Huddersfield Town 1 v Birmingham City 1 - EFL Championship

Saturday 23rd November 2019
SkyBet Championship
at the John Smith's Stadium
Huddersfield Town (0) 1
Fraizer Campbell 55
Birmingham City (0) 1
Marc Roberts/Lukas Jutkiewicz 78
Some post match press coverage has credited Lukas Jutkiewicz with the Blues goal, because Marc Roberts' header 'went in' off of the visitors number ten, so debate that one amongst yourself... the main thing is that it 'went in'.
Attendance: 22,573
Point & hope photo gallery: click HERE

Happy birthday to the former Birmingham, Huddersfield
and England etc. etc. maverick, that is Frank Worthington

Huddersfield Town are back in the Championship, following two seasons where they were, in all honesty, punching above their weight, in the Premier League; which is where they were plying their trade the last time that Birmingham City visited the John Smith's Stadium, for an FA Cup Fourth Round game in January 2018, which (just like this afternoon's game) finished one apiece.

The Terriers won the replay to that particular game 1-4, at St. Andrew's.

The west Yorkshire side crash-landed on their arrival back in the Football League this term, and subsequently turned to Danny and Nicky Cowley, the management team at Lincoln City (a team who've only won once since the sibling management duo decamped from Sincil Bank), to steady the Terriers ship.
In the interim, Huddersfield have climbed out of the relegation places, and prior to today's game had risen to nineteenth in the table, six points and six places behind Pep Clotet's Blues.

I hear tell, that the Kirklees Stadium is a nice modern ground, with great facilities.
Aesthetics aside... it most certainly isn't!
And I would invite anybody claiming such a falsehood, to attend a fixture here on a wet and windswept Winter's day, like say... today, to experience the true grimness of this open to the elements wind trap of a ground. Especially in the away section, where the bijou concourse, is outdoors, exposed to the elements and invariably overcrowded, while the toilets are barely adequate enough to accommodate even a modest number of visiting supporters. Today. Birmingham's travelling fans had once again, sold out their full allocation of tickets.

"It's a long, long road"

Outside the other areas of the ground, there are outdoor fenced off areas for smokers, but in the away end's 'Stalag compound', everyone is just squeezed in together.
Today, the front fifteen or so rows of seats in the 'Abzorb Stand' were completely saturated following this afternoon's deluge followed by persistent drizzle all afternoon; while the travelling disabled supporters were lined up pitchside, beyond the perimeter advertising hoardings, right in the line of fire of any stray balls, beside the goal. Though the stewards did fetch a few polythene poncho type things to spare a few of them from getting completely drenched.
Nice modern ground with great facilities my arse!

By heck! Somebody needs a brush trim.

The first time that I ever visited this place, the far end stand (from what is now the away end) was still under construction... and consequently, the experience was akin to watching a game in a wind tunnel. And it wasn't much better today, but hey ho! Musn't grumble... football is, when all said and done, a winter game and it was a snip, at a mere £30 a chuck, to be exposed to whatever the weather was destined to chuck at us, while watching two evenly matched teams slug out a draw.

A regular football watching habit often manifests itself as a character building test of your patience, stamina and resolve, but, in the main, the joys outweigh the sorrows, even though there are invariably less of them as you march on along the long, long road.
If you haven't got the wherewithal to stomach (quite) a bit of inconvenience from time to time (or even most of the time), then this way of life isn't any sort of vocation that will suit you.

If you want to stay warm, dry and comfortable on a Saturday afternoon and be entertained too, then there is an Odeon cinema next door to this open-plan arena, that should be right up your street and it only costs around a third of the price of a match ticket to gain entry there too.

But: "Jaws was never my scene and I don't like Star Wars!"... so, ignore me moaning about the crap that football fans put up with on a regular basis, because we all know exactly where I am going to be at 3PM next Saturday too, along with thousands of other fellow masochists.

In the eyes of the uninitiated, our partisan behavioural traits and allegiances might appear to be some kind of ritual, borne out of having a severe mental affliction, or some kind of addiction that we can't shake off (and I personally wouldn't dispute that there could be a whole lot of truth in that either).
It's a subculture existence, where otherwise sensible people, have tumbled haplessly over a demarcation line, somewhere in between passionate loyalty and blind stupidity. Don't you go falling on me when you get here... because personally, I accepted my fate a looong time ago.
But, that said, I'm not looking for a cure for my apparent madness, and lifestyle choices/priorities. that border on some kind of an obsession.
Besides, who'd ever want to be sane all of the time anyway!?

If you want to see what actually happens to the completely lost causes and no-hopers, who attach themselves to football with a religious-like fervour, to use the game as a conduit for their blinkered (and more often than not extremely angry) narrow minded world view narrative, of a wide cross-spectrum of people involved within the game; then you don't have to delve very deeply into several online discussion forums and social media groups, to spot many, many, extreme examples of 'screw loose' over-reactions and tantrums, posted by people who don't even have anything even resembling a tenuous grasp of either reality or perspective. Might I just add, that if anybody out there thinks I'm having a dig at them personally, by espousing such an accusatory theory, you're effing well right... I am!

If truth be told, today's game was on a par with the weather at times... fairly grim.
And while neither side played badly enough to warrant being defeated, they weren't exactly ripping up any trees in attack at either end of the pitch either.
There were times, when the fare on offer was about as compelling to watch, as a slow-paced game of tactical chess... and the odd flurries provided by Huddersfield's slide-rule forward passes, for their runners to make a lung-busting dash to get onto the end of, and Blues neat passing triangle exchanges to escape from tight situations, weren't exactly putting either Kamil Grabara, the hosts Polish goalkeeper, or Connal Trueman, who was making his first appearance of the season, in place of Birmingham's (much-maligned) regular number one: Lee Camp, under a great deal of pressure.

For the record, Camp was 'rested' today, after Pep Clotet had decided to select the twenty-three year old replacement instead, following discussions with his goalkeeping coach Darryl Flahavan, about several costly incidents in recent games, involving the Northern Ireland stopper. 

As regards today's encounter... if this had been a coaching demonstration, highlighting the virtues of a high press, hard work, rigid formations off the ball and containment, and suffocating the oppositions ability to be creative in key areas, then both sides would have graduated with very high pass marks indeed.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining, needs must and I perfectly understand the logic behind such an approach, as Messrs Cowley and Clotet set out their stalls not to lose, rather than actually go all out to win the game. And besides, it was a useful point for both camps in the final analysis.

But it would've been nice to have seen the players with the ability to run at defences, being given a bit more of a chance to illuminate this spectacle at times.
Trueman did very well, whenever he was called upon to do anything, even though the need for him to get involved didn't arise very often... so much kudos is due in his direction, for staying alert and focused, for the long spells, when the vast majority of other players on pitch, were battling it out, to find a way to unlock each other's congested midfield zones of the pitch, while effectively cancelling each other out.

I could have sworn that I heard somebody refer to the game as a 'dead rubber', on a radio phone-in, on my way home, but I might have misheard the caller, because I was still chuckling to myself about the Leeds United supporter who'd just rung in, to 'discuss' his team's 1-2 win at Luton Town, where he announced across the airwaves, in a forthright manner: "Those people who ring in to say that Patrick Bamford is shit, are talking a load of fucking rubbish!" A statement that proved, if nothing else, a certain local radio station around this neck of the woods, needs to use a time delay on it's live broadcasts, to avoid further embarrassment in future, now that the horse has bolted and the potential for future verbal transgressions might've just sparked off a new copycat craze.

Chances to break the deadlock were few and far between during the opening forty-five minutes, though Trueman would've grown in confidence, after he pulled off a fine save, to deny Trevoh Chalobah a headed goal.
Ten minutes into the second half, Chalobah drilled a measured and well weighted pass through the visitors defence for Fraizer Campbell to run onto, while the Blues players strung across the edge of the area responded to a cry of "Simon says, stand still and leave your goalkeeper exposed!" Campbell, who scored against Blues for Hull City the last time I saw him in action, was never going to miss a chance like that.

Blues finally responded to going a goal behind, with twelve minutes remaining, from a set piece goal, that saw Dan Crowley's delivery pick out Marc Roberts, whose goal-bound downward header, glanced off of Lukas Jutkiewicz, as it beat Grabara.
Right at the death, Huddersfield were grateful to their Polish keeper, when he pulled off a 'worldly' of a save to deny Alvaro Gimenez from what would've been his second ever goal for Birmingham.
FT: Huddersfield Town 1 v Birmingham City 1
A fair result all told, because in the final analysis, neither team played badly enough to warrant a defeat, but neither of them did quite enough to deserve a victory either.
As the saying goes: "It's grim 'oop t'north!"