Notes on Huddersfield Town’s 4-1 cup win over Manchester United U21s

Huddersfield Town beat Manchester United’s Under 21 team 4-1 on Tuesday night in the final group game of the Bristol Street Motors Cup. The victory meant that Town leapfrogged the youth team into second place and secured a place in the knockout stages of the cup that will progress from waste of time to incredibly important if we can win a few more games and secure a day out to Wembley. 

It’s hard to work out how good this result and performance were really. Manchester United’s youngsters are a very different team to the ones we’re typically playing every week, so giving them a convincing beating with a near-full-strength Town team isn’t easy to judge. In the game we saw flashes of quality from the opposition that aren’t typically on display in League One but equally, they were a bunch of kids coming up against experienced professionals. So maybe we shouldn’t be shouting from the rooftops about this win.

Having said that, there were some nice moments and things to enjoy about Town’s play, regardless of the opponent and the fact we’ve won again and progressed in this competition keeps our momentum going. 

A bunch of rough kids

My expectation for this game was that Manchester United would try to play the beautiful version of football and perhaps be a bit intimidated by the physical challenge of playing older, bigger and stronger players. That wasn’t how it played out. Manchester United’s Under 21s were one of the dirtiest and nastiest teams I’ve seen Town play for a while. They were helped by a referee who seemed to have no interest in clamping down on dangerous challenges or protecting players.

I can imagine their coaches may have said, “Be tough in your challenges and don’t let them intimidate you.” but the interpretation from these youthful and too enthusiastic kids was getting close to assault with some of the rough challenges that went in. Rhys Healey was targeted in the early stages and given the fact his legs are made out of dried spaghetti, it’s a relief he walked off the pitch rather than leaving on a stretcher. 

As the game went along, Town realised that this game seemed to be being officiated using prison rules and mixed it up a bit themselves. But for the first half an hour or so we were booted relentlessly and the referee had the “Oh, what are you like!” mentality of an overindulgent aunt towards the Manchester United kids. 

I typically like a physical game and think the Football League is more enjoyable for the lenient approach referees have taken in recent seasons. It helps games to flow and the odd crunching tackle injects a bit of life into games. But at the same time, if players are getting kicked, stamped on, elbowed and all sorts of other dangerous play then it hugely increases the risk of picking up injuries and it hardly inspires teams to pick strong teams for this relatively meaningless competition. 

Town OK in the first half and then good in the second

Micheal Duff was quite scathing of his team’s first-half performance, where they went in 1-1 thanks to a superb strike from Ben Wiles and an even better backheel flick from Manchester United’s forward, Musa. While both goals were of the highest quality, the rest of the game in the first half was quite poor and neither side really settled in possession for long periods. Town were marginally the better team but we also left gaps at the back too often which a more ruthless team would have exploited. There was also some wastefulness in the final third from Town which meant we didn’t make the most of the good spells we had. 

The second half was a much better showing from Town. Perhaps the kids started to tire or the changes Duff made improved the mix but we became increasingly dominant. For once we translated our spells of good pressure and possession into goals, with the scoreline accurately reflecting the balance of play. 

Town’s second goal came from a wonderful cross from Ben Wiles which Rhys Healey gratefully converted. The third was another assist for Wiles, this time some smart interplay with Kasumu culminated with Wiles selflessly laying it off rather than taking on the shot himself and Kasumu smashed it home. The fourth was direct from a corner, with Tom Lees glancing the ball just inside the far post. 

Michael Duff apparently gave his players the hairdryer treatment at halftime and in part attributed the improvement after the break down to the sharing of home truths. Perhaps sensing that this game could present another cup humiliation for him, the anger and frustration would not have been hard for him to generate. I actually thought our first half performance wasn’t too bad but if the players weren’t doing their best then it’s right they had a strip torn off them. The challenge for Duff is to get the players motivating themselves for every game rather than needing an external boot up the backside to get them interested in doing their best. It goes back to the much-talked-about cultural issues but at least Duff seems to be aware of the problem and doing his best to fix it.

Some decent Town performances

There were some notable performances in this game, with Ben Wiles being the obvious pick of the bunch. He scored a screamer with the game’s first goal and then showed selflessness and vision to play in Kasumu for our second, before putting a beauty of a cross in for Healey to score the third. The difference between this season’s Wiles and the 23/24 version we had is just night and day.

David Kasumu started the game on the bench to make space for Tom Iorpenda in the starting eleven but he left the field ill in the early stages. While this was bad fortune for the young Town player, Kasumu went on to be one of our best players on the pitch. His energy and relentlessness no doubt helped to wear the opposition down. He also scored with a nice finish, making my previous remarks about his lack of quality look a bit silly.

Oli Turton was another decent performer. He’s down the pecking order at the moment, not helped that Duff’s system doesn’t use proper fullbacks and Turton isn’t natural as either a wingback or a right-sided central defender. This performance showed that he’s more than just an understudy though, as he contributed a lot to Town’s play going forward. He provided the assist for Wiles opener (though Helik’s dummy run that draws away two defenders was also a huge contributor to the goal) and could have scored himself if he hadn’t have blazed over the bar from a decent position.

Another poor goal conceded

I don’t like to bang on about the same old stuff but like at the weekend against Crawley, Town conceded a poor goal. It came from Manchester United U21’s only shot on goal all night too, just like Crawley scored last weekend with both of their pair of shots on target.

On one hand, it’s great that our defence on the whole is quite miserly in terms of the number of shooting opportunities they are giving away. But on the other, it’s dismal that we’ve conceded three goals from three shots on target in our last two games. All three have had some shoddy defending in them too.

While Musa applied a lovely finish to score, the only reason the ball was in that part of the pitch was because Miller failed to make a simple tackle higher up the pitch and then didn’t take a booking and concede a foul once his man got past him. Lonwijk also could have done more to stop the ball coming in.

I feel like these goals are more down to a lack of commitment and character than actual footballing ability. OK, we had a couple of chances to get clean tackles in but players shouldn’t need telling to commit fouls to stop goalscoring opportunities developing, it should come from the players themselves.

We need to become stingier and more disciplined when we defend. It’s not good enough to defend well for whole games apart from the two or three times you decide not to bother. Those momentary lapses will be the difference between getting promoted or not this season. If we can cut them out we’ll be in a good state but if they continue then it feels almost impossible for us to be anything but endlessly inconsistent.

Do Town want to go deep into this competition?

I’ve made my feelings about the Bristol Street Motors Cup plain since the start of the season. I think it’s pretty pointless but I’d also like a trip to Wembley in April (Sunday 13th of April if you’re confident enough to start planning your trip to the capital). So I was pleased that Duff picked a strong lineup for this game and we made it into the hat for the next round.

While playing in a low-stakes cup competition like this has potential to distract from our ultimate aim of getting promoted back to the Championship, I feel like winning is a good habit regardless of the competition. We also have a big enough squad to be able to rotate players in and out without weakening the team too much, so this cup has been a great chance to get competitive minutes into fringe players who may be needed in the league if injuries pile up. 

I can imagine there will be plenty of Town fans who are completely uninterested in this competition because it’s really a contest to see who is the 45th-best team in the country, given the teams in the two leagues above us aren’t involved. However, the lack of those bigger teams increases the chances of Town doing well and there’s a good chance of us making it to Wembley. When we lost to Swansea in the final in 1994 it was Town’s first trip to Wembley since the 1938 final. And while we’ve had quite a few trips since then (and to Cardiff’s Millennium stadium) for playoff finals, an actual cup final where the stakes aren’t quite so high would make the whole thing more of a nice trip out rather than the high-stakes, anxiety-inducing occasions playoff finals represent.

Strangely, there’s no date for when the draw will take place but the next round takes place on the week commencing 9th of December. It’ll be a team based in the north and because we finished second we’ll be away to one of the other northern teams that topped their groups. 

Some thoughts on Manchester United’s Under 21s

Michael Duff, somewhat unkindly, pointed out before the game that all of Man United’s best youth players are already out on loan in the football league or have progressed into the first team proper. With that in mind, there were some decent-quality players in their lineup. Musa looked dangerous in moments and also improvised a lovely finish for his goal and Kingdon at the back was aggressive and a bully but that’s probably a good thing to have in a young central defender. If either of these two were available for loan in January they may be worth us making an inquiry.

There was also Malacia on at leftback in the first half who was a first team player making his way back from long-term injury. While he wasn’t fully fit, he also reportedly cost £13m, so the fact he was largely harmless suggests we did a good job on him. 

The rest of the players have that strange Schrodinger’s Cat scenario that Premier League youth players often have, where we could have been watching the next Kobe Mainoo or Marcus Rashford but the law of probabilities suggests that the overwhelming majority of players in Manchester United shirts on Tuesday won’t ever wear them for the first team in a competitive game. 

It’s what led to a strange imbalance in this game, as our players were most likely nowhere near as talented as the ones they were playing against. But equally, our lads have established themselves as professional footballers and made a career for themselves. Whereas some of the Manchester United lads could find themselves applying for jobs at JD Sports next summer if they don’t fulfil their potential. 

I think Duff’s dismissive comments about the Manchester United Under 21s in the pre-match press conference point towards him thinking that they shouldn’t be in this competition and it’s only happened because of the financial clout of the big teams meaning we have to accept their requests for this sort of thing. However, I think it creates interesting matches and gives this competition a bit of novelty. I’d be dead against youth teams or B teams competing in league competitions, which is always a fear, but this sort of match seems fair enough. It’s also worth pointing out that only Aston Villa’s youth team has progressed to the knockout stages, so clearly these youngsters aren’t too good to compete against League One and Two sides.