4-3 DEFEAT TO STOKE
BY REFLECTING ON TOWN’S
Championship teams who have failed to score in fewer games than Huddersfield Town (2): None. They share the same record as Bournemouth, Bristol City and Swansea City, who are 2nd, 3rd and 4th respectively.
Championship teams who have kept fewer clean sheets than Town (3): Coventry City, Nottingham Forest, Rotherham United, Wycombe Wanderers, Derby County. They are all in the bottom six.
No other Championship side has lost after going ahead more than once this season; Town have done it three times, all in the space of the last six games. For all their many, many faults last season, they only lost after taking the lead three times across all 46 games.
Playing out from the back carries inherent risks, and you can probably write off at least a portion of Stoke’s second goal on Saturday to that. You also expect silly mistakes from time to time; there’s a reason these players are playing in the Championship and not the Premier League.
When you’re watching the same team week after week you have to be careful not to put every single goal they concede down to poor defending while attributing every goal they score to their own clever play. There’s often a bit of both involved and that can sometimes get lost as we switch between rose-tinted and black-tinted glasses.
But even the most generous interpretation cannot ignore that Town are shipping far, far too many silly and avoidable goals that are nothing to do with shape or organisation or style, and everything to do with players making stupid basic errors when the slightest bit of pressure is applied to them.
If this had been their sixth game in the space of 17 days and the players were just completely mentally and physically frazzled we could understand it. But they’ve just had two weeks on the training pitch to sort out exactly this kind of thing. game: “I thought [Nick] Powell was terrific today to be honest. We asked him to do a specific job on Hogg to nullify them and we got a lot of opportunities from that.”
Nowhere was that more true than for Stoke’s second goal, which saw Powell chase down Hogg the moment he received the ball from Carel Eiting as Town tried to build a counter-attack before immediately sending his side sprinting towards the Town goal.
Stoke also blocked Town’s path to Hogg three times in the build-up to their third goal, and it was Joel Pereira deciding to try and find him
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regardless that allowed Tyrese Campbell to steal the ball and rush into the box before forcing Richard Stearman’s unfortunate own goal.
If a particular player has a run of good games, the next opponent will go out of their way to stop them from playing. The Potters had clearly identified that so many good things about Town’s performances against Millwall and Luton had gone through Hogg, and intentionally set out to disrupt him.
The midfielder himself grew frustrated with that at a dead ball in the first half, shouting “get out of the [expletive] way!” at an opponent who was blocking free kick taker Sarr’s route between the ball and Hogg.
Perhaps we’re reading too much into it (there are very few things that don’t annoy Hoggy during games), but it’s not always been him getting annoyed, and at times it feels like Town go into games almost expecting to be allowed to play and are then surprised and frustrated when they’re not. Is that playing a part in those silly errors?
The other two goals were failures to deal with second balls at set pieces – but honestly, we’ve spent so long dissecting and discussing Town’s frailties from dead balls over the last 15 months that we have nothing new to add. We all know it’s not good enough.
We thought the Ajax loanee had been brought in to play in the number 6 role, so it’s been a pleasant surprise to see him deployed as Town’s most advanced attacking player in recent games.
Our main criticism of Eiting so far has been that he’s needed a fraction of a second more on the ball than he is ever likely to get in the Championship. But while Eiting’s early showings were slightly underwhelming on the whole, his vision and his ability to pick a pass have never been in question.
Playing Eiting further up the pitch hides his weaknesses and accentuates his positives. It both puts him in a position where if his need for extra thinking time does get caught out by the opposition the consequences are unlikely to be too dire, and gives Town a talented playmaker in the final third in Alex Pritchard’s absence.
The same technique that makes Eiting such a lovely passer of the ball also saw him score on Saturday as he almost passed a volley into the bottom corner from Harry Toffolo’s absolutely perfect cross to finish a move between the left-back, Josh Koroma and Lewis O’Brien.
Having Eiting on the right despite being left-footed allows that leftsided combination to stay together – and means the most talented passer Town have on the pitch is close to Isaac Mbenza. Which solves yet another issue...
No Championship team has been more lopsided than Huddersfield Town this season: a huge amount of their play has gone up that left side, and astonishingly little up the right.
With Toffolo in such good form, you can’t really blame them to an extent, but it has made Town too predictable and meant sides started paying much closer attention to Toffolo.
But close attention on one part of the pitch means there is opportunity elsewhere, and you just felt that if Town could start to find a way to use their right winger more, they might start surprising the opposition.
Against Stoke, right winger Mbenza netted a well-taken goal at the end of a superbly-timed run to bring the score back to 2-2. That was the first time Town were able to release him in a central position – that element of surprise again.