“Really frustrating” Notes on Huddersfield Town’s 0-0 draw against 10-man Mansfield Town

Huddersfield Town came away from Mansfield with a point after drawing Saturday’s match 0-0 despite playing most of the second half against ten men. Getting a point away from home is often seen as a good outcome but this draw feels harder to put a positive spin on than the 1-1 draw against Notts County the weekend before. I wouldn’t say that Town were terrible in this game but they definitely underperformed and struggled firstly against a physical and direct opponent and then after the red card they couldn’t break down a stubborn and well-drilled Mansfield Town team.

The stalemate at least kept Town’s unbeaten start to the season intact and we are currently sat in second place in the embryonic league table. So while there are a few grumbles and obvious wrinkles that need ironing out of the team, it’s not such a bad thing that we’re managing to hold a decent league position despite clearly having the potential to be better.

Here are a few more of my thoughts on the game…  

Playing them at their own game

Mansfield are a team that know what they are, they play to their strengths and are difficult for other teams to play against when they’re at their best. I think the mistake that we made in this first half was to play the game on their terms. We didn’t do a bad job of matching up to them in a battle but we didn’t really play to our own strengths.

Martin Drury has talked in the past about wanting to be able to control the flow of games more and avoid games becoming like basketball, with the ball pinging up and down the field. We didn’t control this game and if anything we allowed Mansfield to dictate the way the game was played, which meant we were on the back foot throughout much of the first half.

There’s something to be said about not being at your best but still being able to keep in the game but it’s a mild form of praise at best. My overall impression of the first half was that we were lucky to go into the break level and needed to rethink our approach to avoid Mansfield dominating the second half too.

(Huddersfield) Town weren’t dreadful and did show some sparks of what they’re capable of in the first half but too much of our play was funneled through our right side, which either meant Fernandes was dribbling into traffic or Bronkhorst was continuing his appalling run of crossing to nobody whenever he gets into a good position. 

Struggling against ten men… again 

The second half was quickly turned on its head when Owen Dodgson received a straight red card just two minutes after being subbed on at half-time. Even Nigel Clough admitted the tackle deserved a red card after the game, so there’s not much point discussing the decision. DSF deserves some credit for his speed at getting in front of the player to draw the foul though. 

I am coming around to the idea that opponents receiving a red card isn’t the shortcut to an easy victory that I once thought they were. Mansfield Town reduced their chances of winning by losing a player but if anything it improved their chances of a draw as they were able to shift to the kind of defensive approach that we struggle to break down.

Compared to other times we’ve found it hard to play against ten men, I think we mostly did the right thing in this game. We moved the ball from side to side to try and find gaps, we had players pushing up and there were spells when we pinned them in their own box and raised the pressure. The problem was that we didn’t do any of these things well enough to open up Mansfield’s defence and they played the circumstances better than we did. 

One of the things that I found really frustrating in this game, across both halves but particularly during the period we were playing ten men, was how wayward simple passes were going. During a phase of the game where we needed to zip the ball around the pitch and stretch Mansfield, we constantly passed the ball slightly behind the recipient, meaning they had to take a step backwards to receive it, take a touch and then move forward. Compared to a well-placed pass into the stride of a player, these sloppy passes killed our momentum and made it easy for Mansfield to stay in shape despite having a one-man deficit. 

Too many off days

I wouldn’t say any players were particularly awful in this game but quite a lot were below their best. Marcus Harness controlled the ball like he was playing with concrete boots on, Fernandes showed moments of real class but rarely in a way that hurt Mansfield, Bojan Radulovic took a whack in the first half and it seemed to knock all the fight out of him, Bali Mumba repeatedly ran straight into trouble and Jay Sway failed to give us the penetration we needed down the left. 

It’s possible to wang on about formations and systems but aside from all that, the players on the pitch have to play well to give the team a chance of winning. One or two having off days can be countered if everyone else is on song but if four, five or more are below par then it becomes very hard to win a game. 

Even Joe Taylor, currently in his best run of form for us, struggled to make an impact. Though in his case, he was making the usual runs but wasn’t receiving the service he’s been getting lately. It was understandable he was getting frustrated but I worry that once he gets irritated he seems to lose his way and becomes less effective. 

Two draws that could have been wins

This draw, coupled with the Notts County draw, means that we’ve now dropped four points against pretty average League One teams. It’s not a disaster, given our other positive results this season but it’s a sign that we struggle against well-organised and defensively solid teams. 

It’s not time to start getting the pitchforks out for Martin Drury but I think these two games have shown that we need to do a bit of work on the training pitch on our attacking play. We’ve found a way to be dangerous against opponents that push up and want to have lots of the ball but we’re struggling to break down teams that are more interested in sitting back and soaking up pressure. 

With the players we have available, it shouldn’t be that we can only score goals from fast breaks and quick balls forward. But currently we don’t seem to have enough ideas to create the number of chances we need to get goals against these sorts of sides. Either we need to start converting the chances we create more clinically or we need to improve the quality and quantity of chances we create against defensive-minded opponents.

This feels like the kind of problem that a new manager is going to face in their early days and it will be a test of Martin Drury to see how quickly he comes up with an answer. He may be hampered by the lack of good options down the left flank but until that issue is fixed in the transfer market, he needs to come up with a plan that means we can get more than just a point from these kinds of games.

AOB

Ledson’s elbow – I’d love to be a fly on the wall for the conversation between Ryan Ledson and Ilias Bronkhorst at half-time in this game. Ledson was given an absolute hospital pass by Bronkhorst which led to a Mansfield player sliding through the back of the Town skipper the millisecond he received the ball. The elbow injury that resulted from this challenge ended Ledson’s game and looked like one of those injuries that seem innocuous but can be hard to recover from. Hopefully he’ll be alright.

Manager of the month award – It’s worth acknowledging Martin Drury’s Manager of the Month award for August. Given this was his first proper management job, it’s impressive that he’s received this accolade in his first month in charge. It’s pretty common to lose the next game after getting these awards, so the point from the Mansfield Town game is OK in that context. 

Sorba’s car crash – It was unfathomable how Sorba Thomas managed to flip his Land Rover over on a busy street near Hull’s training ground last week but somehow he did. Even stranger was the fact that he walked away unscathed. The fact that nobody was hurt by this freak accident means we can laugh at it but I do wonder what on Earth he was doing to crash a car that way. While I miss his crossing and set piece deliveries, I can’t say I’ve missed the chaos that seems to follow him around.