High showing he’s Scott a lot of promise to help Town
JUST a few days after the Terriers’ worst performance of the season seems an odd time to single out a player for praise, admittedly, and there is a risk of overstatement in having done so with Scott High after that defeat to Middlesbrough. But then perhaps that just makes up for the often-understated nature of the youngster’s game that makes his contributions easier to miss than that of some of his team-mates.
Our go-to comparison for High since his emergence into the Huddersfield Town first team has been that he reminds us of a young, Championship-level Jordan
Henderson in that he is good at a bit of everything required of a central midfielder without having one clear outstanding feature to his game.
Unfortunately, such players often find themselves on the receiving end of assessments like ‘I don’t get what he actually does’ from those who are not watching closely enough, and we have seen a bit of that with High this season.
We might also suggest that there may be some unrealistic expectations at play, especially as comparisons to team-mate Lewis O’Brien are so inevitable.
O’Brien’s first year of regular league football came away from Town supporters’ eyes as he spent a year on loan with Bradford City which he has credited as being an enormous step towards preparing him for Championship football.
High’s own League One loan did not go quite so well. After a decent run in the side at Shrewsbury Town last season, a change of manager saw him lose his place in favour of more experienced options before he was sent back to the John Smith’s Stadium in January.
The midfielder was a regular from the bench for Town for the rest of the campaign, but it was really at the beginning of this season that he made his breakthrough, coming into Carlos Corberan’s starting line-up thanks initially to O’Brien’s absence for Covid-related reasons but keeping his place on merit for a spell.
Injuries to Jonathan Hogg and Alex Vallejo have given High that chance again, and if saying he was the best player in a Town shirt in an otherwise horrendous defeat to Middlesbrough is damning with faint praise, there is no argument he was also one of the stars of their 1-0 win over West Bromwich Albion the previous week.
Where O’Brien burst onto the scene almost fully formed in a spectacular debut season that earned him Town’s player of the year award in a landslide fan vote, High’s introduction and improvement have been more gradual. Different players develop at different speeds, and although our hunch would be that O’Brien’s career path will take him to greater heights than his teammate over the course of their promising careers, it’s also worth bearing in mind that 20-year-old High is still a little bit younger now than O’Brien was when he made his competitive debut for Town away to QPR in August 2019.
It’s also worth considering that High has had to change his approach to the game to get into Corberan’s side, becoming more of an allaction box-to-box player despite having come through the academy as more of a ball-playing holding midfield player.
Without a change of shape, as it stands we would not suggest that High ought to keep his place when Hogg is back from injury in the new year.
Town’s greatest January transfer need is a goalscoring central midfielder, and High certainly doesn’t look like he is going to eliminate that need.
But even if he is not the total solution, in the meantime High has shown that he may be capable of playing some small part in helping Town at least begin to solve the creativity issue that has dogged them all season.
High has not looked out of place and Town have a reliable enough midfielder to fall back on in the coming
weeks