Predicted Huddersfield Town XI, Watford’s changes, Moore’s downbeat presser & unusual score prediction – PREVIEW

I’m usually fairly balanced in my opinions about Town, I’m typically somewhere in between the happy clappers who can never find any fault with the club and the doom mongers that will look for misery in even the most joyful moments (though I’m pretty sure long-term readers will probably disagree with my self-assessment). However, right now, it’s hard to be anything but glum about Town’s current prospects heading into their game against Watford later today. 

While Watford are only 16th in the table, just five places above Town and we have home advantage, it’s hard to overlook the fact that we’ve been spanked 4-0 and 4-1 in our last two games. Add to that our ever-growing injury list, Jonathan Hogg’s suspension from this game, the rift that seems to be growing between the fans and the club and Darren Moore’s limp performance as manager so far and it’s really hard to feel inspired. 

So I’m afraid if you’ve clicked this article in the hope you might find it a source of optimsm before you trudge down to the stadium this afternoon, click away now. Otherwise, read on and let’s wallow in our misery together!

Predicted Huddersfield Town XI to take on Watford

At the best of times, picking the starting eleven is a headache for the manager because he’s got to disappoint experienced professionals who expect to be playing Championship football and there are only eleven starting slots available. Sometimes even players in good form have to make way because there are just too many decent options and they can’t all be selected. This is not currently the best of times. Instead Moore has to cobble together the best team he can from the meagre resources available. It’s not easy.

The club tweeted a picture of Tom Lees being presented a commemorative shirt to mark his 600th appearance during training this week, which his teammates gathered around for. The picture looks like a handful of the senior squad have dropped in on the B Team’s training session, but it’s actually the first team. Unfortunately so many gaps have had to be filled by young kids that there are a lot of unfamiliar faces in the lineup.

So, this has been my long-winded way of saying that it’s best to expect a slightly strange lineup for this game. Darren Moore is caught between a rock and a hard place because he has the choice of either sticking with the players that badly let him down last weekend against Leeds, ones who were mostly experienced professionals or to gamble on chucking in relatively inexperienced and risky youngsters who may struggle against a team like Watford. Or gamble another way with players returning from injury who are probably not ready and will lack match sharpness and be at high risk of aggravating their injury again. 

After all the stick Tom Edwards received last weekend (some of it from me) I think he’ll most likely drop to the bench. There was also a widely circulated picture of him looking a bit worse for wear at a Halloween party on Saturday night, which I thought drew some slightly unfair criticism but wasnt ideal timing given his awful afternoon up against Sumerville. Nakayama should probably be dropped  too, as he’s also been an issue in recent games. That opens the door for Ben Jackson to come in on the right and Josh Ruffels on the left of defence, the latter now back in training after injury. 

I’d also expect to see Matty Pearson brought back in to make a back three with Lees and Helik. While it’s a bit stodgy having three fairly slow central defenders at the back, we’ve just shipped four goals in each of our last two games, so the obvious way to counteract that would be to play an extra defender, particularly one like Pearson, who keeps it simple and puts his body on the line when he defends. 

In midfield we have real problems in terms of available players that can play that position. Hogg is suspended after picking up five bookings, Rudoni is injured, Kasumu has been out for a long time but returned to training this week, Ben Wiles will play but seems to be carrying an injury himself (or at least something is making him underperform most weeks) and Brahima Diarra technically can play in this part of the field but was terrible against Leeds. It’s only because he’s a young lad and there were bigger problems in other areas of the field that Diarra didn’t receive much more stick for a pretty woeful first half performance last weekend.

If Kasumu isn’t fit enough after just a few days back in training, it may require someone like Josh Austerfield to step up and do a job for the team. It’s uncertain how he will cope but the reason we kept him at the club this season rather than sending him out on loan was exactly this sort of injury crisis, so he could step up and show he can perform at Championship level. However, I suspect Kasumu will be wrapped up in sticky tape and thrown out onto the pitch, as we need all the grown ups on the pitch we can scavange together.

There are problems further forward too, as Delano Bergzorg has posted on social media that he’s going to be “back stronger” alongside a picture of his knee in some sort of compression sleeve. So we’ll not be seeing him today, (despite Moore mumbling something about players social media posts not being worth reading too much into in his presser – Moore’s injury updates are the opposite of useful) leaving us mostly likely having two out of Harratt, Thomas and Koroma up front. I’d guess Thomas and Harratt with Koroma on the bench as an option off for the second half if (or, let’s be honest with ourselves, WHEN) we’re chasing the game. 

I really feel for Darren Moore when it comes to picking a team for today, because it’s not about trying to choose an eleven that can go out there and do the most damage to Watford. It’s more a job of trying to paper over the cracks as best as possible and cobble together a starting eleven that almost looks like it might be a Championship team, with a bit of luck and if Watford don’t poke too hard at the cracks. And I really dread to think how we’ll fill up a bench. Last weekend we had three left backs named as subs. Which makes you wonder why we bothered with using all of the slots at all. 

Predicted Huddersfield Town XI to take on Watford: Nicholls, Jackson, Lees, Pearson, Helik, Ruffels, Kasumu, Diarra, Wiles, Thomas, Harratt

Watford – frustratingly not rubbish at the moment

In typical Town fashion, we’ve ended up playing Watford just as they’ve hit a patch of better form, as they’re currently unbeaten in their last four, with two wins and two draws. Prior to this recent upturn The Hornets have had a pretty unspectacular start to the season and Watford’s usually trigger happy board have been surprisingly patient with Valérien Ismaël, even giving him a contract extension since he arrived. Perhaps they’re starting to see the benefits of keeping a manager around for longer than a couple of weeks.

Ismaël is a coach that likes his teams to play a hard-working, aggressive type of pressing football, so I expect it will be a different type of Watford team we’ll see today to the ones that have visited Huddersfield in recent seasons. In the past I’ve often thought Watford squandered the talent they had in their squad by never quite working out a way of getting the best out of their players. I did a bit of noseying at a Watford fan podcast, Voices of the Vic, and they pretty much said the same thing. They think their team this season isn’t as good quality-wise as in the past but the togetheness and work rate on the pitch is better. I think I’d prefer that if I was a Watford fan, rather than watch an endless procession of managers fail to get the best out of a talented but disjointed squad.

Player to watch: Jake Livermore

With Jonathan Hogg suspended, I worry that Watford’s old war horse will be able to use his experience and know-how to dictate things in the middle of the park. Livermore has no doubt lost a bit of pace as he’s aged (if he ever had it) but he’s been around long enough to know how to make up for that with his knowledge of the game and pointy elbows. If Town are forced into playing their kids in midfield he could well run rings round them.

Darren Moore’s Downbeat Press Conference

I’ve found Darren Moore to be a pretty unimpressive media operator so far despite him arriving with a glowing reputation from journalists who covered his previous clubs. He’s obviously a very nice man and I think if you spoke to him one on one he’d be great fun to talk to but in front of the media he knows not to give too much away. Sadly this means his press conferences are usually pretty dull affairs where it’s an exercise in thrust and parry, with the journalists trying to draw him into saying something newsworthy and him responding with a media-trained soundbite that would put an insomniac to sleep.

Yesterday’s press conference was a bit different though, but not in the way I expected. After last week’s thumping from Leeds I was hoping Moore might be a bit more assertive and forthright in his comments, remarking on the positive steps he would take to put things right and how unacceptable the performance was. Instead he was strangely subdued in his responses and seemed to retreat into himself if anything. It gave the impression that he might be feeling the pressure of the job.

There were a couple of responses in particular which were strange. He was asked about whether he was concerned about his fullback department after Leeds exploited it in the last game  (30:28 in the video) which would usually be batted away with a standard answer that defending is the whole team’s responsibility. But instead of denying the concern, Moore said that all areas of the pitch are a concern to him, which is a strange way to avoid hanging individuals out to dry. In avoiding saying one or two players are rubbish, he’s basically said the whole lot of them are.

There was another funny  interaction earlier in the presser (24:19) where The Examiner’s Steven Chicken asked Darren Moore if he thought Town’s injury problems mean that this tough spell might continue for a while longer. Like the other question, it was easy to squirm out of this question by saying that losing experienced players gives an opportunity for the young prospects to step up and prove themselves. Even if you don’t mean it, it’s what managers always say. But Darren Moore replied by saying, “If it does, it does. It is what it is.” Hardly inspirational stuff.

In fairness to Darren Moore, these press conferences must feel like being kicked while you’re down. Being asked almost the same awkward question five different ways and having to be polite to the people that have been slating you in the papers and on the airwaves over the last week can’t be easy. However, these responses and Moore’s demeanor throughout the press conference suggest he’s thoroughly fed up at the moment and doesn’t seem optimistic about Towns short-term prospects. You have to question how he’s going to inspire a winning mentality in his team if he can’t even paint a smile on for a 30 minute press conference.

Desperately trying to inject some positivity into an otherwise miserable blogpost

The logical way to approach this game is to expect a defeat, and most likely another poor performance and possibly another glut of goals against Town too. The recent games have been woeful and while past performance is no indication of future performance, it’s usually a decent guide. However, whenever five to three rolls around, no matter who Town are playing or how bad our form is, I always start to hope. So that pathologically optimistic part of my mind will take over when kick off rolls around and I’ll start to believe we can get something from this game. And why not? It’s eleven against eleven after all.

In fairness, there are legitimate reasons to be somewhat optimistic. While we are down in the dumps right now, we are still out of the relegation zone as it stands and the league currently has a handful of other bad sides that are also wallowing at the bottom end of the table. So while we continue to look bad during this tricky patch, our overall position isn’t awful and once we get out best players back and fit we might start to look a lot better.

It’s also not that long until January and we can then expect the squad to be strengthened. I’m not willing to consider the possibility that this won’t happen at this stage, after the summer where we failed to make the signings we needed, it’s unthinkable that we wouldn’t act decisively when the next transfer window opens, after we’ve seen the damage the last sloppy transfer window has done the this season already.

Thinking more short term, the squad is thin and the gaps left by experienced professionals will have to be plugged by kids. But some of those kids may well step up and prove they’re more than ready for this level. It’s always exciting to see a youngster take their chance and burst onto the scene, so if we are having to blood lots of kids from the academy it seems more likely we’ll see this happen.

I also think that the current gloom around the club would lift with just a couple of wins. Not even good ones either. A scrappy one nil from a lucky penalty or own goal would be enough to help us climb the table and another would put us back in the midtable pack. Then we’d wonder what we were fussing about. So all we have to do is find a way to get those wins, whatever way we can. The last manager was an expert at doing that and maybe this one might start to think a bit more like that until he has the resources to be more idealistic in his approach.

Match prediction: Huddersfield Town 0 – 2 Watford

I almost never predict Town defeats but I just can’t see anything else today, even after my attempt in the section above to be a bit more positive. It’s not the results of the last two matches but the performances. Both the Leeds and the Cardiff games were over as contests within half an hour and I can’t see us changing enough in a week to win against Watford. I think we’ll see a reaction because Darren Moore’s job will be on the line if his team keeps losing by huge scorelines but I don’t see how he’ll be able to get a win with the depleted squad he has available. I don’t see how anyone could, to be fair to our beleaguered manager.

So I think a two-nil defeat would actually be a small step forward for Town because at least that kind of a loss isn’t a humiliation and we’d at least still in the game for the whole 90 minutes with that scoreline, instead of suffering the humiliation of our opponents subbing off their best players to rest them early in the second half because they know we’re no threat to their lead. I would also hope that we see some fight from the players today too. As fans, we can forgive lack of ability from our team and being outplayed by opposition players of superior ability but it’s hard to stomach when you feel like the other team have worked harder and that’s how they’ve won.