SMITH: I knew my time at Huddersfield was at an end

reach the Premier League. He said: “The manager was very clever in how he approached that situation about what our targets were.

“He never actually set anyone a target, he never set himself one, he never set the players one and I’m sure he will have said to Dean (Hoyle, then chairman) at the time ‘we’re not setting a target on what we want to achieve this season. If we work hard, if we do the right things, if we buy into what we’re trying to do as a football club, it’ll take care of itself.’

“I think we all saw that as an opportunity to go under the radar a bit and see how far we can actually go.

“It was probably around Christmas where I thought to myself ‘I’m quietly confident here.’ We’d started the season great, we were scoring, we were keeping clean sheets, we went to Newcastle and won...I thought if we just keep quiet we’ll go under the radar and we’ll be in and around it.

“But his message throughout the whole season, even to the point of March-April, was ‘we don’t have a target, we just carry on as normal.’”

Grayson ponted out that the majority of pundits wrote Town off before the season began and that their survival in the first year in the Premier League left a few people with egg on their faces.

Smith said: “Do you know what it was? That was what spurred us on more than anything really.

“Wagner at the time still had the same belief that we’d got there by having no limit on what we want to achieve and now we’re here we’re not going to change.

“All the people that were writing us off, it actually made us stronger because nobody expected anything from us. We were just chipping away and slowly picking up points that would probably be enough to stay up.

“Then we got to Chelsea away and we were thinking ‘if we can get through this game, damage limitation, then we have a home game,’ but we go to Stamford Bridge and end up getting a draw that keeps us up.”

Then came the second season in the Premier League, which began disastrously and didn’t really get much better.

Wagner left in January with Town bottom of the table and they finished the season there with just three wins and seven draws.

Asked if that poor form came as a shock to the players, Smith said: “It was a surprise because we all knew what David stood for in terms of never giving in.

“He was never someone who would chuck in the towel. But I just think he’d taken Huddersfield to their absolute limit.

“He’d taken us from a Championship side who were always in and around mid-table to being a Premier League team who could stay in the Premier League. “But then after that it was about sustaining it and the second season was always going to be so difficult because of the amount of firepower and money that was being splashed about by all the different teams.

“Huddersfield just couldn’t cope and match it. They just financially couldn’t deal with it. We’d spend £10m on someone and someone else would go and spend £20m on someone.

“That was always the position we were in at Huddersfield.

“When January came round I think the manager just thought ‘I have done all I can do here, there’s

There are not many clubs I would have left Huddersfield for and

that’s genuine