We’re doomed! A pessimistic Huddersfield Town season preview

I like to split my season previews into two and write a pessimistic and optimsitic version. I’ve already published the optimistic version, so you can click over and read that one if you were born on the sunny side of the street. Otherwise, if you’d prefer to dwell on the more concerning omens about the season ahead, strap yourself in for my pitch black preview of the coming season.

Before I get started, I’d like to say that this year’s negative preview has been harder to write than in previous seasons, as my genuine feelings towards Town are pretty positive right now despite our relegation. So while there may be some truth in the ideas expressed below, I’m actually not nearly as negative as this article might suggest. My real feelings are probably a mixture of the positive and negative previews but much closer to the happy clappy side of things.  

The squad overhaul hasn’t really happened

Town were relegated with a squad of players that didn’t score enough goals, had a tendency to down tools mid-game then ship large numbers of goals, and were so unprofessional that a vastly experienced continental manager had a month-long meltdown involving slating nearly the whole squad in his press conferences, wiping millions off the value of some of our best players. We were told that there would be a clear out of the bad apples but it is has barely happened. 

Apart from returning loanees, shipping out B Team deadwood and a couple of expired contracts, we’ve not really seen the expected overhaul. The only real significant first teamers to leave this summer have been Jack Rudoni and Sorba Thomas, who have been the two most creative players in a team with very little creativity in the last few seasons. 

The contract situations of many of our players have clearly hampered the club in their desire to move on players that might otherwise have left. However, if we really wanted to have a fresh start this season we wouldn’t be expecting our new head coach to get a tune from fundamentally the same group of players that have failed for the last four or five other managers that they’ve played under. Maybe, if we keep changing managers and not players but the results stay bad, it’s the players that are the problem. 

There’s plenty of time left in the window for deals to be done but we said the same thing last summer and the expected flurry of late deals never materialised. Instead we went into the season with a half-baked squad and paid the price. While I’d hope we’ve learned our lesson this time around, I worry that rather than learn from mistakes, there are some people in the senior leadership at Town that would rather rebrand failures as successes.

We haven’t signed enough players

Linked to the above point about not getting rid of the players that are part of the group tarred by the relegation of last season, we’ve also not brought in enough fresh faces to liven up the group. Four new players just isn’t enough to feel like we’ve made a huge change to the team that struggled so much last season, particularly if we’re also trying to completely change the way we play and the formation we use.

I’ve praised the new players highly in my positive preview article. Though while I’m grumbling: Miller has a shocking injury record, Kane looks fifteen years older than his real age and while all of them are decent signings, none of them represent a significant investment in the squad in terms of the fees we’ve paid if the rumours are to be believed.

I’ve no doubt that deals will be done between now and the end of the transfer window but I’m not clear whether they will be the right ones. I get the impression that Kevin Nagle is willing to invest his money on the right players and Michael Duff seems pretty clear on where the weaknesses are in his squad that need recruiting for. It’s the bit in between those two people I’m not completely convinced about. Can the infrastructure the club has in place identify targets, negotiate deals and get them over the line? 

I’ve not gone into great depth about the Alfie May deal other than saying that Birmingham gazumped us on that deal but that situation seemed like a mess. I’m not saying the club should have matched the rumoured wages Birmingham paid May to tempt him out of his Huddersfield Town medical (he was that close to signing for us apparently!) but I do wonder if we handled that deal as well as we could. If the stories in the press were correct, Charlton strung us along for a long time, telling us that they were waiting for a new striker themselves before they could allow the deal to go through or something similar. In retrospect it seems like we were given the runaround and they got a marginally better offer from Birmingham due to their wrangling. If we’d have negotiated harder we may have concluded the deal before a rival bidder entered the fray. Maybe I’m completely wide of the mark and there was nothing we could have done to stop that deal from collapsing but I worry that we are often a bit gullible in these situations and other clubs take advantage.

Duff seems good but don’t get attached – we can’t keep hold of managers

Over the last two seasons, Town have averaged three managers a season. So while Michael Duff looks like a good appointment at this point, after a positive preseason, who knows where we will be by Halloween. Football is so fickle that if we don’t win our first three games then it’s almost certain that there will be a #DuffOut hashtag starting to circulate on social media. 

The current average tenure of a Huddersfield Town manager is similar to the lifespan of a goldfish from the fair and that can’t be a good thing. We’re becoming the Watford of the North. If one or two managers leave after a short timescale it could be down to their individual deficiencies but when it’s happening over and over again then it’s something that’s obviously wrong with the club.

So for that reason, I really hope that Duff isn’t the latest neck on the chopping block and this time we stick with a manager. His last managerial appointment was short lived at Swansea and from his comments it’s clear that he regrets jumping ship from Barnsley to manage in south Wales so hopefully he sees his project at Town as a long-term appointment. As much as any job in football can be seen that way. 

I’ve looked through the list of recent Huddersfield Town managers. Only Carlos Corberan and David Wagner have managed full seasons at Town in the last nine years. Breitenreiter, Moore, Warnock, Fotheringham, Schofield, Cowley and Siewert all lasted under a season in charge. So the history books suggest that Duff will have to be better than seven of our last nine permanent managers to still be in charge by May next year, which is a pretty depressing statistic. 

League One will be tough

In my optimistic preview I’ve played down the difficulty of League One by pointing out how the quality of the teams in the Championship is much higher but that doesn’t mean that League One will be a breeze for Town; far from it. If anything, it will be like a knife fight in the mud. Are we ready to get our hands dirty and scrap it out with the teams at this level? While I know there are some quality footballing teams in the third tier, it’s also true that there are plenty of teams that are scrappy and horrible to play against. Can Town find a way through them? I get the feeling Michael Duff knows this will be a problem Town will come up against but have we got the tools to solve these problems?

And if we don’t get enough points against these “weaker” teams that will most likely be incredibly hard work to play against, we’ll then have to try and get something from the teams suchas Bolton and Birmingham who are probably as good or better than many teams currently in the Championship. The way that Birmingham have spent this summer means that anything short of a 100 points is pretty much a failure for them and almost everyone is predicting them to finish in an automatic promotion spot, meaning Town and the rest of the league are competing for the remaining other spot or a place in the playoffs. 

It’s quite possible that Town could have a very good season but still fall short if a few other teams pull off equally good years themselves. The year Darren Moore got Sheffield Wednesday promoted, he had to do it through the League One playoffs despite amassing a huge points total because Plymouth and Ipswich also had excellent seasons too. While Town have a pretty decent record in the playoffs, we also know it’s not far from a lottery and if we are serious about bouncing straight back we should be aiming for an automatic spot and that will be exceptionally hard to attain I suspect.

We’ve got a losing habit

Part of the reason I am doubtful about Town’s ability to become a winning machine this season is that we’ve got so used to being a rubbish team. The winning mentality that Kevin Nagle talks about often in his video diaries isn’t really there. It’s a bit of a circular thing though, because the best way to have a winning mentality is to win games but the best way to win games is to have a winning mentality. So I’m not completely sure how we fix it.

Breaking up the squad and building a new one would have been a way to break this losing mentality but I’ve talked above about how the overhaul we hoped for this summer hasn’t materialised and we’ve still got the bulk of the squad that went down last season. Having a new head coach in place may help with that, particuarly one with a disciplined approach and focus on getting good principles instilled in the players. But then again, his most recent experience was a short, failed tenure at Swansea which will still be nagging in the back of his mind too despite his prior successes at Barnsley and Cheltenham. 

If we can win three out of our first four games then I’m sure we’ll all feel good and it’ll create a buzz about the place. But if we don’t hit the ground running and it’s a bumpy start, I worry we’ll see players slip back into their habits from last season where their shoulders slump as soon as the first goal of a game goes in and every time a ball goes out of play they start bickering with one another. It’s not like that at the moment, the mood in the camp is clearly good but I really don’t want to go back to how things were last season.

Duff’s system looks solid but will it be creative?

I’m actually quite a fan of Duff’s system that he’s implemented this preseason despite what I’m about to say. Regardless of the specific system he’s brought in, I think it’s valuable just because he actually has a system. Almost any kind of tactical approach would be worthwhile providing we put it in place and follow through with it, after drifting through recent seasons with only vague approaches of trying to hang in games and nick something if we can. 

Having said that, the 3-5-2 shape that Michael Duff has been preferring so far seems to lack a place for wingers. Josh Koroma and Pat Jones are the only proper wingers left on Towns books now and the former is now playing as a striker in this system and the latter has been used as a backup wingback on the right. I worry that this will leave us with a lack of creativity, particularly in wide areas, as the creativity is expected to come from the attacking midfielders who play fairly narrowly most of the time. 

To make matters worse, our most creative outlets from recent seasons have been Sorba Thomas and Jack Rudoni, so we’ve not got those particular players to lean on for inspiration any more either. Herbie Kane and Antony Evans do seem like they will be able to bring something new to the table in fairness, but without out-and-out wingers on the pitch we might not generate all that many chances from wide areas. In fairness, we’ve done OK so far in the friendly games in this respect but I worry that this system may prioritise control over creativity at times.

Where is the pace?

If I was to pick Town’s most experienced back three it would be Lees, Pearson and Helik. If I was to pick the highest quality midfield three, I would personally pick Hogg, Evans and Kane. But if these six were to play together in central midfield and defence it would be pretty dangerous for Town as all of them are too slow and any opposition player with even moderate pace would be able to make a footrace with any of those players I mentioned look like Wile E Cayote vs Roadrunner.

It’s not just the players I’ve mentioned above either, none of the following are exactly speed demons either: Turton, Ruffels, Wiles, Ward, Radulovic and Iorpenda (though maybe Iorpenda’s got the same quality Phil Billing, had with long legs that look like they’re moving slowly but are actually moving quickly). 

There are a few quick players within the squad, Koroma, Kasumu, Spencer, Miller, Sorensen and Headley but these players are mostly up front or in the wingback areas. Or in Spencer and Kasumu’s cases, often using their speed to correct their poor positioning. 

So almost regardless of the position we’re recruiting for, a bit of pace would be part of the brief for the recruitment team if I was Michael Duff as I worry this could be an area we are exposed in. Otherwise, he may find his team selections complicated by needing to avoid certain combinations, so he doesn’t put too many slow coaches in the same areas of the pitch.

I hope this article hasn’t left you feeling too down in the dumps. Remember, it’s not all doom and gloom! Read my positive season preview to lift your spirits. I actually think there’s a lot more to be positive about than negative this season and I suspect we’ll have a good time in League One, one way or another.