Five conclusions: Too-nice Huddersfield Town ride luck to three points

...and we don't mean that as a negative, either; winning with imperfections is better than the alternative

1. Huddersfield Town need to be more ruthless with both their finishing and mentality

It’s worth saying straight off the bat: a win’s a win. With another game coming up on Tuesday and the weather playing a significant role in how the game unfolded, Town need to make up ground on those above them to compensate for previous losses. The performance is secondary, really. They won. Grand. Job done. We’re going to gripe a bit here, but we haven’t lost sight of that fact.

We need to be more analytical than that, though, and there are aspects of this performance that remind us that Town are still far from the finished product (as if we ever thought that in the first place).

Even in a particularly eventful game, one moment stood out. Miles Leaburn had gone down injured in the Town half, but the game continued. Town moved into attack, working the ball out to Mickel Miller in a good crossing position. There had already been enough of a pause to see if the referee was going to stop play, and he chose not to. Miller turned and played it out for a throw, and Michael Duff went ballistic, rushing down the touchline to shout at Miller that he should have played on.

It was fitting that Leaburn was the unwitting instigator of this little tableau, because the giant Charlton striker had played villain all afternoon.

Leaburn made it his business to be a pain, and played a big part in winning Charlton their penalty. Later, he sparked friction with Tom Lees — and the Town fans — by refusing to stop sitting on the centre-back’s leg as he complained in vain for a penalty he knew he did not deserve.

I chatted to someone from the Charlton end after the game who said Leaburn was the player who enabled Alfie May to get so many goals for them last season: the hard-working, nightmare-to-mark, do-anything-to-win foil who distracted and wound up defenders. In other words, the perfect centre-forward for a Nathan Jones side.

Whatever you may think of Leaburn or Jones, Town could do with a bit of that. This team of nice lads need to learn to be nasty to gain that crucial competitive advantage.

As Duff put it after the game: “That's not the time to be a nice guy. Mickel’s a really, really nice kid, but when the whistle blows, you’ve got to be horrible. The lads get win bonuses, so if some bloke comes up to you and takes a hundred quid out of your pocket, you'd have a fight with him. It’s no different.