Five conclusions: Huddersfield Town fail to dispel pessimism with latest uninspired showing

Some players performed their roles well enough, but the more troubling question is whether they’re being given the right ones

1. The sad thing is that’s exactly what we expected from Huddersfield Town

This was never going to be a repeat of the 5-0 walkover on Boxing Day, and we didn’t expect it to be.

But nor did we expect that Town would be convincing, or that they would win, or that they would even score, because we’ve been given so little evidence over the past six games that this would be the case.

A Town player has scored in just one of their past six games, after all. Even if we count Rotherham’s own goal, the last couple of times Town had such a poor run of goalscoring form was when they were as bad as we have ever seen them: in that awful run in April last year, when the players had given up entirely; and under Darren Moore in the 2023/24 Championship relegation season, when they were left with Kyle Hudlin as their best centre-forward option.

Even so, we had hoped that Town would prove us wrong. There were moments where it looked like they might: if Josh Feeney’s header against the crossbar had been four inches lower, and/or a near-own goal hadn’t been hastily cleared of the line later in the first half, we’d be saying, ‘well, it still wasn’t great, but it’s a start’. There were some things we took encouragement from in the performance.

But we don’t have any greater condemnation of Town’s inability to get the job done here than the words of Port Vale boss Jon Brady after the game.

“I’ve got four centre-backs out. I’ve got eight [players] out altogether,” he said. “We’ve put a left wing-back in at left-sided centre-half, we’ve put a left-sided centre-half in the middle. Taylor Magloire breaks his nose in the first 20 minutes and it’s all over his face, and he pulls himself off the floor, knowing we’ve got nothing else, blood streaming out, and he plays on.

“We had one training session with that back line training what we were going to do, and we got into a really good rhythm [in the] second half on that pitch, which is a joke to try to play on, to be honest. It really is … playing on this pitch week in, week out is breaking the players. That’s a fact.”

He went on: “We’ve played five games to [Huddersfield’s] two over the last two weeks, so for us to be the stronger team towards the end of the game, I have to praise the boys, no matter how the next couple go.”

To all of that we would add: Port Vale are bottom of the league.

We mean no disrespect in pointing that out. The improvement in Vale’s defensive record over the past few weeks has been remarkable, even if they’re still struggling to score goals. All this has come too late in the season for them to stay up, but they‘ve won against Championship and Premier League opposition in the FA Cup over the past ten days.

Even with all that considered, this was still a game that Huddersfield Town could really, really have done with winning.