The following are selected highlights of Jon Stead’s pre-match press conference ahead of facing Cardiff. You can hear the full thing, as well as Cameron Humphreys’ thoughts, on our podcast live feed or by hitting the play button above.
Jon Stead
Steven Chicken (We Are Terriers): I’ll start with team news if I can please…how’s Lee Nicholls doing after Saturday?
He’s OK, he’s improving by the day. Obviously, with something like that, you need to take precautions, so he’s been assessed daily and that’s how we’ll work it at the minute.
We’ll probably have a better picture after Tuesday to see how long term that is. It just gets assessed and runs through a staged protocol, so when it gets to a point where there’s an assessment made on how long that time frame will look like, we can give you that, but for now, it’s day to day, but he’s improving and he’s in good health.
Is he ruled out tomorrow regardless?
Yeah, he’ll struggle for tomorrow. There’s no risk that we can take in that regard, so it will rule him out for tomorrow, but what he’ll look like after that, we’ll have to wait and see.
So is he in the concussion protocol?
Yes.
OK. So Jak Alnwick obviously will step in and get a chance against his former club, of course. How did you regard Jak’s performance on Saturday?
Brave. He came for things, he was dominant when he needed to be.
Jak’s a good goalkeeper, and I’m sure he’ll be ready to go. He’s been waiting for an opportunity, and a massive game tomorrow, isn’t it? I have no worries about him whatsoever. He’s a top guy, he’s been around the league now, he’s got good experience, and he’s got insights on Cardiff as well, which might help us! But yeah, he’s ready to go and he gets an opportunity.
And how’s Lynden Gooch doing after he went off?
Goochy’s still being assessed. He’s got a really, really tight calf, so that’ll need a scan and we’ll have a look at that to see what that looks like. Not ruling him out yet for tomorrow, but we’ll have to get the assessment off the back of the scan today.
And I think the other three you’ve got out — George Sebine, Jack Whatmough and Ryan Hardie — any more on any of them?
George should be fine … We’ll have to be careful with him, because he’s still got stitches, and I think there’s stitches underneath and then stitches on top, so they’ll still be in there — so he’ll have a nice big bandage on if he gets on the pitch tomorrow.
Jack is close, so he’s closer to training now. Whether tomorrow comes a little bit too quick for him, [I don’t know], but he won’t be far after that if he doesn’t make it.
And then Ryan, again, I think he’s in for another assessment this week to see when he can start really pushing again. We’re hopeful of him getting back sooner rather than later.
And we know Josh Feeney and Cam Ashia are very unlikely to feature this season…any other team news you can give us?
No.
With the emotion of it on Saturday, you said you’d have to go away and pick the bones out of it — what did you find when you went and did that?
Yeah, obviously not much sleep on Saturday night, I’m sure everybody else was the same!
But we were back in as a staff on Sunday morning and we went through it stringently. We looked at a lot of things that we did really well, really, really well, which were top in terms of the stuff we’ve been working on, and seeing that come out in the game was really, really pleasing.
On the flip side of that, there’s obviously areas that we need to massively improve, some of those individually, some of those collectively in units.
So we assessed where we needed to make changes there and make sure that we’re giving the lads the right information, giving them the opportunity to go and succeed and maybe correct some of those individual errors. They fall around different aspects of the game, not just the set-piece aspect, which is obviously right there in your face, isn’t it? But there’s a lot of other things as well that we need to get better at.
So the processes, the way we work, will stay the same, and we’ll keep picking at that. Even if people think sometimes it’s a good performance and everything’s fine, you move on — that’s not the case, not the way we look into it.
There’s always things that we need to get better at. So we did a lot of that on Sunday morning. A lot of stuff then has gone on today in terms of individuals, units and team meetings. And then yesterday, again, your focus has to then straight away switch to Cardiff. So yesterday again was a lot of stuff in the afternoon, making sure we’ve got all that prepped and ready to deliver to the players this morning.
So again, processes carry on no matter how wild the game is, whether it’s good, bad or indifferent. We have to keep to the same disciplines and make sure we’re doing everything that we can do to make the players as comfortable as they can be on the pitch. So those things happen, and then obviously the focus of that on Tuesday.
On some of the positives in a moment, but obviously that last 15 minutes — and look, we know the set-piece record has been poor in the last few months — is there a sense, though, of, for instance, the second phase on the final goal, is it just boot it upfield when they’ve got all 11 men in your half and you have to make them chase it for 30 seconds? Is it that kind of game management to avoid those set pieces in the first place?
Yes, it’s a very, very simple game, complicated by coaches sometimes, but actually, I think there’s a simplicity to that: look, it’s the last second of the game, can we play it forward?
There’s things then when there’s the look of it as well. The ball goes to the side and gets delivered back into the exact same place that [Radinio Balker] would have been in.
There’s things that happened before, in terms of the first goal — somebody is just slightly out of position and makes a decision to move forward instead of back. There’s loads of different things that just equate to actually the simplicity of football.
But I think when you add in the magnitude of the game, the level of stress that these players are under, the fatigue level that you’re at at that point, it obviously clouds your judgement…but I’m certainly not making excuses for any of us, and I mean that collectively, because there’s things that we need to do better as a staff as well.
So that allows us as a collective group to nail all these things and make sure we’ve given them the right information, so when it’s in that high-tempo environment, they can make clear decisions. So we’re all looking at that collectively to make that better.
But yeah, like you say, it’s a simple thing. That ball travels into the opposition half, they don’t retrieve it, and the whistle’s probably blown. I’m certainly not going to argue about refereeing decisions because that’s not what we’re about. We need to really focus on things that we can control and the things that we’re trying to implement.
And like you said, we’re seeing that. I’ll tell you what, it was an entertaining game, giving it a right go. We’ve been written off every two minutes in the last four or five weeks. We still keep putting in another performance and just creeping it back again, and we’ll need to do that again tomorrow night.
I’m sure you’ve been banging your head against the wall with this set-piece record for weeks now. What is it? Pure concentration? Is it people knowing their jobs? What do you put it down to as a coaching staff?
I think we could have these conversations with any coaches, any clubs across the league, from top to bottom.
There’s an element of individual stuff. There’s an element of personnel, and the capability to go and deal with certain situations. We look at the setups and whether the setup’s right or wrong. We’ve changed and adjusted those. We’ve adjusted how we deliver it on the grass, how we deliver it in meetings.
I know that’s, in a lot of respects, not a good answer because the outcomes have been the same, but we’re trying to figure out which way we can get that better, and we’re working extremely hard to do that, as are the players as well, taking accountability for that as well.
I know that from speaking to you after the game, and from speaking to Martin as well, your attitude is you’re not giving up on this season. It’s still 'anything can happen, keep going…’
Yeah, we’ve been written off every 10 minutes. Again, the players have shown that they’re not giving up. The conversations that we had this morning, the way they trained this morning, nothing’s done and dusted.
The fans have been fantastic. What an atmosphere it was. I know it ended in disappointment, but that spell before that was just incredible to be a part of. It really, really was. I think everybody felt that in the stadium.
We need that again tomorrow against a very, very good side, by the way, but one that we’re more than capable of matching and beating.
So we’re still full of confidence, and the players showed that in the way they trained this morning, and when we’re asking them questions around things, and the way that they’re answering it, they’re telling us they want to go again.
So I’m excited again for tomorrow. Honestly, like I said, we get written off every two minutes and I’m sick of it, to be fair. Until it’s done, it’s not done, so until then, let’s get right behind it.
Have you been in situations like this, either in your coaching career or your playing career, where you do get written off? We’ve seen it at Huddersfield a few times, albeit more in relegation battles than promotion pushes, but have you been in that situation where it feels like everything’s against you and you managed to pull it off?
Yeah, we’ve had a few. I think again, probably relegation side of it more than others, where you just get over the other side. And I remember getting Harrogate, as a player, through Covid and stuff, where nobody expects Harrogate to get up into the Football League. We ended up being in the final playoffs at Wembley and then, for a small club, for the first time in their history to get into the Football League…it was unheard of.
I think as an individual, you get written off a lot, especially as a player, and I think a lot of our lads have been written off a lot this season, and a lot of them have come back. A lot of them have struggled through that. A lot of them have found ways to show what they’re really capable of.
Again, our job as a staff is to give them the platform to show what they are capable of. Because I think everybody at the start of the season looked to this group and just thought, you know, that is a group that can go and do something this season.
We still have that same belief, that same belief in the players, in their attitudes and the commitment and the way that they approach training conversations and the way that they behave around us.
They’re a joy to work with, so I just want them to get the rewards. I just want the players to get the rewards for all this hard work, and they will be fired up, and we will have them fired up and ready to go again tomorrow.
