Pipa needs to pick it up again
Town avoided another embarrassing and demoralising result despite the performance leaving a lot to be desired, and have taken an important step towards learning a different way to grind out results.
We can’t help but feel this style is being implemented now in the hope Yaya Sanogo can slot into the side as soon as he is medically cleared to start games.
This new approach will surely play to his strengths – get it into the corner and get crosses in for him, or put it straight to him over the top and get him knocking it down to team-mates from the edge of the box.
There’s nothing at all wrong with that if it gets results - there is nothing more exciting than winning, and anything beyond that is a fun optional extra.
For Town to go into the final stretch of the season having decided they need to return to pragmatic safety-first football is entirely necessary and absolutely the right thing for them to do given their recent form.
The Terriers’ ideal situation now is they pull themselves out of the fire sooner rather than later and can use any remaining games left over to slowly reintroduce some of the elements Corberan wants from his side longer term.
But it will not be lost on fans that they were promised this season would see the team learn a new, progressive, attacking style of football that would set the club up for a bold new future.
Even if they manage to keep their heads above water, the shift back to grinding out results is a tacit admission that this season has been a failure and that the progress they made in the first half of the campaign has been lost.
It’s the right move to acknowledge that fact and adjust accordingly, but a pity nonetheless.
WHATEVER criticisms you might have of the Terriers’ recruitment, there is no doubt they pulled off a bit of a coup in signing Pipa from Espanyol for a fee thought to be in the region of £500,000.
The 23-year-old made an immediate impression at the start of the season, slotting in at rightback and looking every inch the player Huddersfield Town were desperately lacking in that position.
But recently, things have started to drop off a bit for Pipa.
Go by the numbers alone and everything looks rosy. He is making more tackles, more interceptions, more clearances, more dribbles, more blocks, more assists, more goals, more shots, more key passes, more successful crosses and more through balls per 90 minutes in 2021 than he did for Town in 2020.
But stats only ever tell part of the story, and over the last two games Pipa has failed the eye test.
Earlier in the season we noted his willingness to bust a gut to get back in position to cover for mistakes, but that has dropped off recently.
Against Preston the full-back was caught upfield and was lackadaisical in his tracking back.
That trend continued against Birmingham. He was lucky on a couple of occasions that Maxime Colin, Ivan Sanchez and Alen Halilovic did not punish his mistakes more harshly, as better opposition would have.
This is not to put the blame squarely on Pipa’s shoulders, because in each instance there were other players who made errors that compounded the issue with their own poor decisions.
But regardless how much Town need to give Pipa license to get forward, they need him doing his bit to get back too - otherwise it becomes much too easy to stretch the Town defence with a simple cross or by getting onto the end of a rebound.
Even if Pipa is being asked to stay forward more often, Town definitely also need more end product out of him than they have had over the last few games. His cutback for Fraizer Campbell to shoot in the 11th minute against Derby was the last chance he created.
Even in those impressive earlyseason performances, there was always been a sense that Pipa had a touch of Juninho Bacuna syndrome: always taking three touches when two would have done. His over-willingness to hold up the ball has allowed Derby, Preston and Birmingham to get back and recover their shape where a sharper player might have plunged in the knife.
He also likes to take ambitious shots when passing is the better option. Even the two goals he’s scored these season owe a lot to a goalkeeping blunder (at Millwall) and a big deflection (against Stoke).
These are small foibles that just need ironing out of an otherwise promising game, and if Pipa weren’t such a key player for
Town - especially in Harry
Toffolo’s absence - we may not have zeroed in on him in this fashion.
The brutal reality is that Carlos Corberan is lacking in players who can provide a creative attacking spark at the moment, but Pipa should be one of them. If he’s not doing it at either end, it takes another 10 per cent out of a side that needs to grind out every advantage it can find.