Darren Moore Warns Huddersfield Town Creative Star Player On Basics Ahead Of Sheffield Wednesday Trip

Darren Moore Warns Huddersfield Town Creative Star Player On Basics Ahead Of Sheffield Wednesday Trip

The manager has to balance his long-term playing-style ambitions carefully against not overloading the players with too much information – but the basics come before any of that

If it takes us as fans and reporters a bit of time to get used to a new manager’s turns of phrase and way of thinking about the game, you can only imagine what it must be like for a footballer to have to adapt their entire way of playing whenever a new gaffer arrives at a club.

Huddersfield Town’s squad have had to get used to that a fair bit over the past 18 months or so, mind. Carlos Corberan’s abrupt departure last summer led to a brief and unsuccessful spell under Danny Schofield, which was followed by a longer but barely more fruitful tenure for Mark Fotheringham.

The Scot made way for Neil Warnock in February, to scarcely believable effect; and now, controversially perhaps, Darren Moore has taken over, the club feeling the former Sheffield Wednesday boss was more in keeping with their long-term ambitions of reaching the Premier League again.

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That lofty ambition feels quite a long way off at the moment: three games into his reign, Moore is yet to lead Town to victory. He is keen to downplay the obvious narrative around his return to Hillsborough this weekend as he tries once again to find that elusive first win, insisting it is just another game to him – and that means going about things on the training pitch the way he always has.

 

He said: “We always will consistently work off the ball, we always consistently work on the ball. Why? Because there’s two elements of the game: there’s a game in possession of the ball and a game off the ball. So we’ll consistently work at that – and not only that, we’ll consistently work because we as a football club and a team want to improve and there’s a desire and determination to improve.

 

“It won’t be like a light switch where you switch the light on and it comes on and off and you see the performances. There’s a continuation of work, and we’ll continue to work day in day out, and the reason we continue to work is we want elements to make us better and we need to be better.

 

“Going round in terms of the football club, that’s our desire, and that’s our temperament here: we want to want to be better as a team and as a football club going forward. Ultimately that always, always will be done on the training ground.”

 

Moore acknowledges that it will be a particular challenge to implement more of a possession-based style on a team that was so successful playing on the counter-attack under Warnock – to the point that Town never once had more than 50% possession in a competitive game under the veteran manager.

 

The new boss is keen not to rush into moving away from Warnock’s methods wholesale all at once: midfielder Ben Wiles commented last week that the side had not yet entirely eschewed Warnock’s unique man-marking system, for instance.

 

Town’s poor work on the ball in the final third was a constant minor gripe of Warnock’s, too, and while there were signs of improvement in their approach play in the second half against Coventry and especially against Ipswich, Town regressed badly against Birmingham City in midweek. A 4-1 defeat was the result.

 

“That’s why I use the phrase ‘it won’t be like a light switch effect’ in terms of seeing that immediately,” Moore says of the challenge facing his side in trying to learn new habits on the ball. “It takes time, it takes work, and it takes a lot of information and detail and learning to produce that.

 

 

“Is that a route that we will be going down? Yes, we will be going down that route – but also at the same time, it’s something that’s done over the course of time and we will be consistently working on that. And again, it’s another area of the game that I’ve spoken about working off the ball – and there’s a part of it working on the ball, and we will be doing that.

 

“It’s where my desire is in terms of how I see the game and how I feel the game should be played, and as I said, we’ll be trying to implement that into the squad.”

 

First, though, Town need to make sure they do not neglect the fundamental parts of the game: things like routine saves, simple passes, and staying alert to runners into the box. Centre-back Tom Lees – the only player in this squad with prior experience working under Moore – admitted as much after the Birmingham game.

In an effort to put that right, Moore sat his players down to rewatch video of the Birmingham game and compare it to better performances in the matches prior, pinpointing where things had gone awry. Is there an argument, though, that these are things to which Championship players should not need to dedicate so much time?

 

Moore points out: “Yeah, but you can still work on the basics. You can always still work on the basics and the fundamental basics can go a long, long way. Any sports professional at the very, very highest level at the game, there’ll be an element of doing the basics well.

“So I agree with what Leesy was saying in terms of getting those basics right, and even the simple basics you can get undone with – it certainly felt that was the case the other night. Certainly the goals that we’ve conceded, we certainly feel that they were avoidable from our perspective. From Birmingham’s perspective they played well as well on the night and that led to the goals, but certainly from our perspective, we felt they were avoidable.”