Five conclusions on Huddersfield Town's loss away to Leicester City

The Championship leaders stuck to the script by claiming a 4-1 win at the King Power Stadium

1. This game now marks a line in the sand for Huddersfield Town (as far as the Championship goes)

This is normally where we would round things off, but in this case it’s important to start here, because we were very forgiving of the performance in Town’s 1-2 defeat at home to Middlesbrough on Friday and come out of this 4-1 defeat on the road with a big shrug. If you thought Town were going to come to Leicester and get something, we can only imagine you overdid your new year festivities. One does not simply walk into the King Power Stadium; not this season.

But as gentle as we may be on this occasion, and will obviously continue to be for the trip to face Manchester City in the FA Cup on Sunday, this is really the last time this season that we will be so easy on them.

The stark facts are that Town have won just three of their past 20 games and now sit on less than a point per game with over half the season gone. Town are level on points with this stage last season, when it took a miraculous recovery for them to avoid the drop. They are behind the tallies they had at this stage in 2020 and 2021, when they went almost to the wire in their battle against relegation. There aren’t many sides that go through four relegation battles in five years without it catching up to them eventually.

When Huddersfield Town next line up for a Championship game, at home to Plymouth Argyle on 13th January, things need to have changed. We saw signs in the Blackburn and Middlesbrough games that things might actually be finally starting to click when it comes to Darren Moore’s coaching, but they still ended up losing at home in the latter game.

The club have spoken optimistically and openly about their need to add new players to the squad, but even should they succeed in that endeavour – always easier said than done – they will only be making up for where they fell short in the summer.

Fans will expect signing to be made before that Plymouth game, not to be left waiting and sweating for yet more weeks wondering when that first new arrival is going to come in – and that’s to say nothing of Moore’s own desperation to see new blood on the training ground and in his matchday squad.

Despite getting Lee Nicholls back from concussion, Town once again finished the day with 12 players sidelined after Jaheim Headley limped off, and will now also lose Yuta Nakayama until the middle of February after he was named in Japan’s squad for the Asian Cup.

We’ve been patient, and feel we have had good reason to be so, despite some wretched performances testing us along the way. But that patience has been predicated on an extension of trust that the new regime will prove true to their word and sort out the squad in the January transfer window.

That’s exactly what they must do now, otherwise that criticism and uproar from all sides is only going to come back double.