Below are selected highlights from Friday afternoon’s press conference with new Huddersfield Town head coach Liam Manning. You can find the full audio above or in your We Are Terriers podcast feed.
There will be no weekly digest from us this week as we couldn’t even begin to do a meaningful predicted line-up and we’re not sure you need telling what this weekend’s game is all about.
Injury news is that Herbie Kane has been back in training all week while Jack Whatmough and Antony Evans have been integrating back in with the rest of the side. Sean Roughan remains sidelined.
We will also have an exclusive interview with Huddersfield Town sporting director Chris Markham for our paying subscribers at teatime today so keep your eyes peeled for that and get signed up if you aren’t already to make sure you get access.
What do you make of the squad so far?
Yeah, I think you can do all the video work, you can watch games, you can try and get up to speed with things, as we have at the start of this week — But there’s nothing like being on the grass with the lads and getting a real feel for them and physically what they’re like, understanding their connection, their relationship, the culture we’ve got see.
I’ve been really pleased with how they applied themselves this week. It’s been a real buzz about the place, naturally, I think when you have a change, but I’ve been really pleased, looking forward to seeing what they can take into the game.
Was that part of the attraction of taking the job, because it is a good squad with a lot of talented players who are perhaps underachieving?
Anytime, I think it’s the group that you’re going to work with [that appeals]. I think when you look at it, there’s a huge amount of experience at this level, a huge amount of success. I think there’s some really exciting lads that I think can hit levels higher than what they might have shown so far this season.
So I think that’ll be my job, to challenge them on that. I think there’s a lot of potential to achieve and still to come. So yeah, that was one of the biggest attractions, was the current playing group, and what I think we can get out of them.
What sort of football does a Liam Manning side look like?
I spoke about it the other day — because I just spent a few years working with City Group, this perception gets built up around possession, etc.
But think if you look at the groups I work with, especially obviously at Bristol City, where we have a decent amount of success, it starts with the behaviours: people that are honest, people that are hard-working, people that show a level of intensity and aggression and a real purpose through all their actions. That doesn’t mean they’re always going to get things right, but I think in terms of a starting point, it’s that.
Then after that, for me, it’s how to attack, and there’s different ways to do that. You can be direct, you can go behind, you can go through…it’s finding different ways to attack to hurt the opposition, and all about being hard to beat without the ball winning your duels, winning your battles, and being organised as a group.
What’s the priority then: winning, or winning in a certain style?
The position I’m in and the learnings I’ve had in the numerous games I’ve done so far, I think the priority is winning, and to be clear I want to win tomorrow, I think I’d take that over the performance.
And then, of course, I think if you want to sustain winning, the performance then becomes equally important.
So I think you can win the odd game by playing off the cuff or having no real identity, but I think in terms of if you want to consistently win, if you look at teams historically, that have gone on to have success and win over and over again, you have to be clear on what you’re doing, which in football is the biggest challenge.
It’s like here, we’ve got some talented individual players so it’s how do you get a group to be aligned on the same page? I think that’s often the challenge in football, so that’s the bits that we’ve been trying to address and work on this week.
You’ve talked about how you want to play forward, you want to be brave — would you say that’s a fair assessment of the style of football we can expect?
Yeah, I hope so, that’s what I want. That’s what we’ll be pushing the lads to do.
Naturally, will they always get it right? No, so again, I think there will be moments where they can play forward and maybe go square or back instead.
But my job behind the scenes — and the staff that we have — is to coach them to be brave, to play forward, to ask questions, and naturally in the game, you can’t always do that — but it’s about not playing it square or back when we’ve got that opportunity to go and hurt the opposition.
That’s the big bit for me. We want to create, we want to dominate games, but we want to do it in the right areas of the pitch, which is as close to their goal as possible.
