Avoidable goals, missed opportunities, concerns: old & new, and a few positives if you looked hard enough – Notes on Huddersfield Town’s defeat to Plymouth

It was a disappointing start to the season for Huddersfield Town, with them making the long trip down to Plymouth and coming away with no points after conceding three sloppy goals. There were a mixture of positives and negatives to take away from the game and it’s difficult at this early stage of the season to know how concerned fans should be by this result. 

Because there are no other recent competitive games to give context to the result, the first game of the season always has an outsized importance to fans. So a defeat like this was always going to be hard to swallow but rather than running around like the sky is falling in, I’ll try and take a more measured reaction. I’ll wait at least two more games before I start acting like the sky is falling in.  

All three Plymouth goals were avoidable

I’ve already thrown the individuals under the bus for their blame for each of the goals in my player ratings article, so I’ll not dwell too much on it here. But Nicholls and Helik should have dithered less for the opener. Thomas and REG shouldn’t have backed off so much for the second and Koroma shouldn’t have given the ball away so softly for the third (though it did look a bit offside on the replays – so I’ll not blame Helik too much for getting beaten for pace). 

Warnock told several players after the game that they had let him down. When ITV pushed him to name names, he said that, “Josh and Sorbs cost us two goals today.” This is the kind of naming and shaming that Mark Fotheringham was hated for but nobody bats an eyelid with Neil Warnock because he’s been in the game long enough to have earned the right to call out players when they’ve let down the team. He’s right too – the way Sorba gave up on Plymouth’s winger for the second was poor and Koroma’s lack of care in possession was just as bad in the build up to the third. 

But if you’re going to point the finger at Thomas and Koroma you also have to say that two of our most experienced and well-respected squad members fouled up for the opener, in Helik and Nicholls. It was a bit of a “Mine, yours, leave it!” moment, when they dithered in the box and Helik only half cleared with his header and the ball came straight back at them and ended up in the net.

Cutting out silly goals was one of the things Neil Warnock fixed very early on in his spell in charge last season. The 4-0 defeat to Coventry was the last game where I thought we were as easy to score against as we were in this game. Hopefully it was a blip and we’ll be back to being hard to break down again after this.  

Town’s missed opportunities cost them but at least they created them

In the interview I mentioned above, Warnock mentioned Jack Rudoni’s header and Josh Koroma’s shot in the first half which were opportunities that we should have finished. There were others too, such as Danny Ward’s shot that was saved at close range and a couple of occasions when we intercepted the ball from their keeper but failed to exploit the opportunity – Brahima Diarra wasting the best of these chances.

There are two ways of looking at the chances we missed. Obviously it would have been better to have converted them and to have won the game but it’s reassuring that we generated five or six presentable opportunities to score in a game where we didn’t have it all our own way.

I think one of the advantages of the way we’re set up to play at the moment is that we tend to get opportunities even if we’re not playing amazing football. By making the most of set pieces, long throws, crossing early and pushing players forward when we do get balls into the box, we’re making the most of the opportunities that we can create for ourselves and not relying on playing beautiful football to score goals. 

It will be interesting to see if we can still create chances against better teams when the fixtures get tricky in the coming weeks. I have a feeling we will but we’re going to have to be more ruthless in front of goal, as those opportunities won’t be as frequent as they were on Saturday when we’re playing teams like Leicester.  

This game confirmed preseason concerns and added some new ones

Looking at the game from a gloomy perspective, this match didn’t do much to put to bed fans’ concerns about our squad not being good enough after a summer where we’ve not managed to bring in new players in the areas where we know we need to improve. Our midfield looked non-existent until we rushed Hogg back from injury, pulling him off the bench despite the fact he’d not been able to play in any of the preseason friendlies (barring maybe one of the early ones in Cornwall).

We also saw Ward having another game where he struggled to make much in the way of chances for himself and wasn’t provided with much service either. While there were opportunities for other players, it does make me wonder if we need a different kind of striker to get the best out of this system. I don’t think Hudlin is the answer, but he may be able to offer a different option against Middlesbrough on Tuesday and it will be interesting to see how it works having someone that’s a bit less mobile but a lot more to aim for in that game. But, the worry about not having a good enough striker remains, as Harratt and Hudlin are unproven at this level and it seems they’re Ward’s backups until someone new arrives.

The new concern is that we suddenly look a bit too open at the back, where we built last season’s successful run in on having a very solid base and being able to edge games by getting the odd goal from set pieces or counter attacks with less than 30% possession. That solidity seems a bit wobbly based on this performance but, as I mentioned above, hopefully it was just a one-game blip rather than a trend.

There were positives for the happy clappers to cling to

If the key moments of this game had gone slightly differently, Helik nods the ball out for a throw rather than into danger, Sorba fouls Mumba as soon as he gets past him or the linesman flags for offside and then Town could easily have come away with a point or all three. That’s before you think about the squandered chances at the other end. 

So the balance of play wasn’t actually too bad. Even though Plymouth have just come up from League One, I didn’t expect us to boss this game, as they won that league with a huge number of points and had an incredible home record. So going there and playing badly but still seeing a number of ways things could have gone slightly differently and Town could have got something from the game fills me with a moderate amount of optimism. It’s clutching at straws a bit, because it’s built upon ifs, buts and maybes, but this wasn’t a purely negative performance by any stretch.

I think there were some things to like in elements of the individual performances too. There were glimmers of Sorba’s ability to deliver the ball from wide with pin-point accuracy, even if some didn’t hit the mark. Edwards showed a real willingness to get the ball in the box too. I was also pleased with how we managed to fill the box up with runners when we attacked too, which shows that this team is still wanting to work hard for their manager. Add to that the fact that Hogg managed to get through around 60 minutes of football when you include all the added time without obvious issue when he was supposed to only play 20 and there were glimmers of hope. You just have to dig around a bit to find them.

The fixture list looks rough

Having been upbeat in the last section, it’s time to bring things back down to Earth. Here are our next run of league fixtures:

• Leicester (h)
• Middlesbrough (a)
• Norwich (h)
• West Brom (a)

So we’re going to be the bookies’ underdog in our next four games. It won’t be until we face Rotherham at home on the 16 September that we head into a game as favourites to win. I’m not advocating writing off these next four games but it’s also worth expecting Town to not see much of the ball for long periods. 

The advantage of having some tough games up front is that we should have a slightly easier run after that (not that there are any easy games in the Championship). And we also know that we managed to pick up quite a lot of points at the end of last season from teams that were in the top half of the table. So even if we are underdogs, we should look to pick up points where we can.

The cup could be a big chance for the fringe players to step up

I’m looking forward to the League Cup game against Middlesbrough and while I value the competition more than most managers do, I don’t have much of a problem with the approach of rotating most of the team out and giving the fringe players a chance. As an enthusiastic armchair pundit, I like to get a good look at all the players that are waiting in the wings and hopefully more than a few will take their chance to make a case to be included in the starting eleven for the league games.

I had the exact same feeling before our League Cup outing against Preston North End last season and I think it’s one of the worst Town performances I’ve ever seen. We were diabolical in that match but I don’t expect a repeat of that kind of form against Middlesbrough. In the Stockport friendly the team was completely switched at around the 60-minute mark and the second-choice eleven that played from that point onwards was, if anything, more enjoyable to watch and played with a bit more freedom (admittedly against a makeshift Stockport team that had also made a lot of changes).

So I’m quite excited to see who steps up in the League Cup game. After a fair few underwhelming performances against Plymouth, there is an opportunity to catch Neil and Ronnie’s eyes in this game and make a case for an inclusion for the Leicester game. 

If time allows it, I’ll do a team prediction article where I’ll talk about the players likely to feature in more detail, but I’m particularly interested in seeing more of players like Josh Austerfield, Kyle Hudlin and Pat Jones. Who all have a lot of promise but have not yet played a lot of minutes in Huddersfield Town colours.