Huddersfield Town falter in the Potteries – Notes on Town’s draw against Stoke

Town experienced their 12th 1-1 draw of the season against Stoke on Monday. It seems incredibly unlikely that one scoreline would turn up with such regularity in a season (the next most common scoreline is a 4-1 defeat, which has happened four times). Whether drawing so frequently is a good or a bad thing will depend if Town can scrape themselves over the line by the end of the season. Just like yesterday’s game against Stoke will either be a valuable point away from home or two dropped against poor opposition depending on which side of the dotted line we finish. 

After domestic complications forced a hiatus from blogging for the last few months (practical rather than anything more worrying) I’m now back and hopefully will be able to post more often during Town’s attempts to stave off relegation. So, to kick start my return, here are my thoughts on Town’s draw with Stoke.

A missed opportunity but a fair result 

It’s easy to look back on this game with blue and white tinted specs and think Town deserved the win but on balance a draw was probably a fair outcome. We had a goal ruled out for offside (which seemed baffling at the time but replays showed it was right), had some decent chances, and were pushing for the winner for long periods. On the other hand, Stoke started stronger, forced Nicholls into a few decent saves and put us under a great deal of pressure after they equalised. So when you take it all in, a share of the spoils is probably fair.

The thing I find galling about this game is that Stoke weren’t like Coventry last Friday, who were simply a better team than Town. Stoke had just as many problems as we do and there were opportunities to exploit their weaknesses if we could have just got our act together for long enough to keep them under pressure. 

There were pockets of this game where I could see this Town team knows how to play and has the ability to execute a gameplan but those were brief moments of positive play that swung away from us before we could convert them into a goal. 

When it’s a top team there isn’t much you can do. But this Stoke team were low in confidence and had their supporters on their backs. We should have exploited that. 

The blame game: Sorba’s concentration lapse and Burgzorg’s greed

I think football fans can be a bit too quick to find whipping boys to target after an undesirable result and will then go over the top in their criticism. It’s overly simplistic in a football game with hundreds of passages of play to pick out a couple of them as being key to the outcome of a match.

But having said that, there were two particular moments in this game where different actions could have resulted in a win for Town. So I’m going to name names and point the finger.

Firstly, Sorba Thomas’ marking and attempted block for Stoke’s goal was horrendous. His initial positioning was poor, he didn’t recover quickly enough, the half-hearted leg dangle he did was embarrassing and when he lost his man he trotted after him like he was on a leisurely Bank Holiday jog. 

This is far from the first time poor tracking from Thomas has led to shooting opportunities and goals this season and it’s something that needs fixing. Sorba has at other times defended decently as a wingback, so his ability to stick to his defensive duties is erratic rather than consistently bad. I get the impression he doesn’t retain instructions in his head for a long time (Neil Warnock described him as “uncomplicated”), so some reminders about his defensive responsibilities might be worthwhile.

The second key moment that went against Town in my eyes, was Burgzorg’s decision to take an impossible strike at goal when a bit of hold up play would have opened up a simple pass to Healey who was unmarked, for a tap-in to win the match. If Burgzorg was the kind of player that passed the ball to teammates more often and still had the natural ability he obviously has then he probably wouldn’t have been shipped out on loan to us, in fairness. 

The significance of the decision to shoot rather than pass in this situation was clear from Healey’s reaction, who pretty much had a tantrum on the edge of the six-yard box. As far as I could see, Burgzorg didn’t give the customary hand up acknowledgement apology and instead slumped off in his own little world. Top teams can afford to carry egos like this, when they are attached to top players, but a team that is on the brink of relegation needs everyone pulling in the same direction. Burgzorg might have a bit of magic in his boots at times but if he’s going to be so insufferable in those periods while we wait for him to successfully perform his next trick, I’d consider him too expensive a luxury for our current situation and limit his opportunities from now on.

Radulovic’s tears tell a story 

If Burgzorg exuded a sense that he wasn’t really bothered, the opposite was true of Town’s starting frontman, Bojan Radulovic, who took his goal excellently and was overcome with emotion when he saw the net bulge. Strikers live and die on their goals scored tally, so it’s no surprise he was desperate to score for Town but how much the goal meant to him was quite revealing. 

I think it’s quite nice in a way that he was choked up to score his first Huddersfield Town goal, as it’s clear that he really wants to do well and maybe has been putting a lot of pressure on himself. He’s not been the instant success at Town we hoped he would be but this goal could be the start of things for him now he’s seemingly fit and has a starting role in the team. My interpretation of his tears was that the goal represented a release of the pressure he’d felt building since his arrival and now he might start to play with a bit more freedom.

I suspect that adjustment to the Championship has been tough for Radulovic as in the games he’s played he has tended to be targeted for physical treatment. While every striker gets a bit of stick in this league, I think he gets more shoves and pointy elbows than most because it’s been recognised that he tends to struggle when given this kind of attention and most clubs at this level have decent opposition scouting systems. Stoke certainly kicked him all over the place on Monday, but he seemed to stick to his job anyway and eventually got his reward.

On the subject of Radulovic, I think it’s still too early to say if we’ve got a gem or a lemon. I think there’s a logic to getting a striker who is very prolific in an obscure league and seeing if they can replicate it in the Championship but there’s risks that come with that sort of plan. He looks very slow, so I don’t think he’ll be getting in behind the back lines much but I do like his movement around the box and he seems to have that striker’s instinct for making the right runs at the right times. 

The main thing I like about him is that he’s actually a striker, rather than a winger moonlighting out of position. Which means he knows the role and isn’t always drifting out of position. I’m sick of “false nines” or “inverted wingers” playing up front because we don’t have a fit striker. Whether Radulovic is the long-term answer is debatable but I get the feeling that he will be as good as the service he is given, as he probably won’t create many chances for himself. But now he’s opened his account with Town, I hope we see him scoring again regularly.

The basics are still not good enough

One thing I noticed against Stoke, which is really a theme for this whole season and probably going back over many seasons, is how poor Town are at connecting simple passes from one player to the next. For professional footballers, playing at a relatively high level, it’s quite stunning how frequently they try to pass to a colleague five to ten yards away from them and fail to find their man. These basic, unforced errors plague Town’s attempts to build up attacks and surrender momentum in games all the time, and it happened during the Stoke game. 

It feels almost pointless to bring it up, because it’s almost priced into every Town game that we will fritter away possession constantly. Yet, I don’t really understand why it should be that way. I don’t think I’m even talking about tactics or approach, I’m just saying that the players should be better at their jobs. Basic levels of competence seem below where they should be and it’s frustrating. 

I see comments about how this Huddersfield Town team are too good to be where they are and we’ll be fine. I think we’re exactly where we should be based on the season we’ve had so far. We’ve been consistently woeful this season and it’s been painful to watch. I believe that there’s potential for this squad to be better than the performances they’ve put in but in my eyes, that makes it worse that they’ve served up such poor football so often. 

It’s easy to blame the managers for the poor execution on the pitch but I think sometimes the players themselves are to blame for a lack of care and attention. Breitenreiter isn’t telling them to pass straight to the opposition or to needlessly lump the ball out for a throw in.   

It’s not over for Town… yet 

After being pretty glum over the course of this article, I still wouldn’t say Town are doomed. Being in the relegation zone with just six games left in the season means we are staring into the abyss but we’re not yet at the point where it’s staring back into us, by which I mean, we still have a chance to extricate ourselves from this situation. 

It feels like the clocks changing in the spring is the start of my annual ritual of staring at the league table and the fixture list until my eyes bleed in the hope it will reveal some secret that I’ve not previously noticed. My studying so far has yielded the following miraculous insight, which I’m sure hasn’t occurred to anybody else reading this: we really need to beat Millwall on Saturday. 

The bookies, supercomputers and pundits all seem to think we’re in with a chance of staying up and it’s probably something like a coin toss. Our games against Millwall and Birmingham are probably key to deciding whether it’s likely we’ll stay up or likely we’ll go down. If we can win both of those games I think we’re in a commanding position, having picked up points and denied them from teams around us but if we lose either or both of them things look very gloomy. What insight! 

I don’t want relegation but I don’t want more of THIS 

Having made some pretty tedious analysis of Town’s relegation prospects above, I’ve realised that I’m fed up with relegation fight after relegation fight. So, while I really don’t want Town to go down to League One next season, I think it would be almost as bad to stay in the Championship and repeat this season’s formula of circling the drain of this division for yet another season. I’m so bored of ending the season clinging on to our status in the league by the skin of our teeth. It’s exciting the first few times but when it’s every single year it becomes a bit wearisome.

So, if we can somehow find the few wins we need to drag ourselves above the dotted line and stay safe, we need to fix things in the summer and become competitive. In fairness to Kevin Nagle, I get the impression he doesn’t want to own a struggling team either, so I hope he backs up his vision with action in the summer. Up to this point he has been pretty consistent in living up to his word so there is the hope for a brighter future, if we can just find a way to stay up.