Bad starts, lazy trainers, poor Hull, Fotheringham’s boom or bust and Young Guns Part 2 – Notes on Town’s win over Hull

Huddersfield Town beat Hull on Sunday and now the dust has settled it’s easier to see this result for what it was: a good three points against a poor opponent. While Town started the game poorly and had a few shaky moments throughout the game, they unquestionably deserved the win and showed signs of improvement under Mark Fotheringham after a dismal start to the season prior to his arrival.

I don’t think winning this game means all our problems are over, as many issues that have blighted this season were still evident in this game but there are green shoots of recovery on display now and that gives fans all they ever want… hope. We’ve seen enough false dawns in the past to not get too carried away but there are early signs that things are improving at Town. 

Here are a few of my thoughts about the game.

Another bad start for Town

Town were really bad in the opening stages of this game. Just like they have been in so many games this season. Why, though? I can’t make sense of it really. Hull were almost as bad as Town, so it wasn’t like we were up against an incredible opponent that was playing us off the park, all of our problems were of our own making. 

The biggest issues seemed to be that the players couldn’t get the ball out of our own half or even string three passes together. All our possession broke down with either poor control, basic passes going straight to Hull players or pointless long balls being sent downfield when we weren’t facing any pressure. 

It’s completely baffling that Town seem to struggle so much in the opening stages of games this season. It might just be a strange anomaly that goes away with time but there has been a trend for us to starting most of our games poorly and improving as the game progresses. 

It could be that the players only really get going once they’ve had a rocket from the coaches, which apparently Mark Fotheringham delivered to them at half time in this game. If that’s true then it’s a sad statement of the motivation levels of the players. Highly paid professionals shouldn’t need to be screamed and shouted at to reach peak performance, but if that’s what it takes then maybe that’s what we need to do.

Hull looked ready for League One

I’m a bit surprised that Hull beat Wigan in midweek because they were absolutely awful against us. It was probably the worst performance I’ve seen in the Championship this season among some distinctly average teams. The sloppiness they showed in our final third and lack of intensity off the ball made them generous opponents for Town and perfect for us at a point where we desperately needed a confidence boost.

Town’s start to the game was very poor and Hull still struggled to carve out decent chances because their wave after wave of attacks they enjoyed all fizzled out with terrible build up play or ridiculously hopeful long shots that ballooned high over the bar. 

Their shooting from distance seemed to be a deliberate tactic but I have no idea why they pursued it because they were really very bad at it. Every shot they took was nowhere near our goal and even if it was, we have one of the league’s best keepers, who would fancy himself at keeping out most long-range efforts. It seemed a bizarre strategy when we were so poor and they had the league’s top scorer at the top end of the field that they seemed determined to starve of service. 

So, unless they are able to pluck a very talented manager from somewhere, I fear for Hull’ prospects this season. We’ve played a lot of the league’s less fancied teams this season already and none have been as bad as them. If they play like they did on Sunday for the rest of the season they are near certainties for the drop. Having said that, you could say the same about Town based on any number of our poor showings this season, so there’s plenty of time for both Hull and Town to turn things around.

Dropping lazy trainers is great, calling them out publicly may not be

It was fascinating to hear Mark Fotheringham’s comments after the game about his selection of three youngsters from the B Team on the bench. As has happened in the past, when he was asked a soft-ball question by the in-house media team about giving youth a chance, he pivoted into attacking his senior players instead. He could have heaped praise on Diarra, Ondo and Spencer for their efforts in training for forcing their way into the matchday squad but instead he said anyone that didn’t put in enough effort in training wouldn’t make it into the squad.

This kind of thing is great, it shows the kids from the B Team that they’ve got a chance of progressing if they work hard enough and it makes sure the senior squad players don’t rest on their laurels. I’m all for the actual practice of dropping players that aren’t training hard enough and promoting youth players, even if it slightly weakens the bench for a one-off match. 

But I’m not sure it was wise to be quite so explicit in the media about his thought process. The problem is that the people he’s talking about are quite easily worked out. The only senior players that weren’t either in the squad or injured were Russell, Kesler-Heyden and Mbete so it has to be some or all three of that trio. 

Tearing a strip off them in private seems completely appropriate if they are perceived to be off the required level but I think it can put players’ noses out of joint if you have a go at them in the media. I suppose the easy answer to that problem is for them to train harder and sort out their attitudes but the risk is whether the other players take sympathy with them or not. So far everyone is buying into what Fotheringham is doing but the ecosystem of a dressing room is delicate and players don’t like it when things that they believe should be kept on the training ground reach the public domain.

Mark Fotheringham will either be incredible or awful

I’m going to slightly contradict myself now, as the above paragraph talks about the issue of Mark Fotheringham possibly being a bit too open with the media in his interviews but, on the other hand, I absolutely love how open he is too. It’s really different how much he’s willing to share in terms of his thought process and his ideas with the press and as fans we’re getting a level of access with this head coach that isn’t usually available. Carlos didn’t mention he even had a wife until he’d been at the club a year yet I could almost write Fotheringham’s biography now, including details of his father’s scaffolding business and his mother’s recent holiday.

From watching his interviews and now having seen him on the sidelines in a match too, I can see why Leigh Bromby saw something in him. I am now completely convinced that he won’t be an average, run of the mill manager, Fotheringham will either be a big success or an epic failure in his time at Huddersfield Town and I can’t see him landing anywhere in the middle of those two extremes.

At this stage I’m not sure if he’s the real deal or not but I do like the sound of the things he’s saying and the ideas he’s putting out there. The next stage is for the team to do the talking on the pitch. 

I can see two possible outcomes for Fotheringham. Either he does brilliantly well, the talk is backed up with results on the pitch, players buy into his methods and improve under him and we make good progress and he becomes one of the most talked about up and coming coaches in football as Town climb the table. Or, he’s all mouth and no trousers, he overtrains the players and they get injured, his abrasive personality alienates the players and he loses the dressing room aswell as most of hiis matches, the fans get sick of hearing about his days coaching in Germany and his Mr Angry routine stops looking like a strong disciplinarian and starts to look like a raving madman as we slide towards relegation. 

The margins between the first and the second outcome are razor thin, either is possible and nobody really knows which is likely to come true. The good thing is that we’re not likely to have another Chris Powell on our hands who looks like he can’t be bothered. Whether he succeeds or not, nobody is going to question whether Mark Fotheringham cares and that’s why I’m excited about what’s going to happen next at Town and that’s something at least.

Town have a glut of talented youth coming through

For just about every season of the twenty or so that I’ve been following Town, we’ve always been told that our academy has a load of great youngsters that will be breaking into the first team within a few seasons and beyond the odd one or two exception, we rarely see the production line of players we are promised (Peter Jackson’s Young Guns being the most notable but that was forced by the financial restrictions of the time more than a genuine commitment to youth development).

However, this time we genuinely might be close to having six or seven first-team-quality youngsters that are capable of making an impact on the Championship. Maybe more. It’s never easy to predict which young players will be able to make a step up and which won’t. But this is probably the most promising time I can remember for young players coming through in all the time I’ve been supporting, particularly when you consider the level we are playing at. It’s much easier to develop players of League One or Two than the Championship.

I’d say that Etienne Camara and Ben Jackson have already proved themselves to be capable options at this level now. Brahima Diarra is promised to be the most exciting of all the B Team talent, but we’ve yet to see him given a proper chance to shine (though Harrogate fans loved him when he went there on loan last season). We’ve over a dozen players out on loan too that could come back in and do a job for the first team if we feel short in any particular area and want to recall them. Then there are wildcards like Charles Ondo that come out of nowhere but get a chance if they prove they’re good enough in training.

I get the feeling that the B Team set up is a big financial drain on the club but we may be closing in on a point where it actually starts to repay some of the upfront cost now it has had a few years to bed in. That means selling off players for fees that aren’t quite good enough for our first team but can do a job further down the football pyramid and keeping hold of the ones that are up to it and therefore saving on transfer fees that we would otherwise have to spend. Then every few years we may have a Philip Billing or Lewis O’Brien type of player that is capable of selling for £10m+ to a Premier League club.

Aside from the financial aspect, I just like the fact that we’re developing our own players. Watching a team of expensively assembled mercenaries just isn’t the same as watching players that come up through the ranks. Going back to the “Young Guns” period of following Town when we were in League Two, the football was dire at times but the connection with the players was great because there were so many young lads we’d brought through to fill the gaping holes in the squad. That was one of my favourite periods of watching Town. Maybe the new crop could provide us with The Young Guns Part 2 – just leave the cowboy gear out of it this time.