Tactics – Terrier Spirit – Huddersfield Town FC blog

Jul312025 by Terrier Spirit5 Comments

We’re doomed! A pessimistic preview for Huddersfield Town’s 2025/26 season

Opinion, Tactics

I’ve already published my optimistic preview of the upcoming season, so what follows are all my negative and unpleasant thoughts. Given the current mood around the club, it feels a bit wrong to be applying a cynical perspective to a summer that has been overwhelmingly positive from a Town perspective. Having said that, the spring was diabolical for Town. We finished the season in relegation form and the team had completely imploded. Plenty has changed at Town since the final game of last season, a new manager, 12 players left, 11 players have arrived, a new coaching team has come in and a new philosophy is developing on the field. But it’s hard not to worry that all this might be yet another case of raised expectations that are ultimately dashed when cold, hard reality bites. ...

Jul312025 by Terrier Spirit10 Comments

Sunshine and kittens! A positive preview for Huddersfield Town’s 2025/26 season

Opinion, Tactics

It’s been a long running tradition on this blog to split my season preview articles into two sections, with all the positivity poured into one and the dark, negative feelings contained in the other. To quote John Cooper Clarke, it makes me feel like I’ve got “a dual personality, I hate both of them” (swear filters stop me from sharing the name of the poem this line comes from). This is the happy look ahead to the 2025/26 season, which you may think Town fans will flock towards compared to the miserable version. Sadly, year after year, the stats show that Town fans are drawn to negativity far more than positivity. So if you chose to click on this article then you have my permission to get your felt tips and sticky back plastic out to make yourself a “happy clapper” badge that you c...

May302025 by Terrier Spirit4 Comments

Fragile hope – Thoughts on Lee Grant as Huddersfield Town manager

Opinion, Tactics

Huddersfield Town have announced Lee Grant as their new manager. He's a former goalkeeper who has been the attacking coach at Ipswich during their rise from League One to the Premier League with back-to-back promotions (and then relegation from the Premier League but I don't think that was his fault). He has no management experience but is apparently highly rated and has been waiting for the right job before jumping from coaching to being in charge. His interview on the club's social media was impressive and he handled himself well in his first press conference. He seems intelligent and articulate, which are not attributes you find a lot of in football. Though how his team performs on the pitch matters a lot more than how he handles himself in front of a camera. Here are ...

Jul252023 by Terrier Spirit3 Comments

8 young Huddersfield Town players that could make a big impact this season

Opinion, Tactics

One of my favourite things about Huddersfield Town’s 4-0 win against Stockport last Saturday was how the team that played from sixty minutes onwards was able to continue dominating the game, despite being mostly made up of academy graduates. Huddersfield Town’s transfer policy this summer suggests that they have confidence in this younger generation too, as it seems like we’ve been comfortable moving on experienced professionals who are mostly backup players when we’ve got youth players capable of providing the same role. For example, Duane Holmes most likely left because Brahima Diarra was deemed as good enough cover for attacking midfield just like Will Boyle could leave as Loick Ayina is not just potentially a better option but will also be on a lower wage too. This summer’s...

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 i...

Feb222022 by Terrier Spirit5 Comments

Why do Huddersfield Town struggle against teams like Cardiff and how can they beat them?

Matches, Tactics

Huddersfield Town play Cardiff tomorrow night and will feel confident after beating the league leaders on Saturday and extending their unbeaten run to 15 games. However, Cardiff are in relatively decent form and are the exact type of team that Town have struggled against this season. A physical challenge against an opponent that is happy to play long and sit deep is likely on the cards and Town don’t do particularly well in this kind of game. Or at least they haven’t until recently. This game could represent an opportunity to show how much Town have improved over the course of the season and it will be intriguing to see how the tactical side of the game plays out. Don’t expect an easy win for Town It’s easy to look at the league table and think that Cardiff will ...

Oct262020 by Terrier Spirit4 Comments

Fascinating graphics reveal what happened in Huddersfield Town’s PNE defeat

Matches, Tactics

There's a Twitter user called @DymondFormation who makes amazing graphs for every Football League team after each fixture and publishes them for free on his Twitter feed. They're graphic representations of each player's passes over the course of 90 minutes, with each yellow arrow representing a successful pass and the red ones one that failed. The direction and the length of the arrows show where the pass started and finished. They provide a quick and easy way to analyse the passing game of any particular player. The graphics for Town's 2-1 defeat to Preston last Saturday illustrate some interesting points, which I'm going to dig into below... Kicking long doesn't relieve pressure on the defence Hamer having a 65% pass completion rate isn't a particularly enlightening sta...

Oct192020 by Terrier Spirit11 Comments

Carlos’ lucky chinos, imaginative strategies, yapping dogs, a niggly ref & maximum effort – notes on the Swansea win

Matches, Tactics

Huddersfield Town beat Swansea 2-1 in a hard fought encounter in South Wales yesterday. It wasn't the purest form of Carlosball we’ve seen so far but it was the most impressive win under Corberán in my view. Swansea are a good team that have started the season well but we came with a gameplan which, with a bit of luck, paid off. Here are a few of my unassociated ramblings about the game... Getting the tactics right We didn’t start this game particularly well and seemed to invite a lot of pressure onto ourselves which led to several good chances for Swansea in the opening exchanges. Thankfully Jamal Lowe spurned the best of these and injured himself in the process, which diminished his influence for the rest of the game. Town didn’t sparkle in the first half but there was a steady impro...

Oct12020 by Terrier Spirit10 Comments

What is Carlosball?

Tactics

This quick answer is that Carlosball is the brand of football that Carlos Corberán is seeking to implement at Huddersfield Town. It's very similar to Bielsaball at Leeds but with a few embellishments to fit with Corberán's style. We're still in the very early stages of Carlos Corberán's Huddersfield Town reign but there are already clear signs of how he wants football to be played by his team. It’s possible that more will become clear about how he wants to play as we get further into the season, but here is what I’ve observed about the new approach from his first few games in charge. Man marking The concept of man marking isn't exactly new but the lengths this is taken to by this new-look Town is genuinely surprising. Players pop up all over the pitch to track their man, which looks wei...

Sep142020 by Terrier Spirit4 Comments

6 revealing stats from Huddersfield Town’s defeat to Norwich

Opinion, Tactics

There is a wealth of data that comes out of every football game played these days. Trying to make sense of all the stats can be tricky, so I've cherry picked six statistics from Town's defeat to Norwich to try and make sense of the game and the problems Town currently face. Only 1 out of 12 crosses found a Town player Whipping balls into the box from wide positions seems to a major part of our new attacking strategy. Despite Town having relatively few chances to attack in this game we still managed to get twelve crosses off. The problem is that only one of them found a man. There were always plenty of Town players getting forward when we attacked but we consistently failed to find them in good positions. This suggests the quality of the balls in weren't good enough or the players in the...