Huddersfield Town take on Barnsley on Saturday afternoon, in another Yorkshire derby for the Terriers. More interestingly, it’s a contest between two teams that have had good starts to the season and are currently at the top end of the table. Barnsley lost at Wimbledon last weekend but were undefeated until that point and are only two points behind Huddersfield Town.
Both teams have managers that are new to the job, want to play an attacking type of football, want their team to press the opposition, and from what I can see, Barnsley’s appointment of Conor Hourihane has helped to repair the relationship between club and fans, which had become strained in recent disappointing seasons, just like we’ve experienced at Town. So it should be an interesting encounter between two teams that play a similar way and have similar aspirations for this season.
Here are my talking points ahead of this game…
Will it feel like a Town home game?
Huddersfield Town are likely to take around 5,000 fans to Oakwell for this game. Given that away fans, on average, make a lot more noise than home fans, it’s quite possible that we’ll drown out Barnsley’s fans and reduce their home advantage significantly.
While having the noisiest fans isn’t the only reason for home advantage to exist, it’s certainly a factor. So if the travelling Town faithful make a real racket, it can only be a positive for our players on the pitch.
I’ve always found away trips to Oakwell to be good days out, regardless of the football. The journey is short, the stadium has an old school feel without being too outdated and it’s always nice to be part of a big away crowd.
It’s interesting that Barnsley allow such large away allocations, as Town could offer similar numbers in the South Stand if the Cowshed was relocated somewhere else. But for quite a long time now, we’ve restricted the number of away fans to 2,336 seats despite our stadium nearly never selling out. You can see the dilemma for suits that have to make this decision, should you give a large allocation and bring in all that extra ticket money when the teams with big away followings come along or should you restrict the numbers so there’s not enough fans to dominate the atmosphere? I’m glad that Town have left some money on the table, so we don’t get drowned out by away fans. But I’m equally pleased that Barnsley are not doing this, and plenty of Town fans have been able to go to this game.
Is there such a thing as a friendly rivalry?
I spoke before the Doncaster game about how they didn’t really feel like rivals. For reasons I struggle to articulate, Barnsley feels like a rivalry but a relatively good natured and friendly one. Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield Wednesday and Peterborough fans are often quite unpleasant and I really want to beat those teams when we play them. With Barnsley, I still want to beat them but it doesn’t have that bit of edge those other rivalries have.
The best example of the friendly nature of this rivalry came in the final game of the 12/13 season (I’m genuinely shocked that game was over 12 years ago), when both teams were at risk of relegation but Peterborough losing to Crystal Palace meant a point each was enough to keep both sides up. News of this situation filtered onto the pitch with the score’s even at 2-2, so both sides effectively gave up competing and let the clock run down while their keeper just dribbled in his box with Town hanging back and letting him keep the ball at his feet.
Because of the weird nature of memories, I thought this period of running the clock down was around five minutes or more but I watched a replay and it was barely a minute. Regardless, if we were playing Leeds that day, I’m certain we’d have been trying to get a winner to send them down even if it increased our risk of defeat.
Another thing I remember from that day was how the Town fans that invaded the pitch went over and applauded the Barnsley fans and we all celebrated survival together (and Peterborough’s relegation). While I doubt things will be quite as chummy in this upcoming game, that experience has made me feel quite fondly towards Barnsley ever since.
Have Barnsley fans got over Kane leaving them?
One particular highlight of our games with Barnsley last season was how bitter their fans were about Herbie Kane leaving them. He was slated by them from the stands, booed every time he touched the ball. Rather than shrink into himself, Kane seemed to thrive on the stick he received and played better than ever.
I looked into why some of their fans seemed to hate him despite him being a good player for them. The general feeling was that he deliberately ran his contract down to engineer a move for himself, which happens often enough but I can understand how that might rankle. There was also an ill-advised interview that Kane did after a game where his answers were almost monosyllabic, which fans took to mean that he was desperate to leave Barnsley. There were also rumours that he thought he was too big for them and wanted to play at a higher level, which is also pretty common but him leaving for Huddersfield Town, when we were also a League One team, may have annoyed them more.
So this will be an interesting little sideshow when Herbie Kane first gets the ball, to see if Barnsley fans have forgiven and forgotten or if they’re still holding a grudge. When romantic relationships end in acrimony it can cast a shadow over the happier times before things went sour. This seems to have happened here with Barnsley, but I’d suggest to Barnsley fans that it’s better to have had Herbie Kane and lost him than to have never had Herbie Kane at all.
Though in the last game between Town and Barnsley at Oakwell, it was a different midfielder playing against his former team that made headlines. Despite losing 2-1, Jon Russell stunned Town fans with an, admittedly quite slow, run the length of the pitch, where he beat several players on the edge of the box and smashed the ball into the bottom corner. Hopefully we’ll keep tabs on him better if he plays in this game, as it was pretty humiliating for such a slow player to slice us open like that.
Are Barnsley another team in a false position?
Barnsley have beaten Plymouth, Burton and Peterborough in the league so far, as well as picking up a point against Bolton and losing to Wimbledon. While the league table hasn’t settled down, all of their wins have come against teams 16th place or lower in the embryonic league table. It could be tempting fate, but I think Barnsley’s good start may be down to them having relatively easy games so far.
They’ve also beaten Fleetwood and Rotherham in the League Cup, so have only lost one out of their seven games. And their draw against Bolton was a decent point against one of the league’s strongest squads. However, I’m not convinced Barnsley are as good as the league table suggests, just like we found against Stevenage last weekend when they were top of the table but not brilliant when we played them.
It seems like Conor Hourihane has started well and has set up his Barnsley team well in these first few games. Though I’m expecting this game to be a battle of two teams that want to play football in a similar way. So in theory, it should come down to which side has the better players and can stick to their gameplan the best. In which case, Town’s should hopefully come out on top and if our first XI aren’t good enough to get Town in front, there are likely to be high-quality replacements available on the bench.