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Huddersfield Town’s missing pieces and promising signs in five conclusions on loss to Leicester
Stephy Mavididi’s 73rd-minute strike proved the decisive difference in a hugely entertaining and hard-fought game between the Terriers and visiting Leicester City at the John Smith’s Stadium on Saturday afternoon.
Huddersfield Town gave a good account of themselves and looked as likely as the highly-rated opponents to break a deadlock that stood for much of the game, with centre-back Michal Helik wasting the best chance either side had in a non-stop encounter.
The result extends a losing start to the season for Neil Warnock’s side after their opening-day loss away to Plymouth and the second string’s ten-man Carabao Cup defeat to Middlesbrough, but they will head up to Teesside next weekend with plenty of positives to take despite the result against Leicester.
Read more: Huddersfield Town’s dignity in defeat to Leicester City must inspire actual points
In all honesty, before the game, we were preparing ourselves to play things down a bit in the event that Town lost heavily, mindful that we had gone a bit overboard about getting battered by Fulham in the first home game two years ago before Carlos Corberan’s side went on to reach the play-off final. That Fulham side was actually pretty good, as it turned out, and we anticipate this Leicester side to be at a similar level.
So regardless of the result, what we got was very pleasing indeed. We’re not sure about you, but we had a whale of a time watching this game – and that’s a credit to the Terriers. There was a shot once every three minutes in this game, and despite Leicester City dominating possession (69.4%), those chances were divided relatively evenly between the two sides: 13 for Town, 17 for the visitors. There was barely a moment in the first half, in particular, when one side or the other wasn’t actively pushing the other in attack, and the moments in between featured a lot of whole-hearted battles.
It’s rare that we talk about the game as a whole rather than Huddersfield Town’s performance within it, but the two things are actually related on this occasion. This was a fantastic advert for the Championship – and if Leicester turn out to be as good as we think they are, that speaks highly of how well Town played.
2. Huddersfield Town’s endeavour was high throughout (even if the quality wasn’t always)
There were little stumbles and lapses from all of Town’s players over the 90 minutes, but – bar the very obvious – they were never really costly, and on the whole there was an awful lot to admire about the way Town went about their business.
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