We’d Fight And Never Lose.
Those were the days, my friends…..
Exciting News
Recently, I’ve been in discussions with the Huddersfield Examiner about blogging for them, obviously around some of the things I work on here. Today my first post on their new blog went live, which is tremendously exciting for me.
I don’t really know what I’ll do with this blog now I’m writing on the Examiner one; maybe keep this aside for the extremely narrow stats. I guess we’ll see how things develop. Either way.
305 – Thank You Jon Macken – Post 47
After 3 minutes of the game at Hartlepool on Saturday, Jon Macken scored a penalty for Walsall to put them one nil up and, in tucking away – indeed in that instance, in taking – the spot kick, do something that no Walsall player had done for 681 days. That left Huddersfield Town, 329 days after Gary Roberts put the seal on the 4-2 victory against Yeovil Town that sent them top of the league, as the team who have the longest penalty drought in the country.
Firstly, I wanted to know about the penalties Town had scored, but I wanted a little more than that. Hopefully this will enlighten me about the 12-yard phenomenon that I dreaded as a taker, but loved as a goalkeeper. The first thing I learnt was that the next time a Town player scores a penalty, it will be the 306th penalty Town have scored in the Football League, which is 5.49% of the total tally (which is about right to me – one out of every 20 goals has been a spot-kick).
The current run, though, is nothing like as long as previous long runs without penalties; I knew we’d had at least one entire season without before, I remember the fuss when Paul Dalton broke the duck, but it turns out that this is the 16th longest run (today is 334 days since Town went top against Yeovil, exactly 1 month shy of a year) without scoring a penalty. The longest ran for 735 days (that’s over 2 years, by a few days) and ended in a 2-2 draw at Portsmouth on 8th Nov 1930; we’d have to go another 13 months without a spot-kick being converted to match that – 22nd September 2012; which is a Saturday, so it could happen – I’d assume the dynamic runs of McDermott, Ward Hunt and Roberts would probably garner one by then, though.
The run that the 2-5 win at Crewe (Paul Dalton, as above) ended was the 3rd longest run – see the first table here (the top 10 – end dates on the left, and take note of the game venues, of which more later) – and there’s been no shortage of occasions where Town have been whole seasons without penalties, something that the 2010/11 vintage have not yet accrued.
There was a few other things I wondered
about when I was working through the statistics for this. One thing that I’d just always assumed, but never really known, was that there are more penalties now than there used to be. The game is quicker than it was, and players are far more likely to go to ground (lazy point, I know, but true) as well as referees far more likely to award spot-kicks. So yes, although the 2000s weren’t a golden era for Town converting penalties, there’s enough of a trend (black line) to suggest that there’s been a slow but gradual increase in the number of penalties awarded (well, certainly in the amount scored – I haven’t got figures for penalties missed outside the last few seasons), which looks set to continue for a while.
The other divides that are immediately apparent from the table I constructed were the disparity between penalties at home and away from home and, more strikingly, the results of the matches that penalties are scored in.
Town’s record in matches in which they’ve score a penalty is as follows. Played 298, Won 181, Drawn 69, Lost 48. That would be good for 612 points, at an average of 2.05 points per game. It pays, then, to get penalties awarded to you. (This much is obvious, though. This is a list of games in which Town have scored at least one goal – it makes sense they’ll have lost fewer) – that said, the most common of those penalty containing results are 2-1 victories (29) and 1-2 defeats (28), there’s only been 15 penalties that have been the only goals in Town victories, most recently Valentine’s Day 2006, when Chris Brandon scored at Blackpool. At Blackpool.
At Blackpool, then, being one of 97 penalties awarded away from home, compared to the 201 at Leeds Road/the McAlpine – just about double the amount. I thought it might be more than that, but certainly that confirms what you might think of penalties. A baying away end is far less likely to be rewarded than a baying three stands.
There’s a couple other curios I’d like to draw to attention. Penalties, if we were doing a Family Fortunes (Family Feud, for my US Readers) of what they mean, sometimes crop up as a nice way of completing a hat-trick for those players who have already netted twice. Unfortunately, I have no way of knowing the order of goals, but there’s been five occasions when Town players have netted hat-tricks containing penalties, so honourable mentions to Jack Malam (8-0 v Liverpool, 10th Nov 1934), Peter Butler (4-1 v Scunthorpe Utd, 31st Dec 1977), Joey Jones (4-0 v Cardiff City, 28th April 1984), Dale Tempest (4-3 v Millwall, 17th August 1985) and Phil Starbuck (4-5 @ Cambridge Utd, 26th April 1994). Notably, and happily, all those games were won.
Secondly, there was a spell from 26th November 1955 to 17th December 1955 when Town scored three penalties in four games – the best such run in the club’s history. Vic Metcalfe got them all.
Finally, I think you’ll like this, I certainly do. It’s a graph – big one – of the differences in days between when Town scored each penalty. Click on it for full-size appearance. So many thanks for Sam Parkin for breaking Walsall’s 681 day duck, and hopefully Huddersfield’s will be the next one to go. I’d plump for Lee Novak, I think.
Day 3b Of The 30 Day Football Challenge – Matches That Make Me Happy
Huddersfield Town 1-1 Lincoln City – 19/05/2004 – Favourite for ‘Drama and Relief’
There’s few things better than winning in the Playoffs. Despite our three triumphs, I’ve only actually seen us win one playoff game (Wembley, 1995) but this came bloody close to it. I still can’t think back to the night, to Robbie Edwards’ goal, without thinking that we actually won the game, rather than just remained level with a Gary Taylor-Fletcher and Jamie McCombe featuring Lincoln City. Weekday night; playoff game; its these games that you actually want to be a fan for, and things like this that can leave a smile on your face for days and weeks to come. Wonderful night. As was…
Huddersfield Town 3-3 AFC Bournemouth – 18/05/2011 – Favourite for ‘Drama, More Drama, A Bit More Drama, and Unconfined Joy’
If I wasn’t a Town fan, this might have featured in the top 10 games I’ve ever seen. It had everything, except I watched it through fingers with ever shortening nails. Bournemouth, if there was any justice, should have won the penalties, because they were, for my money, the better team, but that 25 game unbeaten run had obviously instilled a steely-unwillingness to lose that didn’t evaporate until 10 minutes before the end of the final. This match was tight, tense, exciting, had some wonderful goals (Lovell’s for Bournemouth particularly) and two teams who were dead set on trying to beat each other. It might even have made this list if we’d lost the penalties, but thankfully, our day out in Manchester was just rewards for it. By far the most thrilling Town match I’ve seen on television, and one that made me incredibly proud to be a Town fan, and a fan of lower league football.
Huddersfield Town 3-1 Leicester City – 21/11/1995 – Favourite for ‘Enjoying a Performance’
This is the first match I can remember coming away from (to tell the truth it might be the only match I remember coming away from) thinking ‘That Town team could play in the Premiership’. They completely outplayed a very good (Martin O’Neill managed and, look at what they did the next few seasons) Leicester City side, and not only was it a thrilling (night) game, it was a wonderful performance to boot. If only all home games could be like that. A delight.
Huddersfield Town 2-1 Nottingham Forest – 26/11/2005 – Favourite for ‘Justice Being Done’
Let’s get this straight. Jack Lester should’ve been sent off before half time. The foul he made on Paul Rachubka was as late as you could hope to see, anywhere, and pretty ill-tempered, too. That Forest team came to Town seeming to think they had some God-given right to beat us that day, just because they often had beat us recently. They never looked like it, and having gone 2-0 down, took more of a ‘kicking lumps’ approach to the game. It was played in a foul spirit, though a good atmosphere (unusual for Saturday games at the Galpharm) and in the end (after Ian Breckin had decapitated Gary Taylor-Fletcher and Jack Lester’s red card had finally arrived) Town prevailed in one of those games that you instantly want to watch again to see if your view of anything (everything) was skewed. It wasn’t. Jack Lester will not be welcomed back well, I shouldn’t think. But then he seldom is anywhere. Everyone likes seeing villains getting their just deserts, and this was one of those.
Huddersfield Town 2-1 Bristol Rovers – 28/05/1995 – How could it be anything else? You go to watch your team to see them win things. This was the first time I saw them win anything. That’s all there is to it, really.
Day 3a Of The 30 Day Football Challenge – Matches That Make Me Happy
AFC Wimbledon 2-3 Bristol Rovers – 06/08/2011 – Favourite for ‘Stoking the Fires’
A new entry here, obviously, and not one that would probably be on the list in 10 years’ time, but I thoroughly enjoyed every last second of this second game of the Football League season last weekend. From the minute the Sky people appeared, trying to big up Wimbledon’s return but being completely drowned out by Rovers fans singing Goodnight Irene, to the wonderfully ebbing and flowing game, to the ‘not quite working out how you’d have hoped’, it epitomised everything that is good about football in the lower leagues, right down to the Butcher, Baker, Candlestick-Maker feel that Wimbledon’s team brought to the proceedings by containing the gloriously monikered Jolley and Wellard. Truly a shame one team had to lose this one. Truly lit my fire for the season to come.
Leeds Utd 1-3 Southend – 24/10/2006 – Favourite for ‘Opening a New Possibility’
I said to myself that I wouldn’t do this; wouldn’t just have Leeds getting beaten as my favourite non-Town things I enjoyed, but this is a little bit different. I was at another match this night, I think it may have been in Liverpool, for some reason, and we’d got back into the car and were travelling back and heard on Five Live first the result, which was nice, and then the fact that it left Leeds 23rd in the Championship – their lowest position ever we were told. This was pleasant enough, but then – and this is why this match is in here – a Leeds fan phoned up to correct the presenter that Leeds had actually spent about a day that low before, sometime in 1962 or some such. That Leeds fan who phoned up served only one purpose to me. He indicated that, not only could Leeds get relegated, but they were scared it was going to happen, too. I knew, there and then, that come May, they were more than likely going down to League One. Apologies to any Leeds fans who’ve stumbled across this posting, but that’ll be your last unfavourable mention in this post.
France 3-0 Brazil – 14/07/1998 -Favourite for ‘Crowning a Hero’
I love Zinedine Zidane. Everything about him, from his playing ability to his reticence to speak when co-commentating on Marseille games. He is, of course, one of the greatest players of the modern era – so great that PES added one of his personal tricks. Adidas use him as a football ‘guru’. This game, though, was what put him on that pedestal. Let’s not forget that he’d not had the most ‘special’ of World Cups – remember the stamp on the Saudi that saw him banned? That was this one. It was just that this game everything came together beautifully; for Zidane, for France and for football in a way it had spectacularly failed to do four years hence for my favourite of the footballers. This was Zidane’s day, and he shone as brightly as on any day of his career.
Any FA Cup First/Second Round Game -Favourite For ‘Guaranteed Enjoyment’
If ever you need to keep me in one place for a long time, just find a collection of FA Cup First Round Match of the Days, tie me to a chair, and leave me there. I love them. Ever since I first realised that it was there that the real minnows against bigboys affairs happen (think about it – come the third round, it’s the Conference at the lowest, and that’s not the same as watching Faversham Town travelling to Sheffield Wednesday). It’s the round you get the most lopsided scores – Colchester have a 7-1 win to their name, Orient have an 8-2 (extra time) win and Norwich won 7-0 in the last few years alone. The second round is much the same, just on a smaller scale. But yes, FA Cup First Round Day is MY day. Should Town be promoted to the Championship, we will lose my favourite game of the season, every season. It’s a small trade off for not being in the JPT, but I’ll miss it immensely.
Liverpool 0-2 Arsenal – 26/05/1989 – Favourite For ‘Catchphrases’; ‘Delightful Drama’
This game, more than any other game, distilled a league campaign into 90 minutes of football. I’m too young to remember it fully, but I know how it all fitted together, I know enough. Liverpool just had to draw. Then, later on, Liverpool just had to keep it 0-1. Then, for a moment there, it was up for grabs. And then it was grabbed. And that goal, that commentary and that moment came to signify exactly that. The moment that something was either won or lost and then, decisively, won. You don’t get many of those in football, and this was the most dramatic and the ‘first’. Those moments, I guess, unless you lose it all, are wonderful, and each one makes me happy.
21.74 – A Good Start (Pt 2 of 2) – Post 46
So we come to the first 10 games of the season. Now, as you’d expect, we cover about 50% of old ground here, but the two tables, at top and bottom, are far more revelatory of the seasons to come as, I guess, the better teams and weaker teams schedules ‘even out’ towards Christmas. By the end of 10 games, you’d expect a team to have gathered 21.74% of their points tally and, as before, the teams that are heading for promotion haven’t quite achieved that 
ratio, and the ones that are heading for the drop haven’t quite fallen that far but, by 10 games, the gaps between the two are far closer which means that you’ve got a lot better idea by 10 games – particularly in seasons when there isn’t one team running away with it – of where you’ll end up.
So, looking at the table here you see that there’s only one season as before that the promoted teams were moving quicker than the average rate once (that – first – year that Leeds went postal and then collapsed) but the other four seasons has seen the top teams picking up on their first five games performance, but not quite looking like guaranteed promotion form (I find it strange 
that the last two seasons have been the same, but that’s just me), a table that is repeated, in reverse, in the relegated teams table. The four fallers in 2006/07 fell away badly, as we’ve seen from the five game table, but other than that, they’ve not been far off the mark you’d expect – 24.55 is only around 3% above 21.74, and, as a secondary caveat to these teams, its also worth bearing in mind that a lot of these teams were recently promoted, so their early season form – particularly at home – is generally better than one would anticipate (or, in the case of Gillingham is 2009/10, is just good over the whole season).
What have we learned from these two posts, then?
Five games is still to early to draw any conclusions for the season, but by 10 games, the better teams will be beginning to show at the top part of the league, just as the weaker teams will be around the bottom somewhere.
Incidentally, I used the teams that got relegated for this chart, rather than those who gathered fewest points – Plymouth, notably, last season, skewed the figures a little, but only a little, with their creditable start.
10.89 – A Good Start (Pt 1 of 2) – Post 45
“I’m not going to look at the league table until 10 games in. Nothing’s really happened until then, and you can never tell after one game where anyone’s going to end up”
Well, now. Well, now. Is that the case? Remember Southampton’s slow start last season? Remember that Millwall were crippled by injuries and had to surge through. Remember also that Leeds were many points clear before their collapse, and Brighton were top of the league from very early on. So does that make a difference.
I’m going to take the answer to this in two parts and owe Jonathan Wilson (@jonawils) a massive debt of gratitude for the tools to solve this particular puzzle. I’m going to work with the seasons from 2006/07 to last year (five seasons, and fifteen promoted teams) to seek my answers, and hope to come to a conclusion.
How important is a good start? After 5 games, what sort of indication did we have that teams were going to prosper, or flounder? Mr Wilson worked his tallies out by comparing actual points tallies (% of final points totals) with the expected points percentages if they were gathered evenly throughout the season. I saw no reason to mess with his formula, though obviously, my sights were set a little lower than the top of the Premiership and my numbers a little more difficult to pin down.
As it happens, I was a little surprised by what I found – the variety was large but, by and large, the expected points tally (10.87%) was nowhere near matched, except in 2009/10, when Leeds’ start swept all before them, and led to the three 
promoted sides gathering 10.90% of their total tallies in the first five games (as near as damn an average figure as you’re likely to find).
The other four seasons saw the promoted teams doing a bit of struggling while things levelled themselves out, from only 13 points (5.02%) in 2006/07 up to a more respectable 8.65% in 2010/11 – while Southampton dallied, Brighton and Peterborough’s houses got into order pretty quickly.
This can only help to illustrate that the extreme beginning of the season is really no indication at all of where teams will finish, as can checking what was happening with those teams who were going to drop out of the division in May, those four unfortunates. Well, I thought this was going to prove to be an opposite story at first, but it seems that Brentford’s glorious start and collapse was something of an anomaly, matched by the decent starts of 
Bradford, Chesterfield and Rotherham to create the illusion that a good start generally meant a bad end to the season. Of course, as we’ve seen above, there’s a distinct regression to the mean with these early games, and the first five seem to go out of their way to prove that – 18.44% of their total tallies that the 2006/07 relegation vintage had gathered is almost double the rest of the tallies, and explains why the average figure (11.36%) is a touch over the 10.87% we’d expect if the games were equal across the season. The fact is, though, that 11.36% is a good deal higher than 7.60%, which indicates one thing very clearly – teams start a lot more evenly than they finish. The promoted teams gathered 100 point between 15 of them, while the relegated teams gathered the same figure amongst 20 – not a massive difference between 5 points and 6.67 points at the time, but that difference comes to translate into a lot at the end of the season – it would work out at a difference between 54 and 72 points, which is sizeable indeed.
Town then, don’t need to worry if they don’t set the world on fire at the start of the season. As we discovered last year, the best work is done after Christmas.
Next time, I see if 10 games into the season is more revelatory.
1 1 1 – The End Of The Beginning – Post 44
Saturday was the first day of the season and, however you spin it, a 1-1 draw at home is disappointing. I wasn’t going into the game expecting Bury to be brushed aside, I was thinking they’d put up some stubborn resistance but Town would probably have a bit too much in the end; (a Draw/Home scenario, possibly 2-1 or 3-1). Of course, that’s not how it panned out, and it made the season open with a bit of a damp squib.
But is it the end of the world. How likely is an opening day draw to curtail promotion hopes, or result in disappointment? Well, we don’t know. We won’t do until May. In the meantime, I’ve collated tables of the opening day results from the last five years for all teams promoted within the Football League (10 each season). I remember some of them – Southampton’s defeat at home to Plymouth, who ended up relegated, for example – Norwich’s 1-7 defeat was the stuff of legend, but they also lost 3-2 at Watford on Sky on the first day of last season. I don’t think it matters a bean, to be honest. A 1-7 defeat would instigate a bit of worry, and I’d expect changes, but a slowish start shouldn’t matter at all.
So here we go.
My prediction, for once, was correct. Hurrah!
It doesn’t matter a bean what you do in your first game, then. Promotion, if it is to be yours, will be yours.
Other than that Norwich 1-7 Colchester, which is a curio in and of itself, 50%, or five, as its also known, of the promoted teams in 2009/10 drew 1-1 in their first matches – Newcastle Utd and West Bromwich Albion against one another.
9 – Answers – Post 39
Anton Robinson is number 9, after.
Brentford - 1995 - Kevin Dearden (loan), Paul Stephenson (coach) Bristol R - 1995 - Marcus Stewart, Marcus Browning Lincoln C - 2004 - Gary Taylor-Fletcher, Jamie McCombe Mansfield - 2004 - Junior Mendes Bournemth - 2011 - Donal McDermott and now Anton Robinson.
4.06 – A Brief Appreciation of Jordan Rhodes – Post 43
Jordan Rhodes has scored 35 league goals for Huddersfield Town. 19 were in 2009/10, and 16 were in 2010/11. That’s a more than respectable tally – indeed, only Rickie Lambert and Lee Barnard have scored more in League One over that time (though Grant Holt has scored around 2,000,000 in that time, largely against Jordan’s former team Ipswich). Now, that fact alone points to the fact that there aren’t many strikers of his quality around the divisions – if someone scores goals, they’re given a chance higher very quickly indeed now – witness Charlie Austin, scorer of 19 goals in 2009/10, and even Billy Paynter, with 26 that season, even though it seems to have been an anomaly in a sea of otherwise average goal-scoring seasons. Jordan has remained in League One and will be looking to score a similar amount this time around – if he is successful, his run of three 15 goal League One seasons will be the longest active streak (Rickie Lambert currently owns that, but of course will by plying his trade a division higher this time around).
Now, this isn’t what I want focus on in this mini-post. I want to draw focus to the shots per goal figure that these strikers have carried with them. A value per goal, if you will. It was something I did an extensive post about on the then-extant 606 when Jermain Beckford left Leeds to go to Everton – he required a lot of shots, at that stage, for his goals to come; far more, when I worked it out, than Simon Cox and Rickie Lambert did for the same tally. He has adjusted bit-by-bit to the Premiership.
Anyway.
In his first season, Jordan’s 19 goals came from 106 shots (53 on, 53 off target) which was a rate of a goal every 5.58 shots – good for only 10th best in the division, behind such goal-fiends as Charlie Austin, Nicky Forster and, erm, Ian Harte. Last season, Jordan may have only scored 16 goals, but they were from far fewer shots (partly because he didn’t play as often) at only 4.06 shots per goal. Thinking about that, scoring a goal every four attempts, is impressive indeed; counting that slightly over half were on target, that’s 16 goals out of 36 shots that found the net – a goalkeeper success rate of only 20/36 (or 56%) and leaving him third in League One, behind only Craig Mackail-Smith (of course) and Ashley Barnes, neither of whom will provide competition this season.
There’s a few interesting nuggets on the table – Rickie Lambert being so ineffective last season (?), Ian Harte…just generally – but this is a slight going over of old ground (refer to my minute-by-minute Jordan Rhodes post a few months ago) with a reminder of something I’ll be keeping a close eye on this season – expect updates, then, every goal that Jordan scores with all players on the same or more goals – obviously depending on circumstance. The conclusion I would draw, though, is that Jordan appears to be improving every season, and hopefully will do the same again. Will be interesting, too, to see the seasons Bradley Wright-Phillips and Gary Jones have, particularly BWP.
Huddersfield Town In Numbers 