Huddersfield Town and Burnley have got the honour of cutting the ribbon on the new football league season tomorrow night in front of the Sky cameras. In this article I’ll preview some of the potential talking points from the game.
Opening day fixtures can be misleading, after a summer of anticipation, their significance can be blown out of proportion and rather than a single result they are often seen as a signifier of how the whole season will go. But in fact they are just one game and because Town are a team in transition it’ll be even harder than usual to draw any kind of conclusions from tomorrow night’s game as they’re most likely going to need a few games to find their feet.
Anyway, here are a few of my thoughts about tomorrow night’s game…
What kind of head coach will Danny Schofield be?
Schofield has said that he’s not just going to be a Corberan clone and will be putting some of his own ideas into this mix as Town head coach. It’ll be interesting to see how that looks in a competitive fixture. Carlos liked to tinker a lot with his tactics and that helped us pick up a lot of points last season (and possibly cost us a few occasionally too). Will Schofield do the same?
I think the plan for this season would have been for Town to attack more even if Carlos was in charge still, so I’m hoping we’ll see Town trying to create more chances in the final third and get more players forward.
It will also be interesting to see how Schofield approaches possession and pressing. When Corberan arrived he talked about wanting to dominate the ball and press high up the pitch but by the end of last season we’d found a successful formula that depended more on sitting deep and letting the opposition have the ball most of the time.
Based on the evidence from the Bolton friendly last weekend, Schofield wants his team to press high up the field and play at a high tempo. Which is great when it works well but can quickly unravel if your fitness levels aren’t right or if you make too many mistakes in the wrong areas.
How many new players will we see?
There has been quite a bit of churn within the squad this summer and, like most fans, I’m keen to see what our new boys look like. But will we actually see many of our new players start the game tonight? I’m not so sure. Matty Pearson rolled his ankle in the Bolton friendly last weekend so we could see either Will Boyle or Yuta Nakayama in central defence but otherwise there may not be any new faces starting the game tomorrow.
While I’m excited to see some new players, I can’t really complain about a slow integration as the new boys haven’t had a lot of time to play with their teammates yet. Jack Rudoni may be the closest to starting, having played a couple of friendlies so far, though mostly with second-string players and youngsters.
Will Burnely be trying to play like Man City under Kompany?
This will be Vincent Kompany’s first competitive game as Burnley manager and it could be the very best time for us to play them as he tries to implement his new playing style. Having played under Pep Guadiola for years at Man City and managed in Belgium for a while it seems he’s been brought in at Burnley to change their style of play from bruisers to practitioners of the beautiful game.
Whether this is a wise move is debateable but the scale of this transition is not. Hopefully we’ll be able to exploit the growing pains of a team that is transitioning from years of being a physical, long-ball team into a team that wants to hold possession and play out from the back. While I’ve perhaps been a bit simplistic in my anaylsis, I think it is likely that Burnley are going to have a slightly bumpy few months while they try to adapt to their new coach’s philosophy. If I was Danny Schofield I would be setting Town up tomorrow night to put as much pressure on Burnley as possible and try to catch them in possession high up the field as much as possible.
Will Burnely risk playing their valuable assets?
Do you remember the Karlan Grant transfer saga? We knew that West Brom wanted him and we wanted to sell him but the deal couldn’t be concluded, so he sat on the side lines for about a month not playing while we struggled along without him in the team. We couldn’t risk injuring a player we were about to sell for around £15m but we also could have really used a player that could score for fun and it was really annoying.
Burnley have a few players in a similar position for this game, Maxwell Cornet and Dwight McNeil are both linked with expensive transfers away from Burnley and are likely to miss out on tomorrow night’s game. While both would be very good players in the Championship, it would be a big risk to play them when they are on the brink of moves away. Not to mention that their minds will be elsewhere if they’re about to make moves to another club anyway.
Will we make use of the new five subs rule?
There are often little tweaks to the rules that come in at the start of new seasons but this year there is a fairly big one, we’re going back to five subs. During project restart clubs were allowed to make five substitutes to counteract the fatigue that was caused by the fixture conjestion. The rule was dropped last season but it has been brought back in this year.
I’ll be interested to see how this rule change affects games and how Town make use of it. With our preseason being shorter than usual, I suspect we’ll need to freshen things up fairly early just to make sure we’ve got enough energy on the pitch in the late stages. It will also mean there’s a bit more of a tactical cat and mouse game with the other bench as the team that finishes the game could have 50% different outfield players to the team that start the game.
Will all the season card holders turn up?
We’ve sold a lot of season cards for this season but they were pretty cheap compared to the rest of the division and most were sold when Town were riding high and were on the brink of promotion. Now we’ve lost our enigmatic head coach, sold some our best players and are having to start again, will everyone turn up? I’ve made it sound pretty bleak there, but actually, I’m quite excited for this season. It might not be clear what kind of a season we have in store but that’s the part that I find exciting.
The club have a policy of announcing the attendance based on the number of tickets sold, which is the number of season card holders added to the number of individual one-off tickets sold for the match. So completely ignore the announced attendance figure as it is a work of fiction compared to the bums on seats number which the club know but rarely actually publicise.
The actual number of people through the turnstiles is usually many thousands lower the the official attendance, so it will be interesting to see if that is the case tomorrow night or not. Hopefully the draw of the first game of the season against ex-Premier League opposition will prove alluring. Then again, the fact it’s on Sky and is a night game will keep people away, alongside the fact many people are on holiday added to the fact that football in July that isn’t a World Cup feels just plain wrong!
First who is Burnely. Are they a dyslexic Lancashire club! Second the loss of O’Brien and Toffolo possibly isn’t as bad as it first looked. Our midfield has had 2 positions locked out by Hogg and O’Brien for some time as they were the first two names selected each week. Both worked really hard, but neither of them created all that much or scored goals. Toffolo also made left/wing back his own. His assists and goals will be missed but again, even after a bad game, you couldn’t leave him out, meaning there was no chance for anyone else. There are now plenty of chances for a number of players, new and old, to come into the side and prove themselves. It will be interesting to see who steps up. It goes without saying that I hope both O’Brien and Toffolo succeed in the Premier League. Apart from football, they seem really nice blokes who deserve to do well..