Shuffling the pack, was it fair?, testing the depth, Warnock Way suggestion, and more – Notes on Huddersfield Town’s draw with Stoke

Huddersfield Town were forced to share the spoils with Stoke on Wednesday night in Neil Warnock’s final game as Huddersfield Town manager. (it was actually his third “final” game but this time he really means it!)

In this article I’ll talk about how I think a draw was probably just about fair, pay some backhanded compliments to Stoke, consider how the fringe players fared when given a chance in this game, reflect for a moment on Warnock and Jepson’s time at Town through misty eyes and then look ahead to what’s coming next now we know Darren Moore is taking over…

Draw a fair result

At half time I would have snatched your hand off if you offered me a draw, as Stoke had bossed the game and could easily have been ahead by a couple of goals by that stage. But a decent set piece goal had put us ahead and some wasteful finishing, an offside goal and some fairly decent marking meant that Stoke’s dominance only led to one goal for our opponents and Town still had a few chances of their own here and there. 

One thing that I think Neil Warnock did very well during his time at Town was to set up his team in such a way that we could be comprehensively outplayed in the middle of the park but still be very competitive in both penalty areas, which is where games are won and lost. So the possession stats look bad in most of our games (this one included) but we typically have a similar number of shots to our opponents and often get results which don’t always seem to reflect the overall balance of play. When it happens consistently over a period of time, it’s not luck, it’s an approach which makes the most of a limited squad. Stoke had better players than us and the man-marking system we used meant that their good movement pulled us all over the pitch during the first half. But we just about kept them where we wanted them and that’s a large factor in why we stayed in the game. And why Warnock has been able to get a lot out of not very much since he replaced Mark Fotheringham.

While Stoke were clearly the dominant team in the first half, the changes Warnock made at half time (and Edmonds-Green’s replacement for Kasumu in the first half, who was underperforming before his injury) led to a huge improvement in Town and we suddenly looked a lot more competitive in just about every area of the pitch. Jaheim Headley was one of the brightest sparks, which is funny really as his entrance to the game was forced due to injury rather than managerial inspiration, but regardless he added some real penetration and threat down our left and helped the forwards to get into more dangerous areas because he was playing a good bit higher up the pitch than Ruffels did in the first half, or at least it seemed that way with his surging forward runs.

I feel like this game was a good example of why the Championship is such a fun level of football to watch. In the Premier League, if you have a bad patch in a game you could end up three or four down and out of the game but in this match both teams had spells of being on top and there was a nice ebb and flow. There were also scrappy periods where each team had to fight to get on top of the game and earn the right to play their football, but unlike with League One or Two, there were some real quality players on the pitch to enjoy watching when it was possible to be a bit more expansive. So it might not always have been a beautiful game, but I enjoyed how it swung back and forth, there were some decent battles and in the end it was just about the right result.

Stoke had a lot of quality but Town found a way to match them

I would expect that if you compared the two teams’ wage bills there would be a huge difference, Stoke’s maybe being double or even more than Town’s. So it shouldn’t be a huge surprise that their players are better than ours in terms of individual qualities and skill on the ball. As we found in our transfer dealings this summer, there are other clubs in this league that are fishing in a different pond to us when it comes to player recruitment. And it was possible to see what that extra money in wages and transfer fees gets you when you see the movement, touch and ball-playing ability of the forward players like Tyrese Campbell and Saed Haksabanovic. 

But it’s to Town’s credit that we hung in there, didn’t give them the easy chances we’ve allowed in too many other games this season and therefore they struggled to turn dominant spells into goals. Then that meant that we were able to turn a well-earned free kick into a goal that put us ahead from a beautiful Sorba Thomas flswt piece and an equally perfect Matty Pearson header. And the equaliser for Town might have been scruffier but it was deserved because in the second half we managed to keep pushing them back with our energy and direct running, which they struggled to cope with.

While I think we’ll continue to find it hard to beat the teams at the top end of the table, this little unbeaten run that Town are now on provides proof that we’re capable of picking up results at this level with the squad that we have. It isn’t always pretty and we can’t alway go toe-to-toe with teams but we can find a way to get results. I know some fans hate the “little Huddersfield” mentality this paragraph suggests, but I’m really just saying that the current squad is a long way behind the average Championship standard, so if Darren Moore wants to replicate Neil Warnock’s trick of picking up unexpected points with Town, he’ll need to find a way to play that nullifies the opposition’s strengths and masks our weaknesses. 

Neil Warnock finally tests the depth of his squad in last match

One of the things that I liked about this final match of Neil Warnock’s time at Town was how he made full use of the squad available to him. I think before this game he’s been a little bit reluctant to trust some of the fringe players in Championship games, such as Edmonds-Green, Nakayama, Headley and Jackson. All have ability but question marks about how they can cope against decent Championship teams. In fact, with Nakayama, it’s not even a suspicion because Warnock said in a press conference that he felt he was making too many mistakes in B Team games to trust him in defence, but that was mostly because he’s had such a long injury lay off.

On the whole, I think the faith shown in the fringe players was repaid. I think this was the best I’ve seen Edmonds-Green play this season. He provided a good screen for the defence when he came on for Kasumu and while he kept it relatively simple, he also didn’t get anything wrong either. Nakayama took a while to grow into the game and was a bit loose with his passing at times but he showed some real class at times too. I’d say he’s probably got the best first touch of any player in the team, which is strange considering he’s a central defender. I hope we see more of him now he’s back in the starting lineup.

I’ve already mentioned Headley, who did well on the left wing-back role but Ben Jackson did a decent, if less eye-catching job on the opposite flank. He did provide a superb low, driven cross in the box for the equaliser and put in a few other decent balls too and provided a more secure defensive base on the right side of the field, after Sorba Thomas once again struggled to track runners in the first half. 

A fitting farewell to a pair of Town legends

It was lovely to be able to give Neil and Ronnie a proper send off after the game. It’s common for managers to leave football clubs with a sterile announcement on a website, coupled with a generic picture of a corner flag. So giving the management team another guard of honour and seeing all four sides of the ground staying behind to applaud them off the pitch was a special moment and completely deserved,

I think Neil Warnock appreciates these gestures a lot too, as he spoke about it in his interview with Radio Leeds and talked of how it’s rare for managers to get a guard of honour after getting booted out of a club. I know Neil Warnock has a way with words when he’s talking to the media, but “booted out” doesn’t sound exactly like the kind of phrasing the club would want him to be using to describe how they are moving him on so they can bring in a long-term successor. But, if he wants to stay and the club have told him he has to go, that is what’s happened I suppose.

Regardless, I think it’s nice that Warnock has left the club on good terms and leaves as a legend, with his record unbesmirched and the team in a decent league position and no obvious bad blood. That’s very rare in football management but he deserves it. 

I think it might be nice for the club to think about a more lasting tribute to Neil Warnock. A statue next to Harold Wilson in front of the train station may be a step too far but there are other options. Renaming the road approaching the stadium from Stadium Way (boring) to Warnock Way would be a pretty good one. Or if the club could bear to lose the sponsorship opportunity, they could name a stand after him. I’d rather sit in the Neil Warnock stand than the “Big Red End” that the stand I still call the Panasonic is currently titled.

Thinking about it, maybe we should wait until Warnock has retired for real before we make any lasting tribute. I’ve a paranoid fear that Town’s season could end in relegation at the hands of a team managed by Neil Warnock, and if that happens there probably won’t be much of an appetite for huge gestures of appreciation towards him!

Reflecting on the season so far

Now Warnock has left, it’s a good time to take a moment to look at how Town are doing. After having just one point after our opening four games (admittedly it was a very tough run of games) we’re now looking a lot better, with eight points from seven games. While it’s hardly world-beating in terms of points return, it is above the crucial point-a-game that you need to stay above relegation worries. And we’ve played a lot of the league’s toughest teams already, so in theory there should be easier fixtures ahead (though, as the cliche goes, there are no easy games in the Championship).

While we’re not in an amazing position, I think 16th in the league after seven games is pretty good. It’s probably a bit early to be looking too hard at the league table anyway but at least we’ve a few wins under our belts and there are teams below us struggling more than us. I’d like us to be aiming higher than just scraping survival this season but the lack of significant investment in the squad this summer (which was unavoidable by the sounds of it – so I’m not complaining)  will make it hard to really push on. 

I think the good news is that we’ve a starting eleven that should be able to compete with the majority of teams in the Championship and a few youngsters coming through that have potential to come in and make an impact too. And it’s possible that the January window will see us make some of the additions we failed to make to the team in the summer. 

What’s next…

I’ve not spoken much about the big news in this article: Darren Moore’s announcement as Town manager. I wanted to cover the Stoke game and Warnock’s departure first. I’ll do a full write up about our new man tomorrow but I’m pretty pleased with this appointment. Every new manager comes with a degree of risk but Moore feels lower risk than some of our past appointments because he’s managed at this level before, has a reputation of being a good man-manager, does the community and fan-engagement parts of the job well, and has a recent promotion on his CV.

It’ll be interesting to hear what he has to say in today’s press conference which the club have promised to broadcast live on YouTube at 1pm. I suppose it’ll be the usual platitudes but in between all that we might be able to get an idea about how he wants to do things, what he’s been promised by the club in terms of resources and how he wants the team to play.