notes – Terrier Spirit – Huddersfield Town FC blog

Dec212024 by Terrier Spirit9 Comments

The best performance of the season – Notes on Huddersfield Town’s 4-0 win over Cambridge United

Matches

Last night Huddersfield Town beat Cambridge United 4-0 in the best performance of the season (so far). While we’ve seen glimmers of what the team is capable under Michael Duff, it’s rare that we’ve played well for long stretches in a game, so this was the most complete performance I’ve seen from Town in a long time. Most likely back in the Corberan days. Everyone had at least a decent game and several players were excellent on the night, which led to some very nice attractive football, capped off with the goals we deserved. There were other pleasing elements beyond the pretty football and abundance of goals, such as the way we absorbed pressure when they pressed our defenders or how the midfield controlled play and dictated the pace of the game. It’s a strange but lo...

Dec162024 by Terrier Spirit22 Comments

Huddersfield Town claw back a point in spite of the ref – Notes on the 2-2 draw with Lincoln

Matches

Huddersfield Town returned from two goals down to draw 2-2 with Lincoln City on Saturday afternoon. As you might expect from the way the scores seesawed, we saw plenty of good and bad from Town on the afternoon but overall a draw seemed about right in the end. While Lincoln were impressive in the first half and Town couldn’t cope with them, the opposite was true of the second half. If only there was a popular expression in football to describe when the game is vastly different in one half to the other! With the points being shared and the performance from Town featuring a bit of everything, fans can take away pretty much what they want from this game. Dwell on the horrors of our limp first half and it’ll feel like we’ve thrown away a potential victory against a team that came into ...

Dec42024 by Terrier Spirit11 Comments

Notes on Huddersfield Town’s 1-0 win against Wigan

Matches

It’s hard to know how to approach a write-up of last night’s game against Wigan, where Huddersfield Town won 1-0. The victory saw Town extend their unbeaten run in the league to eight games and was also our seventh consecutive win at home, so whichever way you slice it, this result is part of a wider upturn in Huddersfield Town’s fortunes. However, the game also saw some of the club’s persistent problems from this season continue. Our strikers were mostly hard-working but poor, the football we play is stodgy and dull for long periods, and it takes four times as many chances than other teams to actually get the ball in the net. Winning games when you’re not at your best is what successful teams do. Though those teams tend to play well with the rare average performance, Town seem to...

Nov272024 by Terrier Spirit7 Comments

Town win in spite of spurned chances – Notes on Huddersfield Town’s 2-0 win over Leyton Orient

Matches

Huddersfield Town won 2-0 at Leyton Orient last night, in a game where they created enough chances to win by five or six goals but due to poor finishing and incompetent strikers, the game was much closer than it needed to be. Town haven't won an away game since Bolton back in September, so this was an important win, even if there were elements of the performance that could have been better. Grumbling after winning is becoming a nasty habit of mine after Town games but it's hard to talk about a game like this without pointing out the negatives as well as the positives. On the brighter side, Town carved out plenty of chances to win the game comfortably and showed good resolve and organisation when Orient had a strong spell at the start of the second half. It's also worth remembering that...

Nov252024 by Terrier Spirit7 Comments

Nathan Jones has another bad day in Huddersfield – Notes on Town’s 2-1 win over Charlton

Matches

Huddersfield Town beat Charlton 2-1 on Saturday in a game that most people will struggle to remember when they look back on this season. The football was mostly scrappy and lacking in entertainment value but at least Town did enough to get a win, even if they made hard work of it at times. The horrendous weather and the first-half red card for Charlton hampered the game, though it has to be said that Charlton seemed to be improved by going down to ten men and we struggled at times despite having the numerical advantage. While this didn’t feel like a great performance from Town it did push us up into the playoff positions and only five points from Wrexham in the second automatic promotion spot (though Birmingham’s games in hand could mean they climb back up the table when they...

Nov142024 by Terrier Spirit5 Comments

Notes on Huddersfield Town’s 4-1 cup win over Manchester United U21s

Matches

Huddersfield Town beat Manchester United's Under 21 team 4-1 on Tuesday night in the final group game of the Bristol Street Motors Cup. The victory meant that Town leapfrogged the youth team into second place and secured a place in the knockout stages of the cup that will progress from waste of time to incredibly important if we can win a few more games and secure a day out to Wembley. It's hard to work out how good this result and performance were really. Manchester United's youngsters are a very different team to the ones we're typically playing every week, so giving them a convincing beating with a near-full-strength Town team isn't easy to judge. In the game we saw flashes of quality from the opposition that aren't typically on display in League One but equally, they were...

Nov102024 by Terrier Spirit27 Comments

A mixed bag – Notes on Huddersfield Town’s 2-2 draw with Crawley Town

Matches

If you poured a full cup of boiling hot coffee into your lap one day and then the following day you merely dribbled coffee down your shirt, the second day was not great but an improvement on the mess you made of yourself the previous time. That's the best analogy I can come up with about Town coming up against Crawley and only managing to take away a point after they came from behind twice. An improvement from the horrors of Tommy Tonks last week but hardly a result to get fans back on board after last week's result had fans debating whether it was the worst in our history. Against Crawley it wasn't an awful Town performance but it was also not completely convincing either. Familiar fragilities raised their heads for both the goals we conceded and the periods when we were chasing the ...

Oct232024 by Terrier Spirit6 Comments

Fancy jackets, a dog in a frock, reality TV stars and go-go-gadget legs – Notes on Huddersfield Town’s draw with Wrexham

Matches

Huddersfield Town drew their first game of the season against Wrexham last night, with neither side able to break the deadlock in an entertaining and hard-fought game. While a win would have been better, taking a point from a game where Town spent long periods under pressure shows a notable improvement from their recent slump, where they would crumble at the first sign of difficulty. It's too early to say Huddersfield Town's demons have been banished but this point at least shows that the team is capable of showing a bit of mental toughness when up against it. It was also nice to see Town ride out a tricky spell and then become the better team after a bit of adversity. It's open to debate, but my impression from the game was that Wrexham were the better team in the first half, To...

Oct72024 by Terrier Spirit6 Comments

The Herbie Kane Soap Opera – Notes on Huddersfield Town’s 2-0 win over Barnsley

Matches

What a difference a game can make! After the gloom was starting to gather over Town following four consecutive defeats, the team put in a much-needed display against Barnsley on Saturday, winning 2-0 and deservingly coming out on top. While one game doesn't change everything and the problems we've seen in recent games could still be festering under the surface, this game did feel significant beyond the result and could potentially act as a turning point in the season. It will hopefully mark the end of our poor run and be a transition into a happier spell for Michael Duff and his squad of players. Here are some of my thoughts from the game. Town dominated the first half without getting their reward Like the way heavyweight boxers will probe with their jabs in the early roun...

Oct42024 by Terrier Spirit12 Comments

Birmingham show Town how it’s done – Notes on Huddersfield Town’s 1-0 defeat to Birmingham City

Matches

Eskimos are thought to have 40 to 50 different words for snow, because they experience so many different varieties of the stuff. Therefore, at this stage in Huddersfield Town's history, Town fans should probably have at least a hundred different words to describe what a defeat feels like. We've become so accustomed to the various feelings that losing a football match can evoke that it makes supporting this football team seem more like an act of penance than something people literally choose to do with their free time for actual entertainment and willingly hand their money over to watch. You would need a deep and crude vocabulary to be able to fully express the number of defeats we've sat through over the years. So the type of defeat Huddersfield Town succumbed to in Birmingham on...