Is Koroma a victim of his own success?

THE huge bright spot in a miserable season for the Terriers last year was Josh Koroma’s emergence as a legitimate Championship goal threat.

The Huddersfield Town winger scored eight goals from 21 appearances last season to finish as the club’s top scorer despite missing over half the season with a hamstring injury he suffered last December.

Koroma didn’t miss a beat on his return to the side in April, scoring twice in four games – but his goalscoring rate has slowed considerably this season and he has even found himself dropped to the bench recently in favour of Duane Holmes.

So why is Koroma’s form suffering, and what can he do to get it back?

His shot accuracy is not the issue: he’s actually improved on that, putting 50 per cent of his shots on target compared with 37pc last season.

The simple fact is that Koroma is taking 30pc fewer shots per 90 minutes than last season, and that drop is entirely down to his taking fewer shots inside the 18-yard box half as many, in fact, as he’s actually taking more from outside the box.

That’s important because although we may think of Koroma as a player who can find the net from 20 yards, six of the eight goals he scored last season came from inside the box.

It may sound overly-simplistic but it’s a fact that the closer you get to goal, the more likely you are to find the net with your shots. The rise of analytics has meant that players are being instructed to avoid shooting from any kind of distance in favour of getting into positions where they have a better chance of scoring, and the number of goals scored from outside the box has been falling year on year for some time.

So it’s not coincidental that as Koroma’s shooting frequency from inside the box has halved, so too has his success rate.

Last season a huge 35pc of his shots on target hit the back of the net; this season that is down to

Carlos Corberan and his staff need to work out how to get Koroma back to his goalscoring best

17pc. There are a few factors behind why Koroma might be finding it more difficult to get into goalscoring positions this season. Reputation is one of them: every single manager in the division will have done their homework on Koroma and