Terrier Spirit

Nov142024 by Terrier Spirit5 Comments

Notes on Huddersfield Town’s 4-1 cup win over Manchester United U21s

Matches

Huddersfield Town beat Manchester United's Under 21 team 4-1 on Tuesday night in the final group game of the Bristol Street Motors Cup. The victory meant that Town leapfrogged the youth team into second place and secured a place in the knockout stages of the cup that will progress from waste of time to incredibly important if we can win a few more games and secure a day out to Wembley. It's hard to work out how good this result and performance were really. Manchester United's youngsters are a very different team to the ones we're typically playing every week, so giving them a convincing beating with a near-full-strength Town team isn't easy to judge. In the game we saw flashes of quality from the opposition that aren't typically on display in League One but equally, they were...

Nov122024 by Terrier SpiritNo Comments

Predicted Huddersfield Town lineup to take on Manchester United U21s

Matches

Trying to predict the Huddersfield Town lineup up for a Bristol Street Motors game is a fool’s errand, as it's likely that a good number of players will be rested for a competition that is broadly viewed as a waste of time until you get to the final stages. Having said that, I think Michael Duff may be a bit more conservative with his rotation for this game, after losing to Doncaster in this competition in early September and Tamworth in the FA Cup the other week I doubt he wants another cup defeat. So to save himself the risk of further cup embarrassment, we might see a relatively strong Town lineup tonight. While few people particularly care about our prospects in this cup, for those that do, this game is also effectively a knockout game for Town as a defeat or draw will see th...

Nov102024 by Terrier Spirit27 Comments

A mixed bag – Notes on Huddersfield Town’s 2-2 draw with Crawley Town

Matches

If you poured a full cup of boiling hot coffee into your lap one day and then the following day you merely dribbled coffee down your shirt, the second day was not great but an improvement on the mess you made of yourself the previous time. That's the best analogy I can come up with about Town coming up against Crawley and only managing to take away a point after they came from behind twice. An improvement from the horrors of Tommy Tonks last week but hardly a result to get fans back on board after last week's result had fans debating whether it was the worst in our history. Against Crawley it wasn't an awful Town performance but it was also not completely convincing either. Familiar fragilities raised their heads for both the goals we conceded and the periods when we were chasing the ...

Oct232024 by Terrier Spirit6 Comments

Fancy jackets, a dog in a frock, reality TV stars and go-go-gadget legs – Notes on Huddersfield Town’s draw with Wrexham

Matches

Huddersfield Town drew their first game of the season against Wrexham last night, with neither side able to break the deadlock in an entertaining and hard-fought game. While a win would have been better, taking a point from a game where Town spent long periods under pressure shows a notable improvement from their recent slump, where they would crumble at the first sign of difficulty. It's too early to say Huddersfield Town's demons have been banished but this point at least shows that the team is capable of showing a bit of mental toughness when up against it. It was also nice to see Town ride out a tricky spell and then become the better team after a bit of adversity. It's open to debate, but my impression from the game was that Wrexham were the better team in the first half, To...

Oct72024 by Terrier Spirit6 Comments

The Herbie Kane Soap Opera – Notes on Huddersfield Town’s 2-0 win over Barnsley

Matches

What a difference a game can make! After the gloom was starting to gather over Town following four consecutive defeats, the team put in a much-needed display against Barnsley on Saturday, winning 2-0 and deservingly coming out on top. While one game doesn't change everything and the problems we've seen in recent games could still be festering under the surface, this game did feel significant beyond the result and could potentially act as a turning point in the season. It will hopefully mark the end of our poor run and be a transition into a happier spell for Michael Duff and his squad of players. Here are some of my thoughts from the game. Town dominated the first half without getting their reward Like the way heavyweight boxers will probe with their jabs in the early roun...

Oct42024 by Terrier Spirit12 Comments

Birmingham show Town how it’s done – Notes on Huddersfield Town’s 1-0 defeat to Birmingham City

Matches

Eskimos are thought to have 40 to 50 different words for snow, because they experience so many different varieties of the stuff. Therefore, at this stage in Huddersfield Town's history, Town fans should probably have at least a hundred different words to describe what a defeat feels like. We've become so accustomed to the various feelings that losing a football match can evoke that it makes supporting this football team seem more like an act of penance than something people literally choose to do with their free time for actual entertainment and willingly hand their money over to watch. You would need a deep and crude vocabulary to be able to fully express the number of defeats we've sat through over the years. So the type of defeat Huddersfield Town succumbed to in Birmingham on...

Sep302024 by Terrier Spirit15 Comments

Huddersfield Town sabotage themselves again – Notes on 2-1 defeat to Reading

Matches

Can you imagine having a haircut and saying it was mostly fine but the hairdresser got distracted with the clippers and shaved a chunk out of your ear? Or being really pleased with how an actor has performed in a play apart from the bit where they left that stage to take a personal phone call? Or enjoyed a meal out that was excellent but for the scabby plaster floating in the soup? Can you see where this is going? Huddersfield Town at Reading were much improved compared to recent outings but it counted for nothing because they still, at key moments, couldn't shake the habit of sabotaging themselves. So I'm not in the mood for handing out participation trophies for players that put in a decent shift but let themselves down at crucial moments. As we've seen so much in recent games,...

Sep272024 by Terrier Spirit10 Comments

A limp response – Notes on Town’s defeat to Blackpool

Matches

Huddersfield Town lost to Blackpool on Tuesday night in a defeat that saw them continue their poor form from Saturday's terrible performance against Northampton. While it wasn't quite as bad a showing as the 3-1 drubbing, the lows weren't quite so low, the fact we came into the game hoping to see a positive reaction after a defeat and were served up another plate of hot rubbish from Town made this defeat feel worse. I asked in the title of my post-Northampton article if that game was just a blip. Losing the next game with a lifeless effort from the Terriers suggests there are bigger problems than just a one-off bad day. This article will rake over the goals of another disappointing home display for the Terriers and speculate about what might happen next for Town. More bad goal...

Sep242024 by Terrier Spirit18 Comments

Predicted Huddersfield Town XI to take on Blackpool tonight

Matches

Last Saturday was a red letter day for the blog, as I successfully predicted the entire starting XI for Huddersfield Town. Much like a stopped clock is right twice a day, it does occasionally happen that I get the team prediction right but the task was made easier by the fact Town had won the previous game against Bolton by a large margin and the only likely change was forced by injury, with Headely coming in to replace Miller. Today's Town lineup against Blackpool is a much trickier beast to predict though, after near-universal underperformances against Northampton, every position could be up for grabs. But then again, Michael Duff has been fairly faithful to his regular starters so far in his tenure so may stick with his favourites despite the need for change. So here's my pred...

Sep232024 by Terrier Spirit16 Comments

Was it a blip or part of a trend? Notes on Huddersfield Town’s dismal defeat to Northampton

Matches

When a football team stops the opposition from scoring, it's called a clean sheet but there isn't an opposite phrase for when you let goals in. Something like a befouled sheet would be an appropriate wording to use to describe when a team has sabotaged themselves by letting the ball over the line so easily three times in a game. So, against Northampton, Huddersfield Town soiled their sheets in self-destructive fashion. And then, having made the mess, continued to lie in it rather than getting up and sorting out the problem. Putting aside the scatological metaphor, Town's terrible mistakes for the goals were bad enough but I found the limp response to going behind and our inability to stage a comeback until the dying stages, when Northampton started to sit deeper and invited us on t...