I didn’t hesitate coming to Town

“IT’S very new! It’s different, completely different. You know, the atmosphere, it’s not fake. When you have the fans behind you the pressure is higher. How you express yourself in front of the fans is completely different, from the first minute to the last minute. It’s new for me.”

We heard plenty of those kinds of words in June and July, when football first returned behind closed doors, but it is only when

Yaya Sanogo raises the issue of missing the fans that you remember the striker didn’t get his first taste of pandemic-era football until he joined Huddersfield Town at the end of February.

The former Arsenal striker was previously at Toulouse in the French top flight, whose 2019/20 season was curtailed early rather than postponing and picking the season back up behind closed doors as we did in England.

Sanogo says he had plenty of offers after his contract expired in the summer, but he echoed the thoughts of fellow new arrival Oumar Niasse in saying he was waiting for the right opportunity to come along.

He explains: “My friend Naby Sarr is here. We played together for the national team” - the pair won the U20s World Cup with France in 2013 - “and I spoke to him and said ‘yeah, I’ll come’ - I didn’t ask him ‘what is it like there?’ or anything, I just said ‘yeah, I’ll come!’”

As what he has found upon his arrival?

“As a club here, the training ground is good, the team-mates and staff and all friendly and good,” he said. “When I spoke to Huddersfield I think the results weren’t too good, and I think they deserve to be at the top level.

“I’d been training with Auxerre in the French second division, where I started my career, for the last two months, and [head of football operations] Leigh Bromby called me and asked if I wanted to come to sign for Huddersfield. I didn’t hesitate.

“Leigh explained the project to me and it’s a good project. We’ve not lost over the last four games and now we want to try and extend it.”

Head coach Carlos Corberan is the cornerstone of that project, and there are no surprises from Sanogo when we ask what his first impressions of the Spaniard have been.

He said: “He’s got great intensity. He wants everybody at high intensity and everyone training hard so that in a game it will be the same.