How Darren Moore may take advantage of Huddersfield Town’s errors and blunders…

The manager has taken an experimental approach since arriving, and the club’s league position means he no longer has that luxury, but he may have learned what he needs.

When a new manager takes over a team, it’s understandable that they would want to attempt new things or even revisit tried-and-true concepts that failed under their predecessors. After all, different tactics, forms, and mentalities might yield diverse outcomes for ostensibly the same function.

Regretfully, Darren Moore hasn’t discovered the ideal recipe for success at Huddersfield Town—assuming there is such a thing. Whether Ben Jackson was tried at right wing-back, Sorba Thomas at number 10, Yuta Nakayama in the back three, or Brahima Diarra in a box-to-box midfield role, there has been no shortage of effort to try to discover points of difference.

As Kevin Nagle put it, Moore did not get the benefit of a pre-season or of much time on the training pitch after he arrived, and so he had to find out what was what in games. On top of that, as recently as a couple of weeks ago, the manager was talking about wanting to try out his players in unfamiliar positions just in case he needed them to perform there again in the future, perhaps mindful that his injury list was worrying enough already even before getting the worst news he could have hoped for by losing Jack Rudoni to a foot injury.
The bad news is that results have been such that Moore can no longer have the luxury of tinkering in the name of discovery; he needs to be confident that what he does and who he picks to do it all give his side the best possible chance of victory. The good news is that he has, at least, now had the opportunity to have a look at everybody and work out their strengths and weaknesses.

Crucially, that includes knowing who he can count on on a matchday and who he can’t, which any manager will tell you can vary wildly from what they see on the training pitch. All of Moore’s fit senior options, bar backup goalkeeper Chris Maxwell, have now played at least some part under the new manager, with all but one of them making appearances in over half of Moore’s seven games in charge—Rarmani Edmonds-Green being the lone exception.
The question of which players he can trust is perhaps the most important and instructive: as we saw under Neil Warnock last season, sometimes it’s better to play someone who is limited but error-free than it is to select someone who offers more on paper. Few would have expected Edmonds-Green to be a better option than Etienne Camara in defensive midfield or for Jaheim Headley to be preferable on the wing to Joe Hungbo, but so it proved. Those are the kinds of things you only learn from bitter experience.

Minutes played under Darren Moore

With seven players sidelined due to injuries and Jonathan Hogg suspended for Saturday’s visit from Watford, Moore clearly has a challenging task ahead of him. Finding good things to say about the manager’s tenure thus far is difficult, but he has made it clear that they must learn from their setbacks.

Though those have proven to be hollow words thus far, there is some truth to the claim that every time Moore has attempted to solve a problem, it has merely led to new problems elsewhere, even when the solution he came up with appeared ideal on paper. Moore needs to put those teachings into practice if Town is to improve their situation any time soon.