Five conclusions: Home disadvantage for disconnected Huddersfield Town

Losing to Birmingham twice may not be a massive deal in Town's season — but it probably should be, shouldn't it?

1. Confidence in this side is waning

This game was decided by a single moment of quality. The thing is that if you had asked us to bet which way that moment was going to go, we’d have said Birmingham without hesitation.

This was especially true following the news that Joe Taylor was set to miss out for Huddersfield Town with an injury concern. The new arrival will need to be assessed, having been left out as a precautionary measure after feeling a cramp-like sensation in his hamstring. We’ll no doubt find out more about that later in the week.

We’ll wait for the prognosis, but his absence only heightened the dismay at Town’s gradual but definite regression since their Boxing Day victory over Stockport.

We all know Birmingham are going to rinse this league and that there’s only one place to play for in the automatic promotion hunt, so ultimately this game is unlikely to matter.

But that’s kind of the point: at the start of the season, this felt like it would be the biggest game in Town’s season. Two heavyweights slugging it out for ultimate supremacy, only to probably both go up together anyway.

But in the end, all it did was confirm that Birmingham are almost certainly going back to the Championship, while Town remain a very long way from securing similar assurances.

The irritating thing is that Town have got most of what they could have asked for over the past few weeks — loads of players back from injury, new signings for problem positions, victories over Stockport and Wycombe — and it’s still left them no better off.

We’ve had Roosken’s debut red card, the returning players mostly reminding us they need time to get up to speed, and now Taylor's injury worry. After all that, any talk of how Town might kick on once everyone is settled in and Michael Duff knows his best XI and all the other yak yak yak we’ve been giving it recently…well, it currently feels a bit ‘this time next year we’ll be millionaires’.