Hit the North – Huddersfield Town Preview

the ground is the second road on the right, bring own hungry child

Right

Beesy has been to Huddersfield. Once.

It proved surprisingly hard to get to… climbing aboard a trundler in Sheffield, dodging the prams and chavs as you go through the Meadowhall Interchange, through a place called Penistone* and jump off before Leeds.

In an incident that in no way clouded Beesy’s judgement about Huddersfield the first thing we saw when venturing out of the quite nice station was a man urinating at the side of a big church.

Now this is a somewhat odd way to get a first impression and I’m pleased to say it was the last time I saw some dude’s wang on my snakelike voyage to the Galpharm. Still I did encounter several northern stereotypes including people in flat caps, drunk rugby league fans, several Greggs (the baker) and slightly against the run of things… a really cool record shop where I bought Captain Beefheart’s seminal Shiny Beast album.

Huddersfield then, to this correspondent at least, is the very epitome of the north with its dank concrete buildings matching the dank grey skies, miscellaneous meat pies and a constant banging of drums from a hostile football crowd.

Oh, and I was almost killed by the Brentford Team coach… but that is a different story.

Huddersfield Town, founded in 1908, had a remarkably good 1920s winning the FA Cup and the Division One Championship 3 times on the bounce.

Fast forwarding to the modern day… mainly because their history from the 20s is a little bit boring

Now owned by Mr Card Factory “t’own” (or whatever they call themselves) are amongst the favourites to go up this year and can probably, realistically, challenge Leeds and Charlton for automatic promotion. A fortune has been spent and at present they have two players who have each scored as many goals as Brentford have in their entirety this year. The trio of Simpson, Rhodes and Robinson are rumoured to cost several hundred of thousands of pounds.

This no doubt can be explained by the presence of Cort and Kabba as much discussed in the Hobo Challenge. With the anticipated return of Charlie MacDonald hopefully there will be more of a goal threat from Brentford but the month of September appears it may turn out to be a chastening month for the West London tyros.

Anyway bet your house on a Jordan Rhodes hat trick. Beesy genuinely fears the result tomorrow.

Huddersfield facts anyone??

• Huddersfield is a hotbed of acting talent. Patrick Stewart was born in nearby and James Mason hails from the area. Both of these are acted into a cocked hat however by Rene Artois himself Gordon Kaye. Ohhhhhh RENE!
• ‘Allo ‘Allo is the greatest British Sitcom ever written.
• League Egg Chasing was founded in Huddersfield and despite the Thrice Champions era the odd shape ball game is still probably the prefered sport of the town.
• Lee Clark is personally responsible for the current sale of Wispa Gold, having successfully persuaded Cadbury’s to sell the caramely chocolatey treat based solely on a petition of 468 names, all of which are “Lee Clark”.
• Huddersfield is in the Domesday book as Oderesfelt. There also was a Roman Fort around about the Roman period.
• The train station is quite nice

*If that name isn’t funny enough on a visit to Hillsborough Beesy once espied an advert for Penistone Erectors.

Brentford 1 – 1 Oldham: classic division three

If an experiment in financially inexplicable merchandising were conducted to bottle the smell of division three, the lunatic manufacturers could do worse than boil this match down.

An open first 15 minutes gave way to a dominant Brentford performance against unambitious opponents, only for a lack of attacking penetration and moments of defensive disorganisation to prevent a better result.

Both sides could have taken the lead inside the first five minutes only for the first half to degenerate into aerial attrition, marked only by Sam Wood’s obvious discomfort at left back in Ryan Dickson’s absence – doing no favours to Beesy’s confident assertion that the pair will swap positions this season. Auxilliary left winger Sam Saunders was the brightest spark, and it was his run across the box that drew an unnecessary foul, allowing The Grey Goose to open the scoring from the spot.

With James Wilson enjoyably showing himself to be far too good to suffer Pawel Abbot’s flat track bully routine it looked like a rick would be needed for Oldham to draw level. Cleveland Taylor dutifully provided, giving the ball away in his own box after Mark Phillips had failed to clear, although a superb lofted finish was still needed to capitalise.

Oldham’s gaggle of serial whingers can reflect on a job well done targetting the referee as the discipline-free Taylor perplexingly escaped so much as a booking despite kicking the ball at a linesman, shoving Sam Saunders in an altercation in front of the referee and kicking Sam Wood long after play had stopped – at the feet of the same linesman he’d already kicked the ball at.

Brentford threatened to get a winner with Wilson always menacing from corners, and Steve Kabba almost finished a slick move from the left, but with Oldham playing for the draw the game petered out instead.

Price 5 – Foster 6 Phillips 5 Wilson 7 Wood 5 – Taylor 5 O’Connor 5 Hunt 5 Saunders 6 – Weston 5 (Kabba 6) Cort 5

Carlisle 1 – 3 Bees: northern composure

Like we knowingly said in our preview, Lenny Pidgeley now plays for Carlisle. Like we didn’t say in the preview for fear of tempting fate, he’s fucking atrocious and as good as a two goal start.

First games are still usually a poor guide to how a season will unfold – and we write that with Bury and Chesterfield away, and Leroy’s beginnings in mind – but it’s promising stuff if the defensive uncertainties can be ironed out. Maybe we need to get Weston’s tribunal out of the way sooner rather than later though…

Carlisle preview – back to the league of the damned

After two years in the Coca-Cola Abyss, Brentford make a return to their perpetual home, the Coca-Cola League of the Damned. It was always going to be an odd championship to celebrate given the Club should never have imploded so spectacularly as to get relegated in the first place.

Still, on the plus side, it means not having to play truly awful, fanless, quasi non-league sides like Accrington, Morecambe and Bradford next year.

Instead we get the great leviathans of league football, starting with the near-Scottish border botherers of Carlisle. After staving off relegation by a point, it’s hard to see what has changed in Cumbria over the close season (apart from losing their two good players) suggesting more of the same to follow. Still, the first game of the season is usually a red herring, so expect a comfortable 2-0 win for the striker-free home outfit.

The final week before the season begins has seen some curious transfer movement in TW8 making Brentford’s prospects all the harder to divine. Huddersfield’s – Huddersfield’s for goodness sake – chequebook willy-waving rendered futile Andy Scott’s months of fluttering his eyelids at Jordan Rhodes, Nathan Elder was sold and Carl Cort was brought in. News that Steve Kabba has joined him suggests something of a departure from previous policy, a policy we’ll refer to as simply a ‘goally’ policy. Turning our nose up at Billy Clarke doesn’t look so clever now, does it?

Still, basic competence is usually enough to allow you to prosper in the League of the Damned – is Steve Kabba any less good than Isaiah Rankin was? Carl Cort will presumably work harder than Deon Burton did. And they’re clearly better than Rowan Vine was when we had him.

Here are your Carlisle facts:

• Carlisle is the smallest city in the UK by population but the largest by area. That can’t possibly be true.
• The club history on Carlisle’s website is incomplete, and what is there is exceptionally tedious.
• Eddie Stobart started his Ginsters-subsidy business in Carlisle.
• Carlisle’s squad featuring Graham Kavanagh, Scott Dobie and Marc Bridge-Wilkinson would have been quite good, were Saturday’s match to take place five years ago.
• Carlisle doesn’t feature in the Domesday Book as it was part of Scotland at the time.
• Lenny Pidgely now plays for Carlisle.
• Carlisle cathedral is Europe’s largest freestanding structure made out of jam.