It’s been a few days now since Huddersfield Town lost 3-0 to Wycombe and the passing of time hasn’t made this result more palatable. In fact, if I was to describe this game as a meal in a restaurant, it would be a bucket of hot sick with something unmentionable floating in it as a crouton. It is tempting to say this is the worst performance since a long while back but the sad truth is that it’s only the worst defeat since the last defeat, when we threw away a 1-0 lead by allowing two stoppage time goals. But, for a team with Town’s aspirations, we really shouldn’t be turning in so many horrible performances.
You can only get away with calling a poor performance “a bad day at the office” so many times. If you’re continually having bad days at the office, maybe they’re not isolated incidents and you might just be bad at your job. And right now, most of the people involved with Huddersfield Town look like they’re not very good at their job. That would be fine if money was tight and expectations were modest but this is an expensively assembled (by League One standards) squad. Other team’s managers dream of the spending power Lee Grant has been allowed since arriving and with the kind of control that is almost unheard of for a rookie manager. It should not be going so badly for Town but somehow it is.
In this article I’ll pick over the bones of yet another humbling defeat.
The first 25 minutes
It’s nice to be able to have at least one section of this write-up that is positive, and it’s easy to forget that Town started the game against Wycombe pretty well. Lee Grant had tweaked his system, partly because he was forced to put Lynden Gooch into midfield for the lack of specialists available in that area but also with a smart decision to put May back up front, play Harness behind him and shift Ben Wiles out to the right wing, and flipping Castledine over to the left.
While these changes could be summed up as tinkering with the existing system rather than anything too bold or original, I’d say that it was working initially. We weren’t setting the world on fire but Lee Nicholls was managing to find players in space with his short passing and we were managing to draw out Wycombe so we could play through them and get into decent positions in their half.
It wasn’t a revolution in tactics and we weren’t playing Wycombe off the park but we were comfortably the better team and, particularly through Leo Castledine and Marcus Harness, it felt like a goal would come.
While it’s easy to think that we might have gone on to win this game if May hadn’t been sent off, it’s worth remembering that we have been a team that capitulates at the first hurdle for a variety of reasons. So if May hadn’t been sent off, Leo Castledine’s injury could have been the unexpected event that sent the house of cards tumbling. If it wasn’t that then it could have been someone breaking a nail or it starting to rain. I’m pretty sick of supporting a team that can only play well when they’re in laboratory controlled conditions. Every game throws curveballs at a team and their manager, good ones learn to adapt to events and even turn them to their advantage. We’re miles off that at the moment.
The red card
It’s impossible to talk about this game without going into detail about the red card, as the game completely turned on its head as a result of Alfie May’s dismissal after around 25 minutes. Firstly, I think the referee made the right call, just about. There wasn’t loads of contact and maybe Alfie May slipped on his way in but he was coming in far too strong and didn’t keep his studs down enough to justify downgrading the decision to a yellow. Maybe 30 years ago he could have got away with it but there is quite a long list of things you can’t do now that you could 30 years ago and, broadly speaking, the world is a better place for having moved on.
Simon suggested in the comments (which I’ve unfortunately been too busy to reply to directly yet) of my last article that he suspected Alfie May may have been intentionally trying to get sent off to pile pressure on a manager he doesn’t want to stay in his role. I had flirted with the same idea myself but I don’t seriously think a model professional footballer like him would do this (though Andre Breitenreiter thought half our squad were doing this when he was in charge). I think it’s more likely that he was just fed up at finally being given a run in his chosen position and the game was passing him by because he wasn’t getting service.
Regardless of May’s understandable frustrations, he shouldn’t have been flying around into left midfield to tackle back. Even if he’d executed his tackle perfectly, he was doing someone else’s job for them and was therefore badly out of position if he’d have won back the ball and wanted to take us forward. Though, realistically, there was no chance that such a reckless challenge was going to do anything but get him into trouble.
I’d be really curious to know what was the dominant emotion that was fuelling May’s on-pitch meltdown when he received his red card. Was he actually furious with the referee and didn’t believe he deserved it? Or was he livid with himself for doing such a silly thing? Or, maybe, he was furious about the situation he now finds himself in, being mismanaged into poor form and starved of service. Maybe it was a mixture of all three.
How not to play with ten men
Town have twice this season shown that it’s perfectly possible to lose a game when you’re up against ten men, so the red card is only a partial explanation of why we lost this game. Both ten-man Blackpool and Stockport were vastly superior to Town after May departed.
It’s very hard to get something out of a game with ten men but it is possible when you work harder than your opposition and you make yourself hard to beat. Town did neither of these things. We seemed to be playing just as openly with a player less than we were with a full complement.
I was quite shocked at how poor we were at covering up their man disadvantage. In this scenario, the opposition always have a spare man, even when everyone is doing their marking job correctly. The skill of playing with ten men is to make sure the spare man is either in their defence or over on the other wing, which is achieved by constantly shuffling around in your defensive shape to fill the gaps near the ball. Town just didn’t do this well enough. Over and over, Wycombe were able to have two-on-ones in attacking positions and fairly simple passing moves repeatedly carved us open and created decent chances for them.
Our poor positioning was further exploited by how frequently we lost our battles or just allowed runners to go past players. And while it’s easy to pick holes in the tactics Town use, these issues are really more to do with professional pride and basic competence. You don’t need to spend hours in a classroom to know that you track your runner when they’re going for the ball. It doesn’t need an advanced coaching badge to know that if there’s an unmarked player near the ball, you should move over to fill the gap. But we kept getting these simple things wrong over and over.
Grant’s post-match comments
In my article last week about Lee Grant’s failings, I mentioned that his communication style was a bit too polished and corporate to connect with Huddersfield Town fans, who typically prefer straight talking, plain spoken managers. For once, I thought Lee Grant actually showed a bit of emotion in his post-match interviews, which showed a human and relatable side to him.
In past defeats, Grant has shouldered the blame himself and defended his players for their shortcomings. After this game he seemed to allow some of his frustration with his players to leak out, a little bit. While he didn’t name names specifically, he was critical of his senior players that are letting him down at the moment. I think this is fair comment and justified with May’s rash challenge, Ben Wiles and Ryan Ledson’s consistent underperformance and Marcus Harness’ failure to turn decent build-up play into goals and assists.
It’ll be interesting to see if Lee Grant has now changed to a more honest and relatable style of talking to the media or whether this was just a man at the end of his tether who couldn’t keep his usual mask on. I hope he’s realised he’s better off honestly communicating his feelings about a performance because bland soundbites after a bad defeat don’t suggest he’s really feeling these defeats in the same way fans feel them.
Grant is hanging by a thread
Another punishing defeat when there were already questions about Lee Grant’s competence is obviously going to intensify the clamour to get rid of him but it seems that he’s avoided the chop for now. With Kevin Nagle jetting in for this match, it could have been a trip scheduled with the intention of getting rid of Grant and finding (yet another) manager to pin our hopes on. Given Grant is still in post at the time of writing, it seems like he’s not in immediate danger of a trip to the job centre.
I would still be in favour of giving Grant more time in the job to turn things around. Though I honestly couldn’t build a particularly convincing argument about keeping hold of him based on recent evidence. I’d prefer to see Grant given time more out of blind hope and the knowledge that the grass is often not any greener on the other side.
The squad we have has been mostly built by Grant with the aim of delivering the system he wants to play. We could probably write this season off if we sack him in favour of a manager with a completely different approach. And if we sack Grant and bring in someone that plays a similar system, it would at least show a bit of consistency but how could we replace a manager with a similar one and expect anything but more of the same from the new guy.
The upcoming run of fixtures are vitally important for Lee Grant. The next two games being cup games probably doesn’t help him, as two wins in the cup aren’t likely to settle the doubts about him but defeats could add further nails in the coffin of his managerial career. The real test will be how we do in the league and Plymouth at home a week on Saturday feels like it’s a must-win game, both for Lee Grant’s managerial tenure and Town’s hopes of competing for promotion this season.
Any other business
This is the section for the stuff that doesn’t relate to the match but I want to write about anyway.
Feeding the trolls – Kevin Nagle’s online spat with a fan
Before Kevin Nagle flew over for this game, he was involved in some minor online drama with a Huddersfield Town fan YouTuber. It looks like Nagle sent direct messages to this YouTuber on the platform formerly known as Twitter, berating him for his opinions on Town. While Nagle’s messages all seemed like fair comment to me, the fact he’s taking time to directly contact his critics and squabble with them seems a bit undignified to me. Obviously, Nagle is entitled to give a bit back when he and his team are publicly attacked, if he was a personal friend, I’d strongly recommend he doesn’t waste his time on talking to these people. And while he might have expected a private message to stay private, he probably should have expected his messages to end up being shared more widely when the person he’s speaking to is a prolific Huddersfield Town vlogger.
May’s attack on the hoardings
There was very little to enjoy in this match but I did like seeing Alfie May take his frustration out on the advertising hoardings. While it wasn’t quite on the same level as Temuri Ketsbaia for Newcastle it was a decent, studs up challenge that he executed far better than his attempt on Onyedinma. While you can question his wisdom in how he’s channelled his feelings, you can’t say that Alfie May doesn’t care.
Sacked in the morning chants
The Town fans were at their most vocal in this game when they started singing “You’re getting sacked in the morning” to Lee Grant. This is usually a chant that opposition fans chant at a manager, so for Lee Grant to have his own fans doing this just shows how difficult his current position is. It wasn’t so long ago since the Cowshed were declaring themselves as Lee Grant’s Barmy Army. This Barmy Army have unquestionably lost their faith in their leader and are on the verge of mutiny. Bear in mind that the fans at this game are among the most dedicated Town fans who have sacrificed significant time and money to follow their team away from home. If this bunch are fed up with Grant then it’s not likely the less engaged fans have much faith in him either.
I am as disappointed as many where the team is at the moment. I thought KN was wrong to sack Michael Duff, as I think that our injury situation contributed to our performances last season. I think our injury situation at the moment is also a contributing factor, giving Grant limited options.
When Grant was appointed I thought it was a good appointment, although a risk considering his lack of experience. Better than a journeyman. I was pleased with his signings and optimistic for the season.
Whilst I agree with your comments regarding playing against 10 men and Grant’s tactics, I think he should be given more time to improve results. Six managers/ head coaches in less than two and a half years is embarrassing. We are still only 6 points off the pay off places.
always a good read thank you. Its worth making the point that we are losing to, and being out played by, teams in lowly positions.. burton and wycombe are both struggling…(and others we have lost to too).. something is definitely amiss
Great read as ever, TS. And a very fair summary.
The most notable change is your tone, TS. From being calm and even generous with your defence of manager & players alike, I think the cracks have opened up and i now read hostility. And quite rightly. It’s become an utter shambles. In every area of the pitch, Town seem to emerge second best no matter who the opposition.
Another season lies ahead of, at best, treading water. I do have a lot of sympathy for the owner. He might not be the most knowledgeable chairman about the English game, but he has sunk in a lot of money and it’s seemingly come to nought.
Adapting the wise words of Blackadder.
Many managers have been sacked, but our troops have advanced no further than an asthmatic ant with some heavy shopping. So to sack another manager is exactly what the enemy will expect us to do this time!
It’s the same plan that we used last time, and the seventeen times before that.
E-E-Exactly! And that is what so brilliant about it! We will catch the watchful League 1 totally off guard! Doing precisely what we have done eighteen times before is exactly the last thing they’ll expect us to do this time!
There is however one small problem…..
Sooner or later we need to stick with a manager. If we don’t then why would any manager with any common sense want to manage Town. In fact we may already have got to that point. I’m not saying that Grant is the best man for the job but he is the one in position, there are mitigating circumstances and we shouldn’t throw anyone under the bus after a handful of bad results.
Bet you enjoyed researching the quote a few times to get it spot on! Love it.
For what it’s worth (as someone who drives 2 hours for home games) I’d give Lee Grant the next three games. At our best we’re a good L1 team and he needs to show he can learn, grow and deliver promotion with attacking flair and a bit of mettle.
If we can’t do that by the final whistle vs Plymouth, then KN will have another massive decision to make.
PS: Duffball was worse than Grantball. Bolton at home, Bristol Rovers away were two of the most clueless and gutless Town games I’ve ever been to.
Looks like the women’s team boss is fairly successful 🤔
Maybe Grant could do with some advice.
As I’ve said many times, the high press doesn’t work for town. I thought I’d give the match a miss so watched the R. L. Instead . Good move ?