Notes on Huddersfield Town’s commanding 4-0 victory over Bolton Wanderers

Huddersfield Town won 4-0 away at Bolton on Saturday. While it started out as a cagey and closely matched contest, the game ended up as one-sided as you can imagine and Town rubbed their opponent’s noses in it with a display of complete dominance in the second half. A slightly unsettling and perplexing experience for a Town fan. We’re used to being on the receiving end of these drubbings, not handing them out. But it was weird in a good way and while Bolton were awful once their confidence had evaporated, Town were as good as their opponent was poor and the scoreline is a fair reflection of both sides overall performances.

After a run of three defeats before the international break, this game felt significant in terms of Town’s momentum. Now, rather than dwelling on a few recent wobbles, we can take the broader view that we’ve won four out of five league games and are showing signs of being a decent team at this level. There is still some work to do but Town showed against Bolton that they are capable of turning over teams that play into our hands, as Bolton did so generously in the second half.

A cagey opening to the game turns into a drubbing

Knowing how the game ended, it seems strange to talk about how tight and nervy the game seemed in the early stages but there was very little given away by either side for the opening fifteen to twenty minutes and the game felt a bit like a game of cat and mouse. Though, actually, a better comparison would be to a well-matched arm wrestle where two strong opponents won’t budge until the first wobbles and then the other uses their slight advantage to slam the other’s hand onto the table.

The way Bolton started well and went to pieces in the later stages of this game would be strange had it not been such a common sight for Huddersfield Town fans to see from their own team in recent seasons. I can think of a few times we’ve received beatings of four goals or more from a team where we’ve actually started the game pretty well and then capitulated when key moments have turned against us.

There were two key moments that went Town’s way in the first half that, in my view, swung this game to Town. The first was the sliding tackle that Helik made at 0-0 which was a certain red card if he didn’t time it right or if he didn’t make the challenge Dion Charles was through on goal and we would probably have gone 1-0 down. But Helik timed his tackle perfectly and saved us from disaster and snuffed out Bolton’s best chance. The second key incident was the cross from Marshall that Koroma headed home for the opener and put us ahead. 

Town were just about edging the game at the point they scored but it took creating something special to break the deadlock and Marshall did it with his cross (and some nice build up play to set him free). I think that once they went behind there was no coming back because of the pressure on the manage, and the confidence the team played with in the early stages of the game disappeared leading to them trying to force things and playing into Town’s hands.

Bolton’s disastrous second half 

I’ve been complimentary about Bolton’s first half performance but they were awful in the second half. Though it has to be said that Town did an excellent job of dismantling them and exposing their incompetence at every opportunity. And while the pain came for Bolton during those second half minutes, the ground work was done by Town in the first half where their relentless pressing and hustling ground Bolton down and tired them out. Like a boxer putting in punches to the body in the early rounds so their opponent tires in the later rounds, Town had worn Bolton down and reaped their rewards in the second half. It may have seemed fairly evenly matched but I think other teams have to work very hard to match our intensity and that worked in our favour in this game.

The pressing from Huddersfield Town in the second half was lovely to watch. It got to the point where we looked more dangerous when they had the ball, we were doing such a good job of stealing it off them in dangerous areas. While they dogmatically persisted with the failing tactic of passing out from the back, we kept exploiting their weakness in this area and taking the ball off them. It was like finding a cash machine that was handing out free money, why not fill your boots?

So it wasn’t a huge surprise when the goals started to come. The second goal was a penalty, which Bolton fans may feel was soft but it was certainly no softer than some penalties we’ve had against us lately. And Koroma had been penalised for a coming together that could easily have been a penalty to him instead in the first half. So on balance, it seemed fair enough. 

It’s a long-running joke that Town never get penalties given to them, but I think that’s because we’ve not been a team that’s had much possession in the opposition penalty area for a long time. And we’ve not had players with the skill to draw fouls on the occasions we do get into the box. That feels different this season, so I wouldn’t be stunned if we see a few more spot kicks awarded for us this season. A penalty at home hasn’t been awarded for a very long time but I think it’ll come soon.

The third goal looked scruffy on first watch but the replay showed a very clever pass from Tom Lees when he mopped up a penalty area scramble to put the ball into space for Ben Wiles to smash it home. This was the kind of lucky goal that never happens when you’re struggling and need a break. But when things are going your way, loose balls fall into the right players paths, 50-50s drop your way and deflections take the ball in rather than away from goal. It was a good strike from Wiles to capitalise on Lees clever pass following the bit of good luck that the ball fell kindly to him and the extra goal to reward our dominance was well deserved.

Town’s fourth goal will be the one everyone remembers from this game as it would make it onto a VHS of Danny Baker’s Own Goals and Gaffes if this game had taken place in the mid nineties. While it did come about from a horrendous error from Bolton’s keeper, it wasn’t just an isolated moment of madness. Bolton had been passing out from the back badly for a long time and Town had done a great job of ratcheting up the pressure on the keeper and defence up to that point, so the error was partly thanks to the drip-drip effect of constant haranguing from our press. And for the individual passage of play that saw Evans cleverly pick out the keeper’s soft pass, we had forced this to happen by shutting down all the other passing lanes by pushing up an aggressive number of players to close them down.

So while the fourth goal was comical, it was also a just reward for all the pressing Town had done and the bravery they had shown to push such high numbers up the pitch and risk going one-on-one with their attackers if they departed from passing out from the back. 

Duff’s faith in the Rotherham starting XI is repaid

After a disappointing result in our last league game, it was a bit unexpected to see an unnamed team put out in this fixture, but the result proved that keeping the faith was the right thing to do. The midfield trio in particular had failed to fire in recent outings, so it was a relief to see them find a rhythm in this game. There were some of the familiar issues in the earlier stages of the game, where Bolton passed through us a bit too easily and Hogg looked a bit isolated but they were fleeting moments. The general level of performance from the midfield three was a vast improvement and they asserted themselves on the game well and with both Wiles and Evans getting on the scoresheet too, it shows they were getting into good areas. 

The nice problem we now have is that there are players on the bench and coming back from injury soon that may be pushing for starting places but it’s hard to drop players from a team that have just put in the best performance of the season. Joe Hodge, Freddie Ladapo, Herbie Kane, David Kasumu, Matty Pearson, Brodie Spencer and Bojan Radulovic are all players that would start in the majority of other League One teams but they are all going to have to be patient before they get their chance to start games. 

Having had a wafer thin squad in seasons past, where we’ve had to rely on filling the bench with children from the B Team that weren’t ready for senior football and even then not being able to name a full bench, it feels like we’re in a strong position with our squad this season. With the number of games ahead and the style of football we are committed to play, it’s good that we’ve got the numbers and the quality we need. Even if some may have to sit on the sidelines and wait their turn for a little while.

A word on Josh Koroma

I wasn’t sure if Koroma would start this game after the amount of traveling he had done representing Sierra Leone during international duty (eight flights in eight days apparently) but he put in an excellent performance. Over the years we’ve seen many different versions of Josh Koroma, so much so that it’s hard to believe that he’s still only 25, but I think I like the Michael Duff version the most. At times he’s been rotten, other times he’s been excellent but mostly at the single thing he likes to do, to cut inside from the left and shoot with his right foot, which was enough to get him plenty of goals when he was on top form. But currently he looks like a well rounded player. He’s just scored his second headed goal of the season, which is also his second headed goal of his career, which shows he’s doing things this season he never used to do. 

I think this is a large part down to the fact that he’s playing as a striker this season and isn’t approaching the role like a winger who’s out of position any more. He’s getting into the right positions to convert easy chances, so not every goal needs to be an edge-of-the-box curler any more. The fact he can score those ones too is obviously no bad thing, but he’s taking up positions to get on the end of high-percentage chances too. 

If I was going to be critical (which I’m about to be), Koroma does still have a tendency to keep the ball when there are better placed colleagues. Though a player that’s scored a couple of goals and never passes gets away with this kind of behaviour. In fact, you could argue that he earned the right on Saturday to stop passing so he could go for his hattrick, which he was unquestionably doing. While it’s not the most team spirited behaviour, Ben Wiles goal resulted from Tom Lees snaffling a loose ball after a melee when one of his shots was blocked. 

Six games in three weeks

Saturday’s game against Northampton Town kickstarts a six-week jamboree of football for Town fans, with three consecutive weeks of Saturday-Tuesday games. This little run includes a crucial fixture away at Birmingham, a tricky rearranged home game against Blackpool and the unusual spectacle of playing Barnsley at home twice in the space of four days when they play us in the league on Saturday and in the silly cup (which will definitely not be silly if we make it to Wembley) on the following Tuesday). 

So my comments above about having a good squad this season are most likely going to be tested in the next few weeks, as it’s unlikely we’ll be able to field an unchanged eleven for all of these upcoming games without risking injury to key players. It will also be a test of whether this victory over Bolton was a one-off or a sign of Michael Duff’s methods starting to bed in. My impression is that there is still a lot of room for improvement with this Town team but the work-in-progress version of Duff’s Terriers is still enjoyable to watch and good enough to overcome most teams at this level.