Not again! – Notes on Huddersfield Town squandering a 2-0 lead against Sheffield Wednesday

Huddersfield Town drew 2-2 with Sheffield Wednesday on Saturday despite being 2-0 up until conceding goals in the 88th and 97th minutes of the game. The circumstances around the late equaliser were odd to say the least and there’s some questions for the officials to answer about why a penalty was awarded minutes after both the ref and linesman had indicated they thought the game should restart with a corner to Wednesday.

This game can be added to the list of games this season where we’ve played well enough to win but wasteful finishing has led to points being dropped. It’s also another match in Drury’s relatively short tenure where we’ve collapsed late in a game to allow an opponent back in. Both of these trends are worrying but it’s also worth celebrating the fact we played one of the league’s most fancied teams and deserved to win but for a few minutes of madness at the end of the game.

The penalty controversy 

It’s sad that such an entertaining game of football will be remembered for some strange officiating rather than anything the players did but there’s no other place to start when talking about this game. I don’t think there’s much debate about whether it was a penalty or not. Marcus Harness quite clearly booted Liam Cooper in the head and left him with blood pouring over his face. The bit where it gets strange is that the ref and linesman clearly indicated a corner when the ball went dead and neither seemed to be considering a penalty until the Sheffield Wednesday players started appealing for it.

It seems possible that the fourth official may have had some influence over the decision to award a penalty. Given that the penalty was awarded a good few minutes after the incident took place, it might have been that the fourth official saw a replay of the incident before providing the referee with his opinion. I don’t know exactly what happened to make the referee change his mind from corner to penalty but if it was the fourth official AND they had seen a replay before offering their insight, it could be that they’ve brought in VAR to League One on the sly. 

Apparently there’s nothing wrong with a fourth official giving a referee their view about an on-pitch incident but I can’t remember too many occasions where it’s happened. Particularly on an incident where both the referee and the linesman are significantly better placed to have an opinion on what happened.

It was a penalty in my eyes, so I suppose it was the right call in the end but I’m really curious about how the officials ended up making that call.  

Town’s late collapse 

The nature of the goals we conceded to throw away our lead may be annoying but the goals only came because we basically stopped playing from around 80 minutes and just tried to cling on. Our backward drift started a bit earlier than that but around the time we brought Harness and Gooch off the bench we pretty much gave up on trying to do anything with the ball ourselves and tended to hoof the ball back to them whenever we got it back. Our possession across the whole game was only 30% but from the 80th minute until full time it was just 13%, which illustrates how much we allowed Wednesday to have the ball and brought a lot of pressure on to ourselves.

I wonder what the instructions going on to the pitch were from Drury and Stead in these moments. Earlier in the second half, Drury was hopping up and down on the touchline and waving his arm to tell his players to push up more and to get in Wednesday’s faces. I get the impression the instructions changed for the closing stages and the coaches sent on the message to dig in and try to manage out the game. 

Sitting back when you’re 2-0 up is a fair enough strategy for most teams but for some reason, our ability to soak up pressure is pretty much nonexistent and rather than dropping in and becoming hard to break down, we just seemed to collapse and allowed them to generate plenty of chances. 

I  suspect that there were too many players on the pitch that had given everything up to that point and had pretty much run out of steam. It sounds like, from Drury’s post-match comments, that quite a few had picked up knocks that they were carrying through this period of the game too. 

Regardless of the reasons, it’s another game where we’ve not been able to protect a lead. Until we master this piece of game management then we’re going to make it very hard for ourselves to succeed this season. And until we prove we’ve got more character, I think we’ve got to abandon sitting on leads and instead should keep pushing for more goals almost regardless of how many we’ve already scored.

A very good performance up to 80 minutes 

The late collapse and the controversial penalty overshadow a game where Town were otherwise excellent. When you consider we were playing a favourite to be promoted this season, it was very encouraging that we managed to dominate the game and force them into so many basic errors. 

Once again, this was a Town game where we didn’t dominate possession but managed to look a lot more dangerous than our opponent regardless. In the first half we had nine shots, with four of them on target, and Wednesday didn’t register a single shot. Yes, we should have converted at least one of those first half chances (Taylor’s shot was well-saved on the line by their keeper but he shouldn’t have given the keeper a chance of saving it) but every other aspect of our performance was very good.

Before the season started, the target being discussed by the club for this season was more about how the games felt rather than aiming for a specific league position or number of points accumulated. We were promised a team we could feel proud of and a style of football that was on the front foot and went out to win games. I’d say, until it unravelled late on, this game was a good representation of what the football Town should be playing. 

There was some good skill on display, particularly from Fernandes who continues to be incredibly good at the Accu Stadium but the most impressive quality in this game was the collective effort to press Sheffield Wednesday and to force them into making errors. 

The whole team worked hard to unsettle Sheffield Wednesday and pressurised them into mistakes. This is becoming a very useful part of our game. We’ve done the same thing against both Rochdale in the trophy in midweek and Burton Albion the week before. While we’re doing OK at generating our own chances, it’s notable how many of our goals lately have come from our high press leading to the ball turning over close to our opponent’s goal while their defence is vulnerable. It’s nice to crack defences open with elaborate passing moves, I also like that we’re currently able to exploit teams when they mess about with the ball at the back.

The bench and subs

Older football fans will remember the days where substitutes weren’t a thing, or there might have been one sub allowed in a game, but in this era of five substitutes being possible, it’s often quite hard for Town to get the players they need on the bench. 

For this game, Cameron Ashia and Lasse Sorensen weren’t able to make the bench despite both having decent showings against Rochdale on Tuesday night. I’d have preferred to see these two come off the bench instead of Gooch and Harness at the point where the game was turned. While Ashia tends to follow his own agenda rather than follow coaching instructions, his tendency to get on the ball and dribble it upfield would have helped relieve a bit of pressure in those late stages of the game when Wednesday were bombarding our box with crosses. Sorensen and Gooch may not be much different quality-wise, Sorensen is the quicker of the two and arguably the better defender.

I’m also a bit puzzled about why Joe Low was kept on the bench until we were already pegged back to 2-2 despite both Balker and Wallace coming off injured. Roughan and Bronkhorst did a job as central defenders alongside Ibane Bowat but given how many crosses Sheffield Wednesday were putting in, it seemed like Joe Low’s towering frame would have been handy to have in that part of the pitch.

I think Martin Drury’s use of substitutes is often a bit too straight forward and the most common approach is to see who’s looking tired/injured and replace them with the most similar option we have on the bench. He’s a young manager and is still learning on the job but I’d like to come away from a game thinking that he’d out-thought his opposite number and swung a game in our favour with his substitutions.

Lies, damn lies and statistics

If you look at the stats for chances created and expected goals then we’ve one of the best attacks in the league. If you look at the stats for expected goals conceded, we’re again, one of the best. So arguably, we’re statistically the best team in the division. But these statistics don’t mean anything unless you take your chances at one end and keep them out at the other.

An optimist could look at these numbers and think that our ability to create so many chances in games means that soon the tide will turn and we’ll become a formidable team in this division. A more pragmatic take on this situation would be that we need twice as many chances as other teams to score goals and a tendency to play better than the opposition and still drop points. 

After a number of seasons where promising starts have withered by the time Halloween comes around, we’re now entering a crucial period of Martin Drury’s tenure. Either we build on the decent platform we’ve built for ourselves or we fizzle out. My feeling is that this season looks a lot more encouraging than the Duff or Grant seasons because we’re genuinely developing a style of play rather than just trying to grind out results. It might not be quite right yet but I am starting to believe that we’re moving in the right direction, which is hard to trust after past disappointments but I do think there’s something about this team that has potential to become something good. 

Any other business

Young’s water bottle – Matty Young’s inability to keep out Lowe’s penalty in the dying moments was compounded when the notes about Wednesday’s penalty takers that he’d stuck to his water bottle were shared online. It’s common practice for keepers to do this in preparation for penalties but I’m not sure many will have specific instructions on which players they should try to wind up before they take a penalty. It would have looked like clever gamesmanship if he’d saved the penalty but it now makes him look a bit silly.

Injury worries intensify –  As always seems to happen to Town, just as we have a few players close to returning from injury, we now have a fresh batch of injury concerns. Balker, Wallace and Fernandes all left the pitch with injuries and we’ll have to wait until the pre-Plymouth presser for confirmation on how bad these injuries are. Balker’s is probably the most concerning, as he went off feeling his hamstring, which nearly always means a couple of months out of action. 

Knill gone – This was the first league game for Town since Alan Knill’s unexpected departure. The official response from the club was “personal reasons” which could mean an endless number of things. The And He Takes This Chance podcast hinted that he was finding the workload too demanding and, at 62 years old, he’s not keen on the intense way that Drury likes to work. I can see his point too. I heard rumours that Terry McDermott’s main role under Lee Clark was to place everyone’s bets on the horses for them and to provide a bit of banter in the changing rooms. In all seriousness though, Knill’s arrival seemed like a smart move to give Drury an old head to rely on in tricky moments (like when you’re 2-0 up in a big game and you can see your players are all knackered). Hopefully we’ll find a new father figure to add a bit of experience to our coaching team.