but it seems like there’s a good chance we’ll be signing Alfie May in the next few days if these reports are to be believed.
I’m trying to work out where the catch is with this transfer, as he’s the league’s top scorer from last season, he’s not currently injured and the fans at his current club are gutted by the rumours he’s leaving. While 30 isn’t exactly the first flush of youth, it’s an age that means he’s still got a good few years of his best football left in him at least, and given he started professional football relatively late, after coming up through non-league, he may be able to play longer that a typical pro too.
I don’t want to get too carried away until we see him signing on the dotted line but this looks like a great piece of business if we can pull it off. After many seasons of our transfer business being done on the cheap and a series of long-shots and speculative efforts, we finally seem to be trying to bring in players that are proven at the level we’re playing at. I suppose it’s a bit easier when we’ve dropped down to League One and buying players with experience at this level isn’t quite as expensive. But even so, it feels like a more mature and less risky approach to transfers and should lead to a better squad by the end of the transfer window.
The players return to training
The players have returned back from their post-season break and are back in training already. It seems a bit odd that they’re already getting ready for next season when the Euros have only just finished their group stage and that’s still part of last season’s schedule. However, if we’re going to be Fit, Strong and Organised (get used to hearing these three words a lot) then we need to put the work in.
You can watch the video of the testing days and the first day on the grass below if you’re interested. There’s not a lot of interesting stuff in there if I’m honest. Michel Helik’s permed fringe is going to take a bit of adjusting to if he doesn’t get a transfer away, but at least his decision making when making tackles is better than his decision making in the barber’s chair. On a more serious note, Josh Koroma and Brodie Spencer were both away on international duty in recent weeks so haven’t really had much of a break but were both present on these videos. I wonder if they’ve turned down the option of an extended break in favour of getting their faces in front of their new boss and making sure they’re fit if any bids come in for them too.
The most interesting section of the testing part of the video was the strange pull bar that seems to test the players’ strength. There’s no details given of exactly how it works or what it’s measuring but there is a clip of new signing, Lasse Sorensen busting a gut when he’s pulling on this weird looking contraption and then we’re shown that he’s at the top of the leaderboard ahead of Jonathan Hogg in second place. So, while he looks fairly skinny, the new boy is clearly strong. I just hope he knows not to gloat about this result to Hoggy’s face or he’ll get crunched when they start playing games in training.
Sorba changes the narrative
Upon his return to training, Sorba Thomas has uploaded a post to his Instagram about “changing the narrative” alongside a picture of him in his Town training gear. You could read this message any number of ways and I suspect it’s deliberately worded this way. Sorba was dropped from the team shortly after Andre Breitenreiter ranted about a number of players in the Town squad not caring about the team, so it’s assumed he’s one of the bad apples he was talking about. But, having said that, Sorba’s efforts on the pitch last season rarely lacked in effort. It was footballing intelligence and poor defensive tracking back that often let him down. His overrall running was generally pretty good but it was running at key moments where he often let himself and the team down.
Anyway, trying to be positive, it seems that he’s turned up for preseason and is determined to put in a shift. Whether this is to get in shape for a new club or to prove himself at Town is unknown just yet but we’ll find out soon enough. I’m open to either possibility because he’s bounced back from being in the bad books in the past and, while he can be a bit of a clown, he is a very skilled player and would be very useful in a League One team pushing for promotion.
As for his attitude, I’ve seen on his Instagram that he’s been putting in some work doing additional private training sessions in the post-season too, which will hopefully stand him in good stead. While there are serious question marks about his attitude, I don’t think his fitness will be in doubt this season. Given his stats are also incredibly good for a player that was at a struggling Championship side (he’s always among the top for assists and key passes) then I think there will be plenty of interest in him this summer even with those question marks about his mentality.
New home kit unveiled
There’s a scene in the film American Psycho where the executives all gather round and marvel at each others’ near-identical business cards and talk about how different they all are. I always feel a bit the same about Huddersfield Town home kits. Everyone has huge reactions to them when they look mostly the same to me. But, then again, this season’s home kit does have some nice distinctive touches, with nods to the area’s textile heritage with the pinstripe through the white stripes and the patterned bit where the blue and white meet. There are also some nods to this being the centenary of the second of Town’s three consecutive Division One title wins too, with the shaded stars on the back and “Twice champions” written inside the collar – which confused some fans.
Less good is the way the front and the back panels don’t seem to line up, making the stripes not match. Which will set off some people’s need for order in all things. Personally, I’m fine with it. Doesn’t bother me at all. It definitely won’t irk me every time I see those mis-aligned stripes at every home game. Not fussed. I’m sure Umbro have better things to do than make things match up. It’s not like it isn’t their entire job to make shirts and they aren’t expecting people to pay over £50 for these things. It’s fine! I’M NOT BOTHERED.
Rudoni’s departure to Coventry
Anyway, away from my completely normal reaction to the alignment of the stripes on the new home shirt, Jack Rudoni became the first player to be cashed in this summer for Huddersfield Town, when he was sold to Coventry City. The fee was undisclosed but rumoured to be in the region of around £5m, which seems pretty generous. But apparently AFC Wimbledon will receive 20% of the difference between this fee and the amount we paid for him and he’s still young enough to improve, so it’s perhaps not a crazy price.
We signed Rudoni after he’d scored something like a dozen goals from midfield for AFC WImbledon in League One, so it’s always been a bit of a disappointment he couldn’t replicate that sort of form for us. He regularly got into good goal-scoring positions but fluffed his lines due to either a lack of composure or his timing being a little bit off. His all-round play had a similar quality of being nearly-but-not-quite-great too. He was often one of our best creative outlets on the pitch and would try to make things happen but would also regularly make very simple errors, like failing to find a player ten years away with a simple pass when under no pressure (a weird problem nearly all of the squad suffered from lately).
I’m sad to see Rudoni go, but more because of what I always thought he could be rather than what he actually achieved at Town. If the rumoured fee is correct then we’ve done well to be paid handsomely for a player that is reaching their prime in terms of age but still needs a bit of development in terms of getting the best out of them. I think going to a club like Coventry is a great career move for Rudoni as they’re a well-run club that play the kind of football that will suit his game and give him the environment where he’s more chance to come on and get to that next level we didn’t get to see from him. While it feels like we got the best of this deal now, it wouldn’t stun me if he does so well there in the next season or two that we end up looking back on this deal as them being the ones that got the bargain. Maybe this is one of those rare deals where everyone did well out of it.
League and cup fixtures confirmed
Another bit of news that we’ve seen this last week has been the steady release of the upcoming fixtures for the league and the various cups. So now there’s only the FA Cup first round that we don’t know about, which won’t come around for months anyway. Our opening fixture will be Peterborough away, which is a nice one to start with because there’s a bit of a spicy rivalry between the two clubs that goes back to various playoff encounters and other bitter encounters on and off the pitch from the past. Having a home game against Stockport on Boxing Day is nice, as it makes it easy to get out for the game after being cooped up on Christmas day.
League One is a bit too new for me to confidently predict where the tricky run is and when we’ll have it easy. It’s likely everything will be hard for us this season for one reason or another anyway, but on paper it looks like a fairly hard start to League One while the last five games of the season seem relatively kind.
In the cups, we’ve drawn Morcombe in the first round of the League Cup and are in a group with Doncaster, Barnsley and Manchester United U21s in the Bristol Street Motors Cup. We have a pretty rotten recent record in the League Cup in recent seasons. I think we beat Sheffield Wednesday on penalties fairly recently but I can’t remember any other wins and a lot of defeats. So while Morcombe shouldn’t strike fear into the hearts of Town fans, I’d still be skeptical about our chances of making progress because we so rarely field anything close to a full team in these competitions.
As for the Bristol Street Motors Cup, I’ve seen a lot of abuse for this contest but I’m actually a bit curious about it. I hope we see it as a chance to give some of our young players a chance and to experiment with the team. It’s not worth risking injury of first choice players in the early stages but if the second string players manage to do alright and make a bit of progress through the rounds then I’m quite keen on a trip to Wembley if we can make it to the final. A trip to the national stadium for a low-stakes cup final would be a good day out and I’d enjoy seeing Town pick up some silverware, even if it was a competition only open to the teams in the third and fourth tiers alongside the under 21 teams of Premier League academies.
First friendly coming up today
Today marks our first friendly of the season, when we come up against Emley at 3pm. The game is all ticket and costs £15 to get it, which I suppose is fair enough as they want to boost their coffers as much as possible but seems a bit steep to me given Town only returned to training properly on Wednesday this week, so are likely to be far from their best.
For those who are curious but not willing to make the financial or time commitment to actually physically attend, the game will be live streamed by the club for free on YouTube. As it’s the first game back, expect many subs or even a completely different team to come out in the second half for Town.
As it’s Michael Duff’s first game as Town manager, there will be some interesting things to look out for in this game. I’ll be curious to see what shape he sets the team up in. Also, which players he uses in which positions as my suspicion is we’ll be mostly playing a 5-3-2 shape which will mean wingers will have to either convert to strikers or wingbacks. Similarly, fullbacks will be converted to wingbacks or central defenders.
I also have a feeling that the generall way Duff wants his Huddersfield Town team to play football should be quite different to the way we’ve been used to watching Town in recent seasons. Probably not the freeflowing football that sometimes get talked about but a style that involves controlling games more and creating more chances.
Kevin’s lovely gesture
One little treat on Town’s Twitter (I still can’t bring myself to call it X – I’m still calling them Marathon bars) yesterday was a video of Kevin Nagle calling a long-time season ticket holder who had written to him last season after she’d missed many games because of a health issue. To recognise her years of dedication to the club, Kevin told her that he was going to pay for her and her other half’s season cards for the upcoming season.
It’s a nice, heart-warming video that’s well worth a watch if you’ve got a few minutes. I’m a pretty cynical person and can usually find a snarky thing to say about most things but I found this a genuinely nice thing to watch and it brightened up my morning when I saw it. It’s nice to have someone in charge of the club that values doing these sorts of things.
The usual well written article.
Regarding transfers, I live in Lincoln, and the local supporters are upset at loosing Lasse Sorensen. They speak very highly of him and say we will not have a fitter player on our books. A very fit wingback who also does much behind the scenes work in the local community. I think he is a natural replacement for Sorba Thomas who I appears to be on his way out.
I hope the Alfie May transfer completes as he may be what we have lacked for the last 5 seasons, and Antony Evans could be a natural successor to Jack Rudoni who I am sorry to see go.
Thanks Terry. All the reports about Sorensen sounds very promising, both as a player and as a character too.
I didn’t include anything about Evans in my article because it was already pretty long but he’s another quality seeming playing we’re apparently bidding on. If we snap up the Player of the Season from most of the other League One clubs then we should be in good shape!
So it appears that “Alfie May or may not now” can be replaced by Alfie May WON’T be signing for Town as he is to sign for Birmingham for £775,000. If we lost out by £25,000 that’s pathetic or did Birmingham offer a better wage as well. We have the richest owner in the EFL and we still lose out.
It would be a double blow to lose out on him to Birmingham, as it would deprive us and strengthen a likely rival. I’m hoping there’s still a twist on the tail if this transfer before it’s all sorted. If the reports are correct it would be a shame to be gazumped by an amount the equivalent cost of a modest family car. Like you say, wages or something else may be a factor. Though there’s talk May’s family are from Yorkshire and he has a personal connection to Duff so we should have a bit of pull with him hopefully. We’ll have to wait and see.
You never know. The “personal connection to Duff” may be that he can’t stick him and doesn’t want to work under him again!
I can’t understand the bad press that Sorba Thomas gets. It seems to me that he really cares about his performance and beats himself up when he fails to deliver perfection. He has been our best attacking player for ages. There are loads of players who can attack but are useless defenders. Sorba doesn’t fall into that category as he has worked hard in all the many positions that he has been asked to play in. Ok he can come across as arrogant but nobody is the same and maybe he does rebel against the dross we have had for managers over the last few years and therefore makes his feelings known in the dressing room. Although when you watch any of the training videos he always comes across as happy and liked by everyone. You have to come back to the only proper manager that we’ve had, Neil Warnock, who knew exactly how to get the best out of him. It will be a sad day if and when he leaves the club.