Opinion – Page 2 – Terrier Spirit – Huddersfield Town FC blog

Sep302022 by Terrier Spirit4 Comments

Who was the last Huddersfield Town boss to win their first game? – The new manager bounce is a myth

News, Opinion

Mark Fotheringham takes charge of his first game as Huddersfield Town head coach tomorrow afternoon and I suspect many Reading fans will fear that we will be beneficiaries of the famous new manager bounce. However, my instinct was that Huddersfield Town never seem to get good results straight away under new managers and we usually have to wait at least a little while before getting their first win. To see if I was right I waded through the record books (not really, I just looked it up online) and found I was right - new managers, or head coaches, have lost their first game in charge going back for a very long time. Here’s a quick rundown of just how far back you have to go in Huddersfield Town history before you’ll find a Huddersfield Town boss who actually won their first game i...

Sep292022 by Terrier Spirit12 Comments

What kind of head coach will Mark Fotheringham be?

Opinion, Tactics

Mark Fotheringham has been appointed Huddersfield Town’s new head coach. He is the fifth of Town’s last six managerial appointments to come with no significant experience of being the head coach of a men’s football team. In fairness, gambling on inexperience has paid off half of the time in the past, with Wagner and Corberan both overperforming with limited resources. But we’ve also seen Siewert and Schofield crash and burn too. So we know how much of a gamble it is to let someone take their first steps into management at Championship level, where the games come thick and fast with no margin for error or time to learn on the job. Because Mark Fotheringham hasn’t worked as a permanent head coach anywhere previously, we don’t have anything to go on in terms of his track record. So ...

Sep152022 by Terrier Spirit8 Comments

Should David Wagner return to Huddersfield Town?

News, Opinion

Danny Schofield has gone. I was going to write a blogpost about it but I don’t think there’s any point as everyone already knows the talking points: he’s a nice guy, he was out of his depth and he probably shouldn’t have been given it in the first place. There’s not much point dragging that out to 1,000 words of waffle. It’s a genuine shame it didn’t work for Schofield but after nine games and only one (fortunate) win it was pretty clear that things were only going one way.So now we must look to the future and consider who will replace Schofield. The bookmakers think they know, as David Wagner is the odds on favourite, though it might not be quite as straightforward as that. For starters, I can’t see how Wagner would agree to working under a Head of Football like Leigh Bromby. A central t...

Sep32022 by Terrier Spirit28 Comments

Thoughts on Huddersfield Town’s transfer ins and outs, defeat to Bristol City and their crucial game against Blackpool

Matches, Opinion, Transfers

I’ve always thought that if you’re scrambling around on transfer deadline day to get your business done then you’ve done something wrong. So maybe we shouldn’t be quite so delighted with the flurry of activity that Town saw at Canalside on Thursday as the deadline approached. Three new players came through the door as even more were ushered out on loan. In this article I’ll work my through the various deals that took place and then summarise a few of my thoughts on the defeat to Bristol City. I think the transfer news is probably more important than the defeat now, as the game has passed now and is probably not one Town fans want to spend a lot of time thinking about and at least the signings offer a little bit of hope! Michal Helik on a permanent deal from Barnsley I think this...

Aug122022 by Terrier Spirit15 Comments

What’s going wrong with Huddersfield Town? 7 potential reasons

Matches, Opinion

There's something wrong at Huddersfield Town this season. We've lost our first three games, which wouldn’t be horrendous on its own but the manner of the defeats and the way the team have been playing during those games alongside events off the pitch all point towards some rising concerns among Town fans. So rather than a preview article for tomorrow’s game against Stoke I’m going to try and dig into the possible reasons why Huddersfield Town are so bad at the moment. To save you from disappointment before you get too far, I don’t have the answers, you won’t finish this article with a neat, 5-point plan about exactly how to fix Huddersfield Town’s problems. Instead, I’m going to go over all the things I can think of that might be contributing to the problems and consider how much...

Jul282022 by Terrier Spirit8 Comments

We’re doomed! 6 reasons to feel pessimistic about Huddersfield chances this season

Opinion

After getting your hope up with my optimistic preview yesterday, it's time to bring you back down to Earth with a thunk with my pessimistic look ahead to Huddersfield Town's 22/23 Championship season. If you're anything like the typical Town fan you'll feel much more at home among the misery and cynicism anyway. Those rare moments of success feel bewildering and almost threatening, much better the familiar and almost comforting gloom that tends to gather over Town Dan's faces when the subject of our club's fates come up. You don't have to be miserable to be a Town fan but it helps! I'm exaggerating but it does sometimes feel like it's better to expect the worst with Huddersfield Town so then at least it's not a surprise I'd things end badly. While we have had our moments...

Jul272022 by Terrier Spirit2 Comments

6 reasons to feel optimistic about Huddersfield Town’s prospects this season

Opinion

We’re just a couple of days away from the new season starting so I thought I’d look ahead to what we have in store. Rather than try to write one balanced season preview article I’ve split my personality in two and written one that is completely miserable and one that is much more positive. This is the happy clappy, pollyanna one, that looks towards the sunny side of the street and tries to squeeze the positives out of our current situation. The negative preview will be out later. As an interesting aside, I’ve done this double preview approach over the last few seasons and the negative article usually gets about twice as many views as the positive one. So the next time you complain about how miserable the media are you should really blame yourself for clicking all that negative bile rat...

Jul262022 by Terrier Spirit5 Comments

Predicted 22/23 Championship table

Opinion

It seems like an act of pointless vanity to try and predict the league table before a ball has been kicked but it’s also a bit of fun and passes the time while we wait for the big kickoff on Friday. So here are my thoughts on what I think will happen in the Championship this season. Feel free to bookmark this post and come back to it in May next year when none of my predictions have come true so you can laugh at me. Then again, by May 2023 the robot uprising may well have taken place and we’ll no doubt look back with teary-eyed nostalgia at the times when we had the opportunity to think about football rather than spend every waking moment working for our robot masters. Anyway, on with the predictions! The top two - Norwich and Middlesbrough Norwich are pretty boring at this...

Jul252022 by Terrier Spirit1 Comment

Are Huddersfield Town unprepared for the start of the new season?

Opinion

Huddersfield Town concluded their preseason campaign at the weekend with a 4-1 victory at Tranmere Rovers with their second team and a 1-1 draw against Bolton with their, in theory, strongest team - though Bolton’s late equaliser came in the dying moments of the game when nearly half half the senior players had been subbed and replaced by the kids on the bench. Preseasons are notoriously difficult to use as indicators for the prospects for the season ahead but it’s literally all we have to go on until Town play Burnley on Friday of this week, so I thought I’d chew over some of my thoughts about the preseason campaign in general. Too short, not ambitious but probably fine Because Huddersfield Town’s 2021/22 ran for around a month longer than everyone else’s due to our playof...

Jul182022 by Terrier SpiritNo Comments

Who are Sports Broker and should Huddersfield Town be in partnership with them?

Opinion

One of the most amusing trends of the summer has been the outrage from fans that has followed every new commercial partnership that the club has announced. While we’ve been desperately awaiting announcements of new signings the club has instead tried to keep us happy with updates of their latest sponsorship that they’ve managed to line up. There is literally no limit to the number of commercial partnerships that the club can arrange from official lubricant partners, taxi companies and, back in our Premier League heyday, Falconry Partners. But today I’m going to look a little deeper into our relationship with our ties with Sports Broker. We’ve been sponsored by Sports Broker for around a year now but this partnership was renewed and extended a few weeks ago, with the Sports Broker logo ...