Huddersfield Town come back from the international break with a home game against QPR today. It feels like forever since we’ve had a Town game to watch, so I’m looking forward to getting down to the stadium and watching Darren Moore’s team play. Which perhaps shows how bad my memory is, because Town were absolute garbage in their last outing against Sheffield Wednesday two weeks ago, where they played out a 0-0 draw with one of the Championship’s worst teams and didn’t register a single shot on target.
Today could be different though, as Darren Moore has had the international break to work with his team and we’ll perhaps see a bit more of his vision on the pitch. Up to now, because of the limited amount of time he’s had between matches since his arrival, his tactics have been a Frankenstein’s monster of Warnockball and his own, more progressive approach. With QPR without a win in a good amount of time and their manager hanging by a thread, this feels like a good opportunity for Moore to register his first victory as Town boss – but things never work out that easily.
Here are a few of my thoughts on the likely lineup, players to watch and predicted score for today’s game.
Predicted Huddersfield Town XI to take on QPR
Yuta Nakayama played 64 minutes on Tuesday night at the Misaki Park Stadium in Kobe, so I’m not sure how ready he will be to play if he’s had a long-haul flight on Wednesday into Thursday. I also think it’s possible that Darren Moore will want to change the shape of his team to be on the front foot a bit more when he’s at home against a team that haven’t won in six games.
So my guess would be that he’ll bring Ben Wiles back into the lineup, to add some oomph into the midfield and to take the creative load off Jack Rudoni. That also allows him to put players into their more natural positions, rather than shifting players all over the park, as he’s been prone to do in the games before the break.
Fullbacks of Josh Ruffels and Tom Edwards have a fairly plodding, pedestrian feel to them but at least both are pretty solid defensively. Darren Moore has preferred to play with five at the back so far, but I think in this game it might be better suited to switch to a back four to allow him to pick more players higher up the pitch.
However, Ruffels may be an injury doubt, so if that’s the case, either Nakayama or Headley could be on the left side of defence.
In central defence, Helik and Pearson should hopefully have used the international break to shake off any injury niggles they might have picked up in the opening months of the season. Lees is an option too but his lack of game time and preseason puts him third in the queue, and if we’re playing two central defenders he would be the obvious one to leave on the bench.
Then up front a triumvirate of Koroma, Bergzorg and Thomas can operate as a strikerless front three if Ward continues to be injured and Harratt and Hudlin continue to be deemed not good enough to start. While it’s not ideal to keep playing without a recognised striker, this was the risk we took when we didn’t sign a striker in the summer. I don’t hate Bergzorg playing in that position either, but it’s clear that he’s not a specialist in that role and we do suffer from him not having the ability to win headers or do the hard graft that that Danny Ward typically does.
Oh, I’ve not mentioned Hogg or Nicholls, but you know what to expect from them if you’ve watched Town in the last few seasons. With both of them, if they’re fit they play and the team is better for it.
Predicted lineup: Nicholls, Ruffels, Helik, Pearson, Edwards, Rudoni, Hogg, Wiles, Koroma, Bergzorg, Thomas
QPR – not as bad as their form suggests
Huddersfield Town have been on the receiving end of statements like “We should be beating the likes of…”, so I’m not going to write off QPR just because they’re currently on a tricky run. For starters, we always seem to be the team that other clubs choose to end their bad runs on anyway (Birmingham had woeful form until they played us, then suddenly started playing like world-beaters when we came to town). So QPR’s winless streak of six games is probably not worth getting too tied up on.
Looking at their squad, they’ve got Ilias Chair who has been one of the best creative midfielders in the Championship for years, Lyndon Dykes, who’s a difficult striker with bags of experience, Asmir Begovic in goals, who’s played most of his career in the Premier League and others who would most likely walk straight into our starting eleven. So, while they’re in poor form right now, it would be daft to go into this game expecting a stroll in the park and an easy three points.
Like so many Championship teams, they also have a former Town player on their books who can come back to haunt us: Chris Willock. He had a short spell on loan during the Danny Cowley era and we turned down the option to make the move permanent and he’s since gone on to do fairly well for QPR, though he’s yet to notch a goal or assist this season – let’s hope he continues that record today.
Expect the Cowshed Loyal to be chanting “You’re getting sacked in the morning” to QPR manager Gareth Ainsworth if Town are in front at any stage in this game, as he’s been rumoured to have his neck on the chopping block for a while now. October, as well as now being a month-long build up to Halloween (it was never like this when I was a kid!), is also sacking season, as bad starts solidify into something more troubling and questions start to be asked. So with Ainsworth feeling the pressure, this game could be do or die for the long-haired head coach. I’ve always quite liked him, since his days of doing well with Wycombe, but I think the cultures must be vastly different between a small club in a small town like Wycombe and a team like QPR where the expectations and the egos are much bigger and harder to manage.
Match prediction – Huddersfield Town 1 – 0 QPR
Neither team head into this game in sparkling form, so it may be a war of attrition at times, so it could be a game where a set piece or a mistake decides who takes home three points. With that in mind, Town will need to keep their discipline and make sure they put as much pressure as possible on QPR to try and force errors out of them. I could be wrong and we could be treated to a game of sparkling entertainment, with end-to-end football and a feast of goals at either end. But the recent results and performances of both teams suggest it’ll be tight, cagey, and neither will want to risk too much.
With that being said, I think Town are slightly better than the league table suggests, because our performances have been good enough to have won more than the two games we’ve managed so far and a combination of factors have prevented us from doing that. Hopefully we’ll start to put together some positive results in the next few weeks and climb the table. This game would be a great opportunity to do that.
As I mentioned above, I don’t see QPR as an easy win by any stretch but they also aren’t an opponent to fear either and we should look to go toe-to-toe with them and hope that our players are able to produce better football on the day. It may be that we have to do the ugly side of the game better than them too, but that’s sometimes the way you have to play the game if you want to win.
Always good to read your blog over a morning cuppa, TS.
You’re evidently not in sales! You’re not going to get the punters queuing up for this drab & tense encounter won by a single “set piece or mistake”. I’m thanking my lucky stars I’m 200 miles away and no iFollow video coverage to blight my day!
You talk about Ainsworth’s tenuous future but not Moore’s. Make no mistake, if 3 points are not Town’s today, there are going to be murmurings. No bounce effect from the new manager, and more importantly, not a single win even against lowly opposition.
I’m not an F1 fan but there’s always been the debate – how much is the car and how much the driver? F1 is particularly tedious and predictable because the best car generally wins. Football has a similar debate – best players or best manager? Because both elements are human, it inevitably becomes less predictable. Nonetheless, we know from what Warnock achieved last season, a manager can organise & motivate a ‘below average’ squad of players. We’ve yet to see that same Midas touch from Moore and thus we’re just left with a ‘below average’ squad.
Here’s hoping that your downbeat prediction is wrong, that Moore finds the winning formula and that you have an enjoyable afternoon with Town winning by 2 or 3 goals.
Thanks for your omment Simon, glad you enjoyed reading the article. It’s an interesting point about pressure building on Moore. I think there’s always pressure on a manager if they go on a long run without a win but I don’t think it will coming from inside the club. Too many of the new top brass have staked their reputations on Darren Moore being a success to pull the trigger on him early on his tenure, so they’ll give him plenty of time to get going. It’s also expected that we’ll lose plenty of games this season and he’s most likely been given a fairly modest target if he has a specific target for this season at all, as I get the impression this season is about staying up and stabilising before making a proper push next year (assuming we avoid the drop). I like Darren Moore and think he’s a decent manager, so I think he’ll pick up enough points to ease any early pressure. Though it would have been easier for him if he didn’t have such big boots to fill (and we didn’t all know that Warnock would have been happy to continue to the end of the season).
I often have the same thought about how much influence a manager can really have on a football team. I think that most of the time their effect is massively exaggerated and the majority of the time the team with the best players will do the best when you average it out over a season. There are exceptions at the extreme ends of the spectrum – I think Warnock can get a tune out of almost any group of misfits and Fotheringham would probably get Man City relegated from the Premier League. But the bulk of jobbing managers probably get around about the same output from players as the rest do, just using slightly different methods to each other.
Moore latest.
Summary from his presser on HTAFC.
#no rooftop on this team
#3 points up grabs saturday
#wardy made great stride to warnocks house but still not on the grass ?
#turton has seen a football
#Pat Jones injured yet again….. wow
# Rhodes is a special player we are monitoring at Blackpool,
# point at shef wed was a positive ??
If only Danny Ward won some of his headers then he wouldn’t be as much of a passenger,
Ward has always won his share of headers. DW seems as perplexed as Town fans have been for the last four years at the absence of a striker in the club. Unfortunately we’ve never had anyone anywhere near Ward to profit from his headers.