Huddersfield Daily Examiner

Be happier with Town

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off each other.

“The manager might ask me what I know about opposing teams and how they play.

“But the big thing here is playing the way we want to.

“David sowed the seeds last season and they have grown.”

So does Hughes see Town as promotion contenders?

“It’s not the phrase I would use,” he said. “I’d say we are a club who are progressin­g.

“We’re taking a lot of steps in the right direction, but trying to do it in a measured sensible way.

“I was at Reading when they were going through that process, establishi­ng themselves as a top 10 Championsh­ip club with the ability to win a promotion.

“We are going the right way, but it’s vital to be able to stay at the level we are at now.

“Everyone involved in football wants success, and if we do get promotion, what a great achievemen­t.

“But we set our goals game by game and week by week and try to work steadily towards them without getting ahead of ourselves.” IWAN ROBERTS has no doubt Huddersfie­ld Town can challenge for promotion if they maintain the high standards illustrate­d against Norwich City.

The former Town goalscorin­g hero was at Carrow Road to see the 2-1 win as summariser for BBC Radio Leeds.

Welshman Roberts, now 48 and fondly remembered in both Huddersfie­ld and Norwich for his powerful No9 displays, was hugely impressed by David Wagner’s side.

And he’s warned their top-six rivals not to underestim­ate the men from the John Smith’s after Elias Kachunga’s double made it nine points in a week.

“I think a lot of sides in the Championsh­ip will have watched the match and I feel Huddersfie­ld Town have made a proper statement and thrown down a marker,” said Roberts, who scored 50 Town goals in 142 appearance­s in the early 1990s.

“The are saying ‘we are one of the best sides in this division and you are going to have to work so, so hard and be at your very best to get anything off us’.

“They’ve set a standard which is incredibly high and they’ve got to try and maintain that over the rest of a 46-match season.

“There will be the odd off-day and the odd poor performanc­e, but eight or nine times out of 10, if they produce the levels of performanc­e and fitness they showed at Norwich they won’t be far away.”

Roberts has seen almost all the Championsh­ip sides in his media work and doesn’t seen Town slipping off the top-six pace.

“I cover the Championsh­ip on a regular basis, and that first-half performanc­e from Town was the best I’ve seen all season,” said Roberts.

“When I saw Newcastle play Cardiff they didn’t play that type of football.

“I haven’t seen Reading, who I’m told are playing some really good stuff under Jaap Stam, but I have seen the majority of teams in this league, and that opening 45 minutes is by far the best I’ve seen. “It was breathtaki­ng. “The football they played, the sharpness in the pass, the movement and the understand­ing is everything you want to see from your players.”

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