“Mentality issues” – Notes on Huddersfield Town’s Carabao Cup exit to Preston North End

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, so as a Huddersfield Town fan I had just about put aside the disappointments of last season over the summer and was ready for a fresh start. So it felt like a sucker punch to see Town start their season doing the thing they did so much towards the end of last season: throwing away winning positions in injury time. 

A penalty defeat to Preston North End in the Carabao Cup is not the end of the world but the manner of the defeat has brought all of last season’s frustrations back to the boil. There were positives to draw from the game but mostly from the first half after Preston went down to ten men. The period of the first half when Preston had eleven men and the whole of the second half were poor from a Town perspective and the late equaliser felt inevitable after prolonged pressure on Town’s goal. 

Here are a few of my thoughts on the game. 

Throwing away a lead… again 

The feeling at full time on Saturday had a very familiar feel to it. Deja vu all over again. And like most of the other times we’ve capitulated in the dying stages of games, it’s not bad luck, it’s poor game management. In this particular game we played against ten men fairly well in the first half but for the majority of the second half it looked like Town were the team missing a player, as Preston created chance after chance. The breakthrough came in the dying moments but Preston had been building up to it all through the second half. 

It’s also worth remembering that we still had a chance to stay in the cup if we had won the shootout but the body language from Town before the penalties told me we didn’t have much chance. Momentum had swung towards Preston and the slumped shoulders and arm flapping from the Town players while they were picking penalty takers made it clear many had already considered the game lost.

I think there is something wrong with the collective mentality in this group of players but there were also tactical reasons we couldn’t close out this result. Despite having a man advantage, we just couldn’t keep hold of the ball in the second half and we showed a lack of care in possession that invited trouble. It was a collective failure but Ledson and Kasumu are the ones that are most to blame for losing the midfield battle. Neither is the type to put their foot on the ball and slow it all down to take the sting out of a game. This scenario seemed tailor made for Marcus McGuane to come on and tap the ball around and keep possession for us but he remained on the bench.

There are mentality issues too though. I think we proved last season that we don’t have the guts or the character to get our noses in front in a game and then shut up shop. If we take the lead I rarely feel comfortable that we can see out a single goal lead, so why did we not push harder for a second goal? I’m not sure I could really tell you what our game plan was in the second half but it didn’t seem to involve creating sustained attacks or trying to get further ahead. When you know the team lacks the character to see out a single-goal lead, it seemed strange we weren’t trying harder to get another goal. 

Either Martin Drury set the team up to defend the lead and they failed in that job, in which case it’s Drury’s fault, or the team were meant to push on and attack in that second half and just couldn’t execute the gameplan, in which case the players are more to blame. But if the latter is true, it feels a bit odd that the subs we made were all like-for-like and the shape of the team stayed pretty much the same.

Picking out the positives

Trying to add a bit of balance to things after having a big moan to start, I will say that there were quite a few things that I liked about Town’s performance.

• Radinio Balker had a good game, looking decent at the back, playing a lovely long ball that created the situation for the red card and applied a delicate header to Sorensen’s free kick to score our only goal of the afternoon. He was quite clearly our best player on the day.
• Ashley Fletcher was another of our better performers and he looked very useful at holding up the ball and bullying defenders. The red card incident was an excellent piece of centre forward play, showing a useful burst of pace to get in behind his man and drawing the contact from him as he chased down the long ball. If I was a Preston fan, I’d complain about how minimal the contact was and how a player of Fletcher’s size and strength seemingly collapsed the second he felt an arm on him. But that’s modern football and I’d argue that it was both a red-card worthy foul but Fletcher also made a bit of a meal of it. Fletcher was a welcome change up front, as he made the most of the balls we lumped his way and linked up well with the other Town attackers.
• Fernandes didn’t have an outstanding first competitive game but we saw the huge potential he has with a few of his dribbles. The most effective runs he had were too often going backwards and away from goal but he still showed a knack for retaining the ball and causing defenders issues with his dribbling. I’m excited to see more from him. 
• Jack Whatmough also looked pretty decent from what I saw. He looked commanding in the middle of a back three and played some lovely long balls; one diagonal ball to pick out a Sorensen run from deep was particularly eye-catching.

Poor, then better, then poor again

I thought that Town started this game poorly and looked like they were going to be completely dominated by Preston. In the first ten minutes Preston had something like 85% possession and we were being outclassed. The few times we got the ball we tended to smash it aimlessly away and the ball came straight back at us. The only consolation was that Preston’s pressure didn’t translate into too many clear chances and we held our shape even though we rarely got a touch of the ball. 

Things changed after the red card and we did a pretty decent job of stretching Preston and retaining the ball. We restricted them to just a single shot (off target) in the first half, which is impressive when you compare it to the nine we allowed them to take in the second half. 

It’s hard to know how excited we should be about this good patch of the game, OK it was against ten men but it was also against a team from the league above us. My impression was that we’d picked a team with the expectation of not having much of the ball, so when we had an extra man we perhaps didn’t have the best set up to exploit this situation. 

Paul Heckingbottom must have given a brilliant half time talk to his players as Preston North End upped their game significantly in the second half and Town didn’t really know how to cope with them. They kept getting into our final third and putting quality balls into the box. This game has left me more than a little bit concerned about our ability to stop crosses in wide areas (a hangover from last season) and how we deal with crosses when they arrive in the box. When a good ball comes in, it feels like we panic in some moments when we need to stay calm but also are too casual in dangerous moments and don’t react quickly enough. 

The equaliser seemed pretty fitting, as it came from our former player, Delano Burgzorg. He was incorrectly credited with the goal by the stadium announcer but replays clearly show his shot was going wide until his teammate, Erabi, diverted it goalwards. While Burgzorg clearly has talent, I feel sorry for Preston North End fans that are going to have to watch him as he’s one of the most greedy players I’ve ever seen. Given his complete aversion to passing to teammates in the box, diverting one of his mis-hit shots feels like the only way he’ll ever lay on an assist. 

How long is the honeymoon period for Huddersfield Town managers in 2026?

It’s not time for the pitchforks yet, but it’s worth wondering out loud how long Martin Drury has to find his feet as Huddersfield Town manager. Personally, I’d like to see him given as much time as possible to be a success. And given the lack of turnover in our squad this summer, it’s likely to take a bit of time to turn the ship around if he’s working with a very similar “group” to the one that failed last season.

The problem is that everyone associated with Huddersfield Town is inpatient for change. Quite understandably after feeling bad about our team for so long, there’s a clamour for things to start moving in the right direction. While there has been an overt attempt to tamp down expectations this season from the club’s hierarchy, it’ll be very hard to accept another season of stagnation and disappointment.

Historically, the first competitive game of the season has undue scrutiny on it because we’ve all had to wait a long time for it to come around. Maybe it’s better to give it ten games and then make an assessment of whether we’ve cast off the problems that dogged us last season. But what if it’s not working after ten games? What if it is working in terms of performances but we keep squandering results in injury time? What if we start picking up results but the football is rubbish? 

I think the sad fact is that we’ve become a club that sacks their manager at the earliest sign of difficulty and that’s created an expectation among fans that we can fix our problems by swapping managers. Despite the fact it almost never works and the problems at the club run deeper than the manager. 

The best scenario for everyone would be for Drury to get results sooner rather than later and we’ll not even have to worry about how we respond to a bad start. But if Drury does take a bit of time to get things going how he wants, we may need to show some patience with him and believe he can get things right if given long enough. 

Any Other Business

Preston will play Everton in the next round – I always like to torture myself after a cup exit by looking at who we might have played if we’d won. Preston drew Everton and while our ball might have been drawn differently had we made it through, it’s hard not to feel a bit aggrieved that we missed out on hosting a Premier League team at our own stadium. 

The new away shirt is good for seeing names and numbers – I have quite strong feelings that striped football kits should continue on to the backs of shirts but our red and black away kit has a plain red panel on the back instead and I have to concede that it makes it much easier to read the names and numbers on the backs of shirts.

Iorpenda to Derby rumours rumble on – It was notable that Tom Iorpenda didn’t make it into the matchday squad for this game despite other youngsters making it onto the 9-man bench. This hints that an exit may be on the cards for our academy product. I’d find it really disappointing if we lose him this summer before he’s even established himself as a first team regular for us. His expiring contract makes a sale understandable but I’m fed up with our better youngsters leaving without making a significant impact on the pitch for the first team.

Hotel plans – I’ve seen some negativity about it online but it seems to me like a good idea to build a hotel on the back of the Panasonic Stand (I can’t remember the latest name for it). It’s a bit embarrassing that our owner has to stay in a hotel in Leeds when he comes over because Huddersfield doesn’t have anywhere that meets his standards. And the arguments about this project distracting from matters on the pitch doesn’t feel valid, unless Chris Markham is putting off negotiating transfer deals because he’s too busy working out the logistics of the breakfast buffet at the new hotel. Unlikely.