Five conclusions: Huddersfield Town just cannot help themselves

It was the same starting line-up as against Exeter, but the performance couldn’t have been more different. Right now, the only thing consistent about Lee Grant’s side is their inconsistency

1. It’s been a bad week for Lee Grant

Clearly, the players have let Lee Grant down as well; it's hard to hold a manager too culpable for silly mistakes to gift the opposition goals, fail to score excellent chances, or concede avoidable penalties, all of which have occured over the past couple of games.

But we're not convinced the manager has especially helped his own cause. We spoke in midweek about how Grant had left himself nowhere to turn at Harrogate by selecting a bench full of kids; yes, there’s injuries and it’s been a busy first couple of months of the season, but Town have just three games to play in October and have stated their ambitions of winning the Vertu Trophy.

Here, Grant had more senior options available from the bench (alongside Cameron Ashia and Dan Vost), but used them peculiarly.

We can understand why Grant did not want to completely throw caution to the wind too early when Stockport were posing such a threat on the counter-attack. But as the manager acknowledged, what Town were doing was not working and hadn’t at any point in the game. So…what was there to lose from doing something different?

For our money, Lasse Sorensen and Marcus Harness were two of Town’s better performers on the day, while Leo Castledine had struggled and was beginning to look knackered. Yet it was Sorensen and Harness who were hooked first. One came Lynden Gooch and Bojan Radulovic in what amounted to positionally like-for-like changes, given Alfie May then dropped back to Harness’ number 10 to accommodate Radulovic up top.

Castledine did not depart until the 87th minute, by which point he had been absolutely blowing out his arse for around 25 minutes. That meant Joe Taylor’s fresh legs and pace got just three minutes plus injury time to try and affect the game.

We’re not stupid enough to make out like Town definitely would have won if Grant had changed approach or make different substitutions, but the bafflement and frustration in the stands (and we include ourselves in that) was palpable.

One of the big criticisms of Town and of Grant when they have lost this season has been their inability or unwillingness to depart from Plan A even when it is not working.

Grant might hit back, reasonably, that the substitutions he has made have been responsible for scoring nine goals this season, including Radulovic’s header here (from Gooch’s delivery, at that).

But seeing Grant make the changes he did here only for Town to remain laboured in their attempts to create chances against ten men, concede a second goal that had been coming, and then only find a response once it was too late to really mean anything…it all serves as ammunition for the manager’s increasingly vocal detractors.

Just to make it worse, this is the second time this season that Town have lost to a side that played a significant chunk of the game with ten men. We would have hoped they might have learned something from their experience against Blackpool, but apparently not.