McKenna: A good point from a hard-fought game, but devastating news as two outstanding players will be away for long time owing to injury.

Town boss Kieran McKenna felt the Blues’ 1-1 draw at Huddersfield was a good point from a tough, competitive game and didn’t realise the result had taken his side to the top of the Championship.

Brandon Williams’s first goal for the club and the second of his senior career in the 87th minute saw the Blues to a point, their first league draw of the season.

“I didn’t think it was a good game in terms of quality,” McKenna said. “It was a tough, competitive game.

“It was always going to be that in the middle of a busy schedule for us and against a really motivated team with a new manager and that makes an excited crowd and an extra energetic group of players.

“It was a tough game, hard-fought, we never really managed to get momentum in the game. We made too many mistakes in the first half to give them momentum, which was going to be a big part of today.

“We had to fight really hard for the point in the end. I think we can certainly take positives from the way we kept going, kept going until the end. We were the team at the end of the game that looked like getting the winning goal and were pushing for the winning goal, and I think that shows good resilience and good ambition in the group and we’ll learn lots from a game like today.”

Did Huddersfield under new manager Darren Moore do anything different to what he anticipated before the match?

“No, not really,” the Blues manager reflected. “There was nothing different than we expected, but we knew it was going to be a difficult game, they’re a good team as well, they’ve got good players, good individual quality, better than we were facing last year.

“Every game’s a big challenge for us at the moment and there were extra factors today added to that.

“But I think irrespective of that, it would have been a difficult game anyway. We stay humble and recognise that every game is going to be a challenge for us and today’s a day that we’ll learn from.

“Certainly there are parts of the team and the group that are still relatively inexperienced at this level and coming here to an atmosphere like that and a game in that context, that will be something that we can learn from and we’ll be stronger for and we’ll be stronger for the positives that we showed in the performance as well.”

Regarding goalscorer Williams, McKenna added: “A good goal for him, nice and aggressive getting in at the back post, and he does that well.