What if Schindler had MISSED that Wembley pen?
CHRISTOPHER Schindler’s winning penalty against Reading in the Championship play-off final is not just one of the most joyous and iconic moments in Huddersfield Town’s history.
It also changed the course of the club’s fate in massive ways: two years in the Premier League gave way to a steep decline and a heavy hangover still being felt to this day.
How might things have been different if Schindler’s decisive spot kick had instead been saved - and Reading had gone on to win the shootout?
For one thing it is highly doubtful that David Wagner would have stuck around.
The manager was reportedly the subject of interest from Bundesliga side Wolfsburg midway through the promotion season, and having pulled off a minor miracle by even getting Town to the playoffs, he would have been forgiven for thinking he had taken the club as far as he could and departing for a top-flight club in either England or Germany.
Who might have replaced
Wagner? We know that Jan Siewert had been on Town’s radar for quite some time - 18 months prior to when they actually hired him, might they have made the same decision, or would that have been too soon?
Or would they have gone for, say, Daniel Farke, who would in reality join Norwich City that summer?
Either way, players would likely have followed Wagner out the door sooner or later too: Aaron Mooy certainly, probably Philip Billing and Chris Lowe, perhaps Christopher Schindler, Elias Kachunga, and various others.
It also seems unlikely that some of the players who joined the club for their Premier League adventure would have done if they were still in the Championship: no Steve
Mounie, no Tom Ince, no Laurent Depoitre or Zanka or Jonas Lossl.
But there is also a chance that some of those who did leave in the Premier League years would have had a much bigger part to play and could even still be at the club - Joe Lolley, Nahki Wells - and up-andcomers like Jack Payne, Jon Gorenc Stankovic and Joel Coleman might have got a chance to establish themselves in the first team.
Having finally broken free of years of fighting Championship relegation, it seems unlikely that the club’s ambitions would be at all different from what they are now: becoming at the very least a top 10 Championship club.
While it hard to envisage Town going on to challenge for automatic promotion (only one third of defeated playoff finalists since 2000 have subsequently gone up within three years of that defeat) they may have been a little more stable over the last couple of years and less in need of the kind of complete overhaul we have seen them go through over the last year or so.
Finally: without the Premier League money and parachute payments, that would have required further investment from Dean Hoyle; would he have been willing to lend further loans to the club in that position, or might he have decided the club needed new ownership sooner?
Finally, the popular Town fan podcast And He Takes That Chance would be called “FFS Chris”.