‘Fans just aren’t looking forward to coming back!’
IN the latest edition of our “Ooh To Be A...’ podcast, the Examiner’s Steven Chicken and Opta’s David Hartrick look back on the 5-2 defeat to Blackburn, why it was the source of such angst despite Town’s survival hopes being helped by other results on the day, and where the club go from here.
And, in a flavour of what you can expect when you download it, here Hatrick explains why Town need to either back Carlos Corberan this summer, or sack him...
HARTRICK: “We’ve recently had an update from the chairman, making his support for Carlos Corberan absolute. So if that is the case - whether you believe that’s right or wrong - Town really need to commit to it and recruit to his model.
“If they’re going to back Corberan over this summer then, to be frank, if Juninho Bacuna lines up on the left wing for the first game of next season, they’ve not done it.
“There’s questions on both sides, and it’s a question of commitment really.
“They really have to decide what they want to be over the summer because they can’t afford to just atrophy next season and end up finishing somewhere between 18th and 21st again, can they?
“This club needs season ticket sales, it needs to feel like there’s some sort of positivity going forward, it needs to feel like there’s light at the end of the rainbow.
“At the moment it’s very very difficult for a decent percentage of fans to feel like that.
“I know there are a lot of fans who will get a season ticket regardless and just want to support Huddersfield Town. Fans coming back into the stadium wants to be a joyous, celebratory thing, because games without fans are pretty miserable.
“What we don’t want is for Town fans to come in and for it to be a toxic environment, because that’s not what this club, what this team, or what anybody wants or needs.
“But over the summer Town have to reshape this squad and this first XI for Corberan.
“If they’re going to stick with him longer term they need to say, right, what is your ideal model of player for all these positions? Because you’re not telling me that Corberan’s ideal central defender is Richard
Keogh...or Richard
Stearman. It might be Rarmani Edmonds-Green, but possibly not right now.
“So you literally have to go through it position by position and make sure the manager has got what he needs or what he feels he wants.
“But if you do that, then it’s also absolutely fine to say there’s then no hiding place for the manager.
“You have to set targets and say ‘right, we’ve given you everything you want, 10 games into this season we need have a certain number of points and there needs to be a certain amount of positivity and everyone needs to be looking forward to a game on a Saturday afternoon.’
“I think at the moment the problem is fans just aren’t looking forward to games, and that’s just not a good position to be in.”