The Terriers squad was thin enough before a growing injury list, and the loss of their talismanic midfielder gives the manager little to work with but doesn’t entirely excuse him.
The Terriers’ loss against Leeds United on the road could have been even worse, given that you would have expected them to lose regardless of other outcomes in the championship.
From 14th onward, the only teams to gain points were Watford, Millwall, and Sheffield Wednesday. Even those three outcomes were what Huddersfield Town would have desired, considering the first two teams were playing each other, and the bottom-dwelling Owls prevented Rotherham from getting closer to Town in the 21st minute with their game still to play. Town still has control of its placement outside of the bottom three for the time being.
But the fact we are talking in these terms at all at this stage of the season is nonetheless a condemnation. The last weekend in October is frightfully early to be looking nervously at other results, but such is the poor quality of Town’s performances recently that it is legitimate to start worrying: they have conceded four goals in three of their past five games, and while they picked up four points in the other two, they were far from convincing against the two worst sides in the division.
You could almost, almost stretch yourself to write that off as Town simply having been soundly beaten by two of the current top five and had a bad day against Birmingham, if you were so cheery and upbeat that Ned Flanders would beat you about the head with a shovel just to stop the sunbeams from shooting out your eyes.
Unfortunately, even the most hopeful reading of Town’s hopes was dealt a massive blow by something even worse than an expected defeat at Elland Road. The news that Jack Rudoni is not just injured but set for weeks on the sidelines is a dismal blow to a side that we already felt just needed to find a way to scrape through the January transfer window. Doing so without their best player, as Rudoni undoubtedly now is, makes that job feel borderline impossible, particularly with several other key injuries elsewhere in the squad.
We are mindful of the need not to catastrophize. We shouldn’t forget that Town will, at some point, get Josh Ruffels, David Kasumu, Josh Koroma, and Danny Ward back fit. All of them would walk into the starting lineup at present, so having them all available would be potentially transformative.
As it stands, though, it looks pretty bleak. Situations like this would test any manager, and a big part of the question the Huddersfield Town Board will need to think about when it comes to the pressure on Moore is whether a different manager would be capable of doing better with what is available to them and whether they would have expected Moore to be able to get results with this injury list when they appointed him. Also a consideration: is it wise to make a change and go for a sixth permanent manager in 18 months? It’s exactly that kind of disruption that has contributed to the players looking so lost in the first place, after all.
But they will also know from last season that waiting too long can carry its own risks. They rode out a lot of weeks like this, where other results went their way regardless of their own failures, leading them to stick with Mark Fotheringham for seven or eight games too long. They were extremely fortunate, to say the least, that it proved not to be disastrously late.
Ultimately, even if they acknowledge that even the perfect manager desperately needs the January transfer window, Town need Moore to show he will at least have laid the foundations for them to build on with the right signings. You would expect the currently available players to get beat most weeks, but that doesn’t mean they have to make it easy. At the moment, sadly, they are; the results and performances both confirm as much.
Moore and his players frequently discuss the need to learn from their losses. Moore has now experienced enough of them to know what is unquestionably ineffective. He now needs to locate anything that has some probability of succeeding.
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