“Give me lucky generals” – Jon Worthington’s Huddersfield Town cruise to 5-1 victory over woeful Crawley Town

Huddersfield Town scored their first home goal of 2025 on Saturday, which was then followed by the second, third, fourth and fifth before the game was over. Though actually, the game was over after 28 minutes when Town scored their fourth goal and the rest of the match was more of an exhibition game. Town beat Crawley 5-1 to kickstart Jon Worthington’s caretaker spell with a goal-difference boosting victory. 

While the visitors were rank in the opening spell of the game, it wasn’t just their capitulation that led to this victory. Huddersfield Town also looked refreshed and energised after months of leggy and uninspiring performances under Michael Duff. 

Here are my notes on this game…

Wow, Crawley were bad!

I typically watch games with blue and white tinted spectacles on, so the opposition only stand out when they’re very good or very bad. Crawley really stood out. The errors they made to concede the first four were the sorts you don’t see regularly at professional level. The clearing header straight into the danger zone for Marshall’s goal was something that would make an Under-10s manager seethe. 

Crawley opened this game like their team had met for the first time in the car park before the game. Some of them looked like it was their first game of football and they weren’t completely confident on the rules, never mind how to play the game well. I feel for the handful of Crawley fans who made the journey up to watch this game, as their players showed nowhere near the commitment on the pitch that the fans did in traipsing up the motorway to watch this bunch of no-hopers.

It’s worth countering that our Town helped to expose Crawley Town’s frailties. Our high press exposed the lack of technical ability in their team and led to them repeatedly giving us the ball when under pressure. They were like a cash machine handing out free money, and all we had to do was chase their back line a bit to collect another generous gift. 

I expected League One to be a poor standard of football because of all the teams of bruisers that would play hoofball. However,it has stood out how many of the league’s weakest teams insist on trying to play out from the back and play beautiful football with very limited players. It’s like trying to teach my cat to do a card trick, it doesn’t work.

Huddersfield Town much improved

As bad as Crawley were, Town were equally as good. It needs to be remembered that we’ve played plenty of bad teams this season and struggled. Compare this game to the draw with Burton, currently one place above Crawley, we had 30 shots in our 1-1 draw back in late December but couldn’t find a winner. In this weekend’s game, we had five fewer shots but scored four more goals from those chances. 

Every player on the pitch deserves credit for this win but there were a few noteworthy players that deserve special mention:

Ruben Roosken – Played in a more advanced role for most of the game, as the left side of a front three and really looked at ease in this new position. He had a hand in the build-up in the earlier goals before putting the finishing touch on his best performance for Town so far with an excellently taken strike. Mark Cartwright and the recruitment team look to have genuinely done a good job in bringing him in. I wasn’t sure how he’d transfer to English football but he looks good enough to be an excellent player at this level and maybe the next one up too. (I’m trolling with the Mark Cartwright reference, most of his other signings have been naff, but this one actually seems like a good bit of business.)

Joe Taylor – We’ve not yet seen the best of him yet, he’s not fully fit and isn’t fully firing. Regardless, he looks like an absolute menace to play against. He’s constantly hustling and bustling but in a more dangerous way than the likes of Dion Charles and Danny Ward do it. The own goal is a good example of how he’s constantly making defenders uncomfortable and putting them where they don’t want to be. Hopefully, he’ll stay fit for the run in and we’ll get some return on Kevin Nagle’s significant investment.

Callum Marshall – It’s impossible not to mention all of the front three, as they all played their part in Town’s highest number of goals scored in a game in  years. Marshall took his goal excellently, snaffling up the gift of an opportunity and scoring his tenth goal of the season. His stooped posture and heavy breathing mean he looks like he’s just run a marathon before the match has even started but he has a great engine on him. Regardless of appearances, he’s relentless whenever he’s on the pitch and alongside Taylor, he didn’t let their defence settle for a second. 

Joe Hodge – Another player that put in their best performance in blue and white. As the base of the midfield three, he anchored things well, broke up play and quickly got the ball moving forward. His physical stature is a limitation for him to be classed as a truly commanding presence but he did boss things for spells and helped get Town on the front foot.

Matty Pearson – It’s usually Danny Ward that miraculously recovers from injury when a manager gets sacked but this most predictable of miracles occurred to Pearson this time. Perhaps he’s got superhuman healing powers. Whatever the reason, he took advantage of a weak and disorganised Crawley defence for his goal and added some experience and steel to our back line. 

A short grumble about the late goal

Five-nil would have been a much better final score but some late sloppiness cost Town the clean sheet. It was a lovely mazey run from their goal-scorer but multiple Huddersfield Town players failed to either make a tackle or commit a foul to stop the run. 

It might actually be useful in terms of dampening down expectations, as this goal showed that even under new management, the same frailties exist in this squad. There was a brief moment of switching off, some poor organsation, Spencer backing off and a shocking wafted-leg challenge from Ruffels that got nowhere near the player or ball. The sort of thing we’ve done far too much of this season. So there’s still plenty of work to do with this squad.

Duff pulling his hair out

Do you think ex-managers watch their teams play after they’ve been sacked? I hope for MIchael Duff’s sake that he wasn’t sat in his dressing gown with a can of warm Stella, watching a dodgy stream of this game. If he was, he’ll have seen the same players that have been shoddy for him suddenly look like a committed and decent team. Players that are paid as handsomely as ours shouldn’t need a manager to fire them up for games but it seems that the biggest difference between a Michael Duff and a Jonathan Worthington performance is the same players trying harder (and playing better). 

I’ve played around with the idea of how this game would have gone if Duff was still in charge. I don’t think we’d have scored five, as Duff’s tactics are more risk-averse than Worthington’s. But at the same time, Crawley really were pretty bad and we would most likely have beaten them. My only doubt is that Bristol Rovers looked terrible in the opening exchanges the other week but they scored against the run of play and then grew in confidence. So it’s impossible to know if a Duff team would have taken advantage of a poor team or if we’d have sat back enough to let them play their way into form. Most likely we’d have won but probably not by so much.

I actually think the decision to sack Duff might have been prompted by not wanting to let him have this game. As a win was always likely, it would have been tricky to get rid of him after that. And there’s now an international break where several players are due back from injury which should mean we’re in better shape for the run in. We’ll never know, but one more game could have been enough for him to turn it around.

My belief is that the decision for Duff to be “relieved of his duties” was a harsh one and he was only slightly underperforming and there were plenty of mitigating factors in his struggles. Having said that, I don’t feel all that sad that he’s gone as we never really played well for a full 90 minutes of a game under Duff. The focus was too much on controlling games and not enough on really attacking the opposition. After some promising signs at the start of his tenure, I’ll mostly remember him for being steady but a bit underwhelming. 

Worthington looks like a smart appointment 

I’m reluctant to call Worthington a caretaker manager because he’s guaranteed ten games, which is one more than Danny Schofield managed in his time in charge. It’s also only three fewer than Andre Breitenreiter. Fotheringham, Warnock and Moore all managed less than thirty games each too. So under the current regime, every Town manager is a temporary manager to some extent. Employing them for ten-game spells just seems more grounded in reality than giving out three-year contracts to managers that almost never get past the first year. 

Lately Town have seemed drab and disjointed in their performances but the switch in managers has reinvigorated the squad. I get the feeling that Worthy wants to manage a team that has the same characteristics he had as a player. Maximum energy, maximum aggression and a bit of a footballing ability too. The players seemed to have responded to this idea.

It seems like an open secret that this end-of-season spell is the audition for whether Worthington gets the job full-time. He’s as good as confirmed he’s interested in the job and I think it would be impossible not to give it to him if we go up. This match has seen him clear the first hurdle, now he’s got between nine and twelve more to go before the final verdict will be out.

I think Worthington’s stance in his last caretaker spell was maybe more sensible, wanting the reliability of his academy role over the always-precarious job of managing the first team. It seems that he’s got a taste for the big job now though and wants to make it his own. If he can keep on winning then he might just do that. 

Will Worthington be a better manager than Duff? Maybe not but I think he might be luckier. “Give me lucky generals” is a quote often attributed to Napoleon but it applies here too. Duff seemed to have a dark cloud hanging over him in his last few months in charge. Nothing was going his way. But in one game, Worthington has got an hour out of Joe Taylor, has more players coming back from injury than being lost and has seen us score five goals at home when our previous six resulted in zero goals. 

Now we wait for Charlton 

After a period where upcoming Town games couldn’t generate much enthusiasm in me, I’m now properly looking forward to our next game. Sadly we’ll have to wait until a week on Saturday thanks to the international break. The away game against Charlton is likely to present a sterner test than Crawley at home but I’m hopeful that there’s a new buzz about Town at the moment and that could see us through. 

It’s probably a good thing that we’ve got a bit of a break now though. Firstly we can bask in the afterglow of this 5-1 victory a bit longer but it will also allow some injured players to return (Miller, Balker and Kasumu were the names I think I heard on one of the Town podcasts) as well as resting the players that have played a lot in recent weeks. 

Jon Worthington will most likely be grateful for the time on the training pitch too (something Duff had very little of lately) so he can get his ideas across. Worthy has said that he’s watched Town from the stands this season, as well as being involved in the behind-the-scenes setup, so will know exactly what we can and can’t do. Hopefully he’ll keep up the philosophy of front-foot and high-energy football. It’s worked well for him so far.

A quick apology 

Apologies for my recent lack of posting. Life gets in the way sometimes and I’ve struggled to find time to blog about Town. The insipid recent performances from Town weren’t exactly inspiring me to write about anyway but I promise I wasn’t waiting for a 5-1 Town win before taking to my keyboard! I’m hoping to keep up a more regular schedule between now and the end of the season. As a minimum, I’ll aim to do a writeup after every game. Where I can I’ll write previews too and the odd off-the-cuff article. I may even get around to writing the article I’ve been threatening for years about Mick Wadsworth’s post-Town exploits. Don’t hold your breath for that last one though!