Can you have a bad win?, Rudoni & Helik keep improving, QPR self-sabotage, nerdy keeper stats, square pegs-round holes – Notes on Huddersfield Town’s 2-1 victory over QPR

Darren Moore notched his first win of his Huddersfield Town tenure on Saturday by overcoming a spirited but misfiring QPR team. It was mostly thanks to a very good opening spell, some desperate defending and QPR’s own problems that Town came away with a win when their performance was probably a long way short of other games this season where we’ve either lost or drawn. For example, the previous game against Ipswich was a far better performance despite Town only getting a point.

But points are the thing that keep you in the division, not pretty football, so maybe this was the kind of game Town needed to get Darren Moore’s time at Town properly started. Or perhaps this win was a false dawn and there are warning signs we should be taking heed of before things get any worse. We won’t know until we see how this next run of games pans out.

Is there such a thing as a bad win?

If there can be a bad win, then I’d put this game in that category. It wasn’t awful by any stretch of the imagination but QPR were better than Town from the second goal going in until the final whistle and Town struggled to manage out the game despite QPR looking a disorganised mess at times. 

The way Town carved QPR open in the opening stages was lovely to watch but the complete absence of this kind of free-flowing, attacking football once we went two goals ahead was very puzzling. Perhaps QPR sharpened up their defensive work but Town also seemed to decide they wanted to cling on to their lead rather than try and press home their advantage against a struggling team that seemed to be imploding when Rudoni slotted in our second. 

The seventy or so minutes of nervy and cagey football that Town clung on to their lead did at least mean we got our third win of the season but as a spectacle to watch, it was pretty painful at times. I also worry that this approach to the game wasn’t deliberate game management but a psychological weakness in the team, that makes them back off when they’re ahead and allows the other team back in. 

Darren Moore spoke after the game about how the team pushed the pause button after the second goal. If I was him, I would be digging into why this happened and take steps to avoid it happening again. I wonder if some of the senior players on the pitch might have reigned back the younger ones and tried to tighten things up a bit, to avoid leaving too much space to exploit but in the process made us toothless as drab to watch. 

On the plus side, that opening period showed there’s the ability in this team to carve out chances and convert them ruthlessly from open play. These weren’t the sort of goals we scored often under Neil Warnock, so it could hint towards a more exciting and free-flowing approach. Though it would be nice to see if for more than just the first quarter of an hour of a game.

Helik and Rudoni both stood out for Town 

Jack Rudoni won the “Player of the Match” award which makes sense, as he assisted the opening goal and scored the second but Michel Helik could easily have been given it too for his amazing intervention to stop a near-certain goal in the second half. I must have watched his clearance a dozen times now and on each replay he looks incapable of getting to the ball first but somehow he extends a go-go-gadget leg to boot it to safety before it is smashed in the net.

Helik is becoming a bit special for Town beyond these big moments too. He’s capable of saving points with something incredible like that clearance, but his leadership on the pitch and the simple way he goes about completing the basics is also an asset to the team too. I think he’s the best central defender we’ve had since Christopher Schindler, and there’s not much higher praise than that. (I appreciate Levi Colwill has been at Town in the interim but he wasn’t the player he is now when he was at Town.)

Going back to Rudoni, he’s another player that’s growing into his role at Town and the assist and goal in this game will have no doubt done his confidence a world of good. He’s now our joint top scorer (with Helik) on three goals and has exceeded his goal tally from last season, and will surely be hoping to get into double figures before the season ends.

The through ball for Harratt’s opener was the kind of ball that only Rudoni and perhaps Sorba Thomas can pull off in the Town squad, as he perfectly threaded it past the defenders and curled it into his colleague’s run. And his goal, much like his last-gasp winner at West Brom, was mostly due to excellent anticipation and timing his arrival in the box just right. Frank Lampard and Paul Scholes were both experts at popping up in the box just as the ball came in, let’s hope this is a habit that Rudoni is developing.

QPR killed themselves with subs 

Despite Ainsworths post march comments about how he “freshened things up” with his substitutes, I think his team were on course to get something out of the game until he made a raft of changes in the second half and sapped his team’s momentum. Much like in pre-season friendlies, where managers rotate most of the team in the second half, QPR lost all their fluency when they made their subs and the increasing pressure they had been applying to Town’s box dissipated and we found it much easier.

In particular, Jack Colback’s withdrawal was helpful to our cause. I thought he and Chair were causing us problems with their passing and when Colback went off it meant they lost their stablising influence at the root of midfield. 

But, in all honesty, I was surprised by how decent QPR looked given how bad their form is in the league. They played a lot better than a team that hasn’t won in so long and are now in the relegation zone. Having said that, the players’ body language on the pitch, the way they squabbled with each other and the manager’s decisions suggest that things might be falling apart slightly. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that there’s a new vacancy in the Championship in the next week or two. And we all know someone that has a bit of a soft spot for managing QPR, who is sat at home not doing anything at the moment.

Shouldn’t the system suit the players, not the other way around?

Before I start grumbling, I’ll say that I like Darren Moore and I’m pleased he’s here. Despite the fact I loved Neil Warnock and wanted him to stay at Town for as long as he was willing to be at the club, once he was gone I think Darren Moore was the best manager we could realistically have expected to have brought in. So with that said, I’m not all that impressed with the formation that we’re currently lining up with. 

We’ve been using more or less the same 5-3-2 system since Darren Moore arrived, with only slight variations from game to game. And to make this system work he nearly always has to play a handful of players in positions that they’re not naturally suited to. We’ve had Sorba Thomas in a number ten role, despite the fact he’s best suited to whipping crosses into the box from wide areas. We’ve seen Tom Edwards lumbering up and down the flanks as a wingback despite the fact he’s obviously not fit enough to carry out a role that requires a great deal of athleticism and this last weekend we saw Josh Koroma having a go at being a left wingback, despite being a pretty awful defender and is right footed too. 

Personally, I think the system that managers play should be the one that gets the best out of the players he has available. So that requires a bit of flexibility. Playing this 5-3-2 system and bashing square pegs into round holes is leading to situations where players are effectively playing with one arm tied behind their backs because they’re doing jobs they’re not familiar with and in areas of the pitch where they can’t do the things they’re best at. 

I’m trying my best, in this post-Warnock era, to not constantly hark back to him and treat him like some kind of demi-god who never put a foot wrong, because he wasn’t a perfect manager by any stretch. But, in fairness to Warnock, he did nearly always pick the best eleven players he had available and put them out on the pitch in a sensible shape to get the best out of them given the opposition. 

Darren Moore made it clear in his prematch press conference before this game that he’s a big believer in players being flexible and having several positions that they are comfortable in playing in for the team. This seems fine in theory but in practice, it seems a bit daft to try have a right footed winger struggle at wingback when there are two specialists on the bench, in Headley and Nakayama. 

Is playing out from the back making a comeback?

I noticed late in the game, when we were trying to run the clock down, rather than booting the ball down field when Nicholls got the ball, he passed the ball short to his defenders. This is an interesting way to suck up time. Instead of kicking the ball as far away from his goal as possible but surrendering possession, he opted to take the riskier but potentially more rewarding route of keeping the ball so we could pass it around at the back and starve QPR of possession. 

While this wasn’t something we saw load of throughout the game, I have a feeling that Darren Moore’s long-term plan for our team is to get us playing out from the back and keeping hold of possession more. It’s not easy to switch from a counter-attacking style to possession football in the middle of the season with no new players and a limited amount of time on the training pitch, so I think the transition will be gradual but I think we’re starting to see signs. 

I’ve had a nosey at geeky stats website fbref.com and Huddersfield Town are currently sit fourth in the league when you sort the teams by keepers who kick the ball over 40 yards (what a time to be alive, when you can get this sort of data at your fingertips!).  To explain that last sentence more clearly, Lee Nicholls kicks the ball long 64.4% of the time, only three other teams in the league have their keepers kick long more often (Rotherham 89%, Preston 71% and Millwall 69% – none teams with reputations of being upholders of beautiful football).

If I remember, and my hunch is right, I’ll revisit this stat in a few weeks time and I suspect we’ll be moving towards midtable, where teams like Plymouth are only kicking long around 35% of the time. 

I’ve got mixed feelings about what we should do when the ball is with the keeper. Blackburn and Leicester are the league’s zealots, who only kick the ball long around 15% of time and I think that kind of approach is dangerous for a team such as Town, where messing around at the back leads to mistakes and conceding silly goals. However, booting the ball downfield when you don’t have a big, awkward striker to win you flick ons and knock downs means that we’re mostly just surrendering possession and having to scrap to get the ball back constantly. 

So I’m not against the idea of introducing a bit more playing out from the back, but it needs to be as part of a mixed approach rather than a dogmatic system, and we need to make sure we’ve got players comfortable on the ball to move the ball forward and not give away soft goals. 

The club have made it clear that Darren Moore’s job is to get Town playing more attacking football, which is likely to mean more possession and that most likely means needing to pick out players with accurate passes when the keeper has the ball. Maybe not every time, but I have a feeling we might see it more and more. Expect to hear more shouts of “Gerrit forrad!” at the John Smith’s Stadium in the near future.