In a game where Town fans hoped to see this team bounce back from defeat to Bradford, Huddersfield Town stumbled to a 0-0 draw with bottom-of-the-table Burton Albion on Saturday. Town were a bit unlucky to see a flurry of late chances either cleared off the line or just miss the target but the need to push for a late winner was due to Town making a hash of the first hour of the game.
Draws can generate a variety of feelings but this one definitely falls into the two points dropped category. And while the league table doesn’t look too bad, it’s a bigger concern that we’ve looked poor in recent games.
Here are a few of my thoughts on the game….
Duff-esque
This game felt a lot like watching Michael Duff’s Huddersfield Town of last season. The dour football, the inability to break teams down, the players that aren’t living up to their billing, the frustration of seeing a team playing beneath its potential and a manager pretending that it’s all fine. Now we’ve got the benefit of hindsight, it seems to me like Michael Duff wasn’t the principle reason for our struggles last season, so perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that this season is playing out like last the last one.
The general course of this season is following the same shape as last season too, as a good start has tailed off as autumn arrived and rather than building and growing into a better team, we seem to have been found out by opposition managers. This season has some eerie similarities with last season.
The good news is that this season’s story isn’t finished yet and there’s a chance to wrestle back the narrative. Drawing 0-0 at home to Burton Albion isn’t a narrative-changing kind of result (or performance) but I suppose we at least kept a clean sheet and got something from a game where we played poorly for over an hour.
Grant’s overly optimistic view of this game
I mentioned above that Grant’s glossing over how bad Town were in this game felt similar to Michael Duff’s “It’s hard to win a game of football” mantra that we heard a lot last season. Yes, Burton Albion set themselves up well to expose our weaknesses but I think Lee Grant was a bit too quick to dismiss the period of the game where we couldn’t get the ball out of our own half and he massively talked up the team’s performance in the final stages.
The fact that Town put a lot of pressure on Burton in the final stages owed more to Burton’s tired legs meaning they dropped back rather than Town discovering the secret to getting up the field. Waiting until teams are too tired to press properly isn’t a strategy that’s going to get us promoted but it does seem to be one of the main reasons we’ve picked up points this season, even in games where we’ve been poor.
My concern about Lee Grant’s slightly too optimistic response to this performance is that he can’t respond to problems that he doesn’t believe are there. Grant’s Pollyanna view of Saturday’s game may have been encouraged by the overly positive interview questions but he should know better than to downplay Town’s deficiencies.
Lee Grant comes across as an intelligent and articulate football manager but he does have a tendency to lean towards speaking in an overly corporate and slightly too polished manner that seems a bit too separated from what’s actually happening.
Grant isn’t quite in the territory of using media interviews to call out fans for wanting Champagne football on beer money (see Stan Ternant’s time at Town) but I think he could improve how he comes across in the media by being a bit more honest, human and relatable.
Trigger happy Town fans
I might sound like a hypocrite after being critical of Lee Grant above, but I was really surprised by how many “Grant Out” messages I saw online after this game. I think there are a subsection of fans that actively delight when Town struggle so they can vent their rage online. Presumably, these are the people who think Lee Grant needs to be booted out of his job, despite the club being within touching distance of automatic promotion and there being 14 new players to integrate into the team as well as a new manager.
The Honeymoon period doesn’t last forever but it would be weird to consider sacking a manager so soon into their tenure. After years of sacking managers without addressing the underlying issues, I’m hopeful that we’re now on our way back with a sturdier base to build upon. Chopping and changing managers every two minutes will actively hinder the attempt to rebuild the club.
Lee Grant may or may not be a good manager for Town but I think it’s important that he is given time to establish his ideas and build his team. After investing so heavily in a team of players he seemingly chose, it would be daft to not let him have the time he needs to prove himself.
Any other business
Here’s the bit where I cover the less important bits and pieces from the game…
- Roosken’s towel – Did anyone notice Ruben Roosken went to the bench to get a towel to dry his face before taking a corner? I’d understand if we were playing for time, as the whole game stopped briefly to allow him to clean the rain from his chops but in a game we wanted to keep up the tempo, this seemed like an odd choice.
- Pre-kick off Smile a While still not quite right – I wrote after the Peterborough game about how the announcer shouted over the top of the club’s attempts to get “Smile a While” going just before kick off. In this game the big screen in the corner showed the start of the famous video of the old guy singing Smile A While, which did successfully start the crowd in their rendition but then the backing track playing on the Tannoy was at completely the wrong speed to the Town fans, so it actually hindered the singing in the stadium. It would be lovely if all four stands were singing this in unison at the kickoff of every game at the Accu Stadium but so far the club’s efforts aren’t quite right. Maybe just playing the opening line over the speakers would be better. Then putting the words on the big screen for newer/younger fans to learn them.
- Blowing up for half time – The referee’s decision to blow up for half-time while Ruben Roosken was down and getting treatment seemed like an odd one. Usually the ref would restart play after the treatment has concluded and add the time for treatment on to the existing stoppage time. I had a brief look and it seems that the referee has some discretion about when to stop the play, so I’d guess this was just common sense that it wasn’t worth waiting for a lengthy injury treatment for probably about 30 seconds of play. I’d be curious if anyone with more intimate knowledge of the fine print of the game’s rules can shed light on whether the ref did anything wrong in this situation.
Very interesting as ever, TS. I was glad to be abroad and not able to see or hear the match. I was getting increasingly dispirited as I saw the stats build up on the BBC sports app and after about 20 minutes it showed Burton had had 4 shots with 2 on target, Town had zero. So I had that sinking feeling fairly early on.
The strange thing is that if you watch the 10-minute highlights on YouTube which I assume you’ll have done, Town didn’t look too bad at all, and with the clearances off the line, particularly the one from Radulovic’s header, we almost appeared unlucky. Clearly the poor souls like you had experienced at least 60 minutes of rubbish before Town woke up.
I’m not a ‘Grant out’ person; far from it. But I do think he’s showing his inexperience when the going gets tough. This is where Warnock excelled, told it like it was without throwing individual players under a bus.
Those early stats correctly pointed out that Burton were the better team in that opening spell and had a handful of very good chances. Thankfully Town improved as the game went on but it was a worry how much we struggled initially.
I think we were both poor and unlucky at the same time. A lot of the time, the chance we created would have been enough to get a win but we left it too late to really put them to the sword.
Grant and Warnock feel like different ends of a spectrum when it comes to management style. I think Grant could learn a bit from his natural a communicator Warnock was, which counts for a lot in the lower leagues.
I agree entirely with your comments about the minority of fickle fans who seem to enjoy us losing and playing badly. I was pleased with the appointment of Grant, despite his inexperience. Whilst there is an element of risk with an unproven manager, I would have preferred him, or Brian Barry- Murphy, than a journeyman. You only have to look at Kieran McKenna and Chris Davies. He needs to be given time. Look how many managers / coaches we have had in the last 5 years. We need stability.
I was a bit surprised that we went with a completely new coach but so far I can understand why we went for Grant. I think we’ve churned through far too many managers in recent years and the constant change has held us back. Hopefully Grant will be here for a while. Though if he does really well, we’ll then have the problem of keeping hold of him but we’re a long way from that scenario just yet.
Totally agree with above comments. We have a decent inexperienced manager, who will only learn from his mistakes. To Be honest , recruitment wasn’t that bad . Although we still require quality in certain areas , with pace . Ipswich took 3 years to be promoted from league 1. Consecutive years into the premier. The academy is work in progress, building up networks. Takes a few years to produce quality first team , squad Members .
UTT- ⚽️⚽️⚽️⚽️⚽️⚽️⚽️⚽️
At the time, it felt like a very good summer transfer window. Now we’re a couple of months into the season, I’m less certain but there’s obviously potential. Same with Grant. I’m hopeful we’ll not need three more attempts to go up but I’d rather we stuck with Grant and let him have time than chop and change whenever things get tricky.
on the half-time whistle: to play completely by the rules, the 40 seconds that remained of added-on time should’ve been played. but the rulebook does leave some leeway for the referees to make sensible decisions (formally, in Law 5 it says that the referee “has the discretion to take appropriate action”).
the referee clearly consulted with both team captains while Roosken was getting treatment on the ground. we can’t know what they said, but it’s fair to assume that all the players were more keen on getting out of the rain than to wait for a possibly lengthy treatment and then play 40 seconds of football. all-in-all, the referee’s decision wasn’t strictly by the book, but also not against the rules and definitely the sensible thing to do (i’m a referee and would’ve done the same).
(btw: what would’ve been explicitly against the rules though, would’ve been to add those seconds to the 2nd half).
Ah, that’s really interesting. Thanks for clarifying. A situation where common sense prevailed.