Schindler’s

OF COURSE it is a cliche. But it had to be a German who won the penalty shoot-out in football’s most lucrative match.

Christopher Schindler stepped up after more than two hours of nail-biting tension at Wembley to ram home the penalty that took Huddersfield Town back into the top flight after 45 years.

As Gary Lineker once observed, football is about 22 men chasing a ball for 90 minutes, and at the end the Germans always win. Quite often on penalties.

Centre-back Schindler cost the Terriers £1.8million from Munich 1860 last summer. His nerveless spot-kick to settle this Championship final earned his club a cool £185m, and it will be even more if they survive next season. Reading’s players slumped to the pitch in tears as AT WEMBLEY settle a game that can transform the life of a club and a player.

But there is little doubt that David Wagner’s team deserved to make it to dreamland. It was a grim, attritional struggle at Wembley and a match that will not live long in the memory.

Nor for that matter will the rest of a season in which they finished with a goal difference of -2 and failed to score a goal, aside from penalties, in the play-offs.

But that little corner of West Yorkshire, which features managers as great at Herbert Chapman and Bill Shankly in its illustrious past, will not care a jot about that this morning.

Huddersfield were in the bottom tier of the Football League 14 years ago, so it has been an arduous climb back, inspired by the likeable Wagner, recruited from managing Borussia Dortmund’s reserves.

In pre-season he sent his players to a remote Swedish island to fend for themselves for a week. They were the team with one of the smallest budgets in the Championship. But they had forged a tremendous bond under the German, and it showed at Wembley.

Wagner’s team started much the brighter, as Michael Hefele nodded wide from close range.

But there came an even better chance five minutes later, as Elias Kachunga crossed and Izzy Brown somehow put his shot wide from two yards when it seemed easier to score.

Reading, in fact, created little, though Lewis Grabban did curl a shot wide. They found it very hard to get through Hudderfield’s ‘gegenpressen’ – high press, in German, in case you wondered.

Stam’s team were better after the break, though keeper Ali Al Habsi had to move quickly to save Chris Lowe’s shot. For the Royals, John Swift saw his effort beaten away by Ward,