Five conclusions: Huddersfield Town roll into 2026 with renewed optimism

Three straight wins have lifted the mood at the Accu Stadium, but there’s still some way to go before we can call this a corner well and truly turned

1. Huddersfield Town found another way to win

The Terriers came perilously close to going through 2025 without winning three league games in a row, only to pull it out of the bag at the last possible moment.

More pleasingly, after a long period of repeatedly finding new ways to drop points, Town have shown over the past couple of weeks that they are able to win in different ways, too.

Town delivered a professional and clinical performance across all departments in Rotherham. The 5-0 win over Port Vale was a complete walkover, achieved with the minimum of fuss.

As expected, following a similarly physical reverse fixture earlier this month, the game was a gruelling slog, thanks to the opposition’s tactics. When you come up against a team that starts time-wasting midway through the first half, you know it’s going to be a difficult and potentially frustrating evening.

Town had to be equal to Northampton’s approach, and after losing some of the early battles, they rose to the occasion and got the job done.

Our pre-game prediction was that the game would be goalless at the break, with Town going on to win it in the second half. It looked set to be so until Joe Low broke the deadlock in first-half stoppage time.

Funnily enough, time-wasting was no longer a priority for the visitors, who applied more pressure without ever really troubling Lee Nicholls, only for Bojan Radulovic to kill the game off on the counter-attack after some excellent work from Dion Charles.

During their poor runs this season, we have seen plenty of instances of Town struggling with changes in game state, whether it was going ahead, going behind, or getting an equaliser. The opposition would adapt, and Town would look lost as to how to respond.

Here, Town handled every phase of the game appropriately, even if some of their execution in the final third was found lacking at times. Doing that against a side that held Town to a frustrating point just a few weeks ago was an encouraging signal of the progress they have made in a very short space of time.

We should also acknowledge the slight tweak that Grant made to his formation, which looked more like a 3-4-3 (or at very least, 3-4-2-1) than the more straightforward 3-5-2 he had played over the past few games.

As we’ll come on to in a moment, there are reasons it didn’t quite pay off as much as it probably should have done, but it was a sensible adjustment nonetheless.