Carlos is doing the best job he can do!
keeper at his pre-match press conference, Corberan said: “We have three good goalkeepers and not every Championship club has that.
“We know that Schofield doesn’t have a lot of experience in the Championship but he’s showing he has the level to do it.
“But football always challenges you for that level, so he needs to continue being very focused trying to continue to give that level to win his position in the team.
“I know because I was a goalkeeper. What we expect from the keeper is, first of all, make the saves because football has changed a lot and now, sometimes, it’s like we prefer to put a midfielder as a keeper just for the distribution of the ball and that’s not true. For me it would be a mistake. First of all the keeper has to make saves.
“Secondly, he needs to control the box. He needs to support the defenders, and he needs to help the team to be the first attacker.
“So for me there are four areas where the goalkeeper needs to be important and we need to develop our keepers to be a full goalkeeper with the option to give answers in these four areas.
“You need all four areas, because if you don’t have one of them you are going to have less answers to what the game is going to demand. It’s not what I demand, it’s what the game demands.
“Of course some goalkeepers feel more comfortable playing long to playing short. I watch Ryan Schofield and a lot of times I would like him to play long more often but he’s trying to play short.
“But always when you’re playing if you have a style the decisions are coming from the players and if the player feels confident in doing something it’s not because they’re following instructions.”
IN the latest episode of our Huddersfield Town podcast Ooh To Be A..., Steven Chicken and David Hartrick break down a positive weekend for the Terriers after their 2-0 win over Watford.
You can subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts by searching for “Ooh To Be A”.
HARTRICK: Carlos Corberan will be very, very pleased to get that win but the games keep coming and I think what he’s desperate for is just more time on the training ground.
He will get that in the new year, but with the caveat that the weather’s not great, the games are still coming fairly thick and fast, and you’ve got injuries so you’ve got to manage intensity.
It’s a difficult situation, but I think we’d have to agree he’s doing the absolute best job he could really at the moment.
CHICKEN: We’re seeing people on social media saying ‘they’re five points off the play-offs, if they’d invested in the summer we’d be in the play-offs now’, but before the season started you were all saying the squad’s [no good] and they’re going to get relegated!
You and I were both quite vocal about the fact it was a massive, massive gamble to get rid of the Cowleys and bring Corberan in, and you and I were both outspoken about the fact that at the start of the season the squad looked weak.
We’re not having a go at the fans for saying the squad didn’t look good because, to be honest, you and I both sat here and thought ‘this really doesn’t look good’, we were worried coming into this season.
But you look at who we’ve been talking about over the last few weeks and it’s been Ryan Schofield, who’s come through from the academy. Rarmani Edmonds-Green, who’s come through from the new academy set-up. It’s been Isaac Mbenza, who looks like a new man. It’s been Josh Koroma, who once he’d hit that run of form and was the top scorer it’s like ‘well obviously he’s going to play every week’, but it’s easy to forget that in the summer nobody was saying ‘this is going to be Josh Koroma’s year’.
He’d had a fairly unimpressive loan at Rotherham United in the second half of last season.
Corberan has done what the club hoped and said he would do, which is get more out of the players that were already there.
HARTRICK: When I say you couldn’t ask for more from him at the moment, I think there are still areas to be improved on, there are still things I would change and decisions he’s made that I wouldn’t make and I don’t think he would in hindsight.
The thing you have to understand with Corberan is he’s only 21 games into his management career.
These are all learning moments.
He’s a manager who obviously takes a lot of pride in what he does and he’s very passionate about what he does but there are going to be bumps on the road, there have to be. Nobody gets everything right first time round, do they?
So there will be moments where the wheels are going to come off. They have been beaten badly by Bournemouth, and I suspect there might be a couple of quite bad losses before the end of the season. I suspect they’ll lose two more games by three or four. But that’s just the nature of what they’re trying to do. It’s a cliché but if plan A doesn’t work you do plan A better.