Avoidable goals, moments of quality, sluggish selection & vulnerabilities exposed – Notes on Huddersfield Town’s 4-2 loss to Aris Limassol

Huddersfield Town fell to their first defeat of their preseason yesterday when they lost 4-2 to Aris Limassol in Austria. While obviously we all know that the results of friendlies aren’t all that important, someone needs to tell that to Michael Duff’s face, as he was clearly unhappy in his post-match interview with the club’s media team. He was frustrated with the goals the team conceded and the performances levels though offered some insight into why Town didn’t reach the levels we might have expected.

Aris Limassol were a decent opponent. Being a top Cypriot team doesn’t sound like much to brag about but they actually were a very decent team and looking back on their recent history shows they played Rangers in Europe last season and beat them at home and drew away with them. So going toe-to-toe with them and losing shouldn’t be too much to worry about, as few League One teams will slice us up and expose us in the same way yesterday’s opposition did.

Excuses, excuses

It’s always best to get your excuses in early, so Town had some factors working against them in this game. They had a double training session on Sunday and a session in the morning before the game. So if the result of this match was a priority, we wouldn’t have trained three times in the day and a half before kickoff. I don’t see this as bad planning though, the players need to be loaded up and tested on how they manage under stress, this game will have been harder because they started it with tired legs but it will have meant they got more from the game too.

The pitch was also a tricky surface to play on, with the ball not running very well and the pitch cutting up in places. Trying to play a fluent passing game on this type of pitch is not easy and we saw plenty of evidence of Town struggling to get into a rhythm in this game. While we’ll be able to have some influence on our own playing surface at the John Smith’s Stadium, we’ll no doubt play on some poor pitches on our travels this season, so we’ve got to get used to making the best of whatever grass we have to play on, so again, it’s not a bad thing to have less than perfect conditions.

Town’s commentary team for this game also pointed out that Aris Limassol have been back in training a couple of weeks longer than Town (which seems crazy when Town were back early, but I guess they’ll have done their research on this before the game) so were that little bit sharper. If this is the case then Town are currently at the stage of preseason where they’re still building fitness and working on tactics where Aris Limassol will most likely be the finished product for the season ahead. 

Vulnerable on the break against pace

One of the most striking things about this game was how obvious our biggest weakness was and how relentlessly Aris Limassol exploited it. Particularly in the first half. We would try to build up possession by piling players forward and whenever we lost the ball in their half they would play quick balls forward and would find a huge gap between Miller and Ruffels on the left side. In fact, huge gap doesn’t quite cover the amount of space they exploited, it was more a gaping chasm. A space the size of a wizard’s sleeve that their pacey right winger kept sprinting into and opening Town up. 

Though we were generally vulnerable to counter attacks, with the possibility to pick our runners always being on whenever they won the ball and looked up. This counter-attacking style could be Town’s achilles heel in the season ahead if we don’t tighten up. Though perhaps our opponents were particularly good at launching accurate balls forward under pressure and had pacey, skillful forwards that could make the most of those balls – how many League One teams will be the personnel that can consistently do that? I’m genuinely not sure, typically, if you press high up the field then the person on the ball shouldn’t be able to have the time to get a decent long ball off to launch the counter. And even then, if they manage it, you should fancy your defenders being up to the job of keeping up with the attackers. In this game we struggled but it may have been our opponents quality as much as our own struggles. 

A sluggish midfield and defence

The starting eleven for this game included a midfield trio of Kane, Evans and Hogg paired with a back three of Pearson, Lees and Ruffels. None of these six players are blessed with pace and with them all on the pitch together it did expose a sluggishness through the middle. 

Speed is a quality that is most needed by wingers, strikers and fullbacks but at the same time, if you have too many players all lacking in pace in a similar area of the pitch it then becomes easy to get caught out, as we did in this game. We struggled to cope with runners and too often saw players getting in behind. Thankfully we were saved by the offside flag or decent saves by Maxwell but I’m not sure this combination of players works well together. 

Which is a worry because one of the questions I asked myself before kickoff was…

Was the starting XI the one Duff’s expecting to use most this season?

Up to now, the teams we’ve seen in friendlies have just been a mashup of whatever players will fit the system so the best 22 players can get minutes in positions that approximately fit the positions they play on the pitch. This felt like the first hint towards Duff planning towards the start of the season, maybe. If you take out all of the players that might be sold and picked the most experienced Town XI, it would look something like the team that started this game. 

The worrying thing is, in the section above I’ve said that the starting eleven for this game is far too slow in combination with each other so would need to be jumbled up with a bit of youth and pace to counteract some of the obvious flaws. For example, Brodie Spencer in for one of the more experienced back three would give a bit more recovery pace to cover against runs in behind or David Kasumu in defensive midfield would be able to track back if Herbie Kane’s jog-run style of moving doesn’t manage to keep track of his man. 

If anything, this game may have proven that we either need to keep hold of the likes of Nicholls, Helik, Thomas and Spencer to keep the starting eleven strong or we need to move them on quickly so we can bring in quality replacements so we’re not having to scramble around at the end of the window to bring in players to fill gaps in mad rush.

Avoidable goals 

All four goals were poor goals to concede, even if they were also well taken in the most part too. I’ll run through them individually:

1. The first goal actually resulted from Town’s best attack of the early stages of the game. Herbie Kane produced one of the best passes I’ve seen from a Town player in a long time when he flicked a pass with the outside of his boot to curl it into the run of Josh Koroma. The play broke down and from that turnover, Limassol launched a raking crossfield ball and that undid us. A single ball from their corner flag struck diagonally put their man one-on-one with Tom Lees. Lees didn’t keep tight enough to him. The runner coming through the middle had significant ground to make up on a couple of Town players but won the race easily and because Lees wasn’t close enough to the ball carrier, the ball into the runner was delivered accurately and a decent finish to the far corner opened the scoring. Poor marking, poor tracking of runners. But a decent goal from their perspective. 
2. Josh Ruffels won’t want to watch the replay of this second goal. Under very little  pressure his heavy touch when running out of defence gave the ball straight to a green and white shirt. Then a simple pass put their forward clean through. Lees applied a bit of pressure to send him wide but a neat finish from a tight angle doubled the lead. A very tired and sloppy looking mistake from Ruffels.
3. In the last seconds of the first XI being on the pitch they conceded again, with a ball sprayed out to the wings from midfield. The left winger then dribbles infield with very little pressure on him and plays a simple pass to pick out the right winger’s run, again with no pressure on him, for him to finish. Maxwell saves the shot but it squirms under him and dribbles over the line. Everyone looks absolutely dead on their feet at this stage of their game.
4. Despite there being a different Town team on the pitch for the last half, the final goal conceded showed all the problems Limasool had exposed throughout this game. A midfielder was able to pick out a pass because he didn’t have enough pressure on him, a winger ran through because he’d got in behind his marker, he then showed superior pace to get clear through on goal. Maxwell did pretty well to get off his line and got something on the ball but not enough unfortunately, so their winger was able to finish from a right angle into an open goal. 

Town scored when they produced moments of quality

I’ve been pretty hard on Town when covering the goals we conceded but we also looked pretty decent for the goals we scored. 

The opening goal came from Mickel Miller’s great takedown of Hogg’s uncharacteristically superb cross-field ball. Then he proceeded to dribble and dance around three players before the final one hacked him down in the box. As Town fans, we love to bemoan the lack of penalties we receive, but we’ve not had many players that cause defenders the kind of problems that make them concede penalties either. Perhaps this season could be different. Healy coolly finished the penalty, not particularly near the corner but to the opposite side of the keeper’s dive.

The second goal came from the second-phase of a corner, with Koroma crossing the ball back in and Hogg heading the ball home. The cross was lovely and Hogg did well to lose his marker. It’s a shame we couldn’t put more decent balls into the box like this. Pat Jones had a decent cross late on but I can’t remember a great deal of other quality deliveries and the strikers in both iterations of the team were starved of decent service.

Aside from the goals, Town also hit the inside of the post direct from a Evans free kick. He went close with one against Harrogate last week too, so this seems like a potential threat for us in the season ahead. Herbie Kane also lashed a shot from the edge of the box that fizzed wide but would have been very difficult to save if it had been on target. 

Getting beaten brings positives 

While it’s never nice to watch Town lose, I’d rather watch us be beaten by decent foreign opposition that give us a proper test than roll over non-league teams by huge scorelines while our defenders barely break a sweat. We need to be tested in advance of the season ahead. Playing teams that are better than the majority of the ones in the league we’ll be playing in should mean we’ve got nothing to fear when the season kicks off properly in August. 

Duff’s comments after the game revealed the value of this sort of game, as he talked about how their pressing session in training had gone really well the day before but in this game it had gone wrong for some reason. When you’re doing things at half-pace on the training ground with your mates everything looks great. Against decent opposition, you really see what works and what doesn’t. This game gives them some hard evidence to evaluate and make decisions about how to make tweaks and adjustments. Most likely along the lines of how to cope with counter attacks down the sides. 

Duff warns that this preseason might be too hard

In the last few seconds of Michael Duff’s interview he talks about how the preseason schedule might have been either too hard or too easy but the proof will be in the pudding. Reading between the lines, I think this may be a warning that Town are in for some stern challenges in their next three matches before the season starts. Hertha Berlin, Lecce and Sheffield United should all, in theory, wipe the floor with Town. All three are better teams on paper, so we’ll have to play above ourselves to stand a chance in those games. While results don’t matter in preseason, losing four consecutive preseason friendlies before our opening game of the season might not be ideal for confidence. However, as I’ve said above, if we’re playing against teams better than League One standard and holding our own then we are giving ourselves a good foundation for the season ahead.

After last year’s preseason was criticised as a bit of a jolly, it’s clear that Michael Duff is determined to make this one gruelling in every possible measure. The players are learning a new tactical system, are being pushed to their physical limits and are coming up against tough opponents that will expose every weakness. Good. That’s exactly what we need to be ready for the coming season, even if it means we don’t win every game.