No getting away from it, this was poor! Examiner’s Steven Chicken analyses Town’s 3-0 defeat to Cardiff City

WHAT do you get when you put together the attacking impotence exhibited against Wycombe and the self-destructive streak Huddersfield Town showed against Stoke City? This. This is what you get.

This was Town at their worst at both ends of the pitch and nobody can have any complaints about the result.

The biggest condemnation of all is that Cardiff didn’t even have to work especially hard for it.

The defending for the first goal was feeble, the culmination of what was already a poor first half for Christopher Schindler and Naby Sarr.

Then the errors for the next two goals would have been embarrassing for a League Two side, let alone one with aspirations of establishing themselves in the top half of the Championship.

At the other end there was never any indication that Town were going to do anything to take the opposition by surprise - a fundamental tenet of successful attacking play.

Town’s inconsistent form and close-run results this season have been down to their awful yin being balanced out by brilliant yang.

Their 3-0 win over Millwall a month and a day prior was a case of everything coming together at the same time. This game in Cardiff was the exact opposite. Podcast regular and Opta analyst David Hartrick has made a point over the last few episodes of saying Town were going to get a hiding like this at some point for exactly that reason. Another, off-mic refrain of his this season has been to sum up Town’s overall play with ‘same problems, just a bit quicker.’ As he has observed, there wasn’t even the empty positive of ‘just a bit quicker’ to fall back on here.

Chaos was very much our special word of the day after the Middlesbrough game, but this was just a straightforward drubbing. A bit of chaos actually would have been nice, at least it would have broken up the monotony of Town’s uninspired dirge. It wasn’t good.

Town conceded two almost identical goals against Stoke City and Middlesbrough after losing possession inside their own half and then getting caught by a quick transition.

Carlos Corberan made sure that wouldn’t happen again in this game by deploying Jonathan Hogg as a sweeper whenever the Terriers had the ball. He was clearly under instructions to remain 10 yards behind Schindler and Sarr. Whenever he crept forward to carry the ball, he would quickly run back to assume his original position.

We’ve seen Hogg playing in the rearguard before, but it’s always been as part of a flat back three which Town still became when they lost the ball here.

What he was doing here was quite the opposite of what we saw in those embryonic Corberan sides in pre-season, when Josh Austerfield played as a centre-back who