Prematch press conferences can be quite dull affairs, where the manager will go out of his way to evade questions and give the least interesting answer possible. Darren Moore was a master of giving the longest possible response to every question without revealing anything meaningful and I can imagine journalists would end his forty or fifty-minute sessions wondering how they could scratch together an article or two out of his wittering. Andre Breitenreiter did the absolute opposition in his pre-Ipswich press conference and used it as an opportunity to vent all his pent-up feelings about the no-good players he’s had to make excuses for these past few months. It had a similar feeling to Father Ted accepting the Golden Cleric award, if anyone remembers that scene from the 90s sitcom.
Because not everyone has time to watch through the full press conference, I’ve pulled out the eight more controversial statements he made and added a few of my thoughts on them underneath. There were also a few subtle hints that Breitenreiter and one of the journalists interviewing him don’t expect him to be around for much longer. I’ll put the video of the press conference at the bottom too, it’s worth watching if you have the time.
Some players have already left the club in their head
When talking about the squad Breitenreiter will be taking to Ipswich, he said that some players have mentally already checked out of the club and are thinking about other things. So he intends to only take along players who are committed to the cause. For those amateur sleuths who are keen to work out who these bad apples are (myself included), the team sheet on Saturday will make very interesting reading.
While there are rules in place that teams have to play full-strength teams and there will be scrutiny from the league and Leeds fans to make sure we abide by this, I think it’s vital that we only play those players who have a future at Huddersfield Town. I can imagine those players who feel Breitenreiter has thrown them under the bus will be close to mutinous at the moment after his scathing comments, so it may not even be possible to get them to travel to Ipswich if he wanted them to play.
Injuries forced Breitenreiter to pick players showing poor behaviours
Andrew Breitenreiter mentioned Balker, Nakayama, and Ward’s injuries over the past few months as being particularly problematic as it left him being forced into playing players that he knew were bad characters. I find this a fascinating admission, as few managers would be willing to allow players who are not pulling their weight to get anywhere near the first-team squad, never mind regularly start games.
Thinking back to the options we had on the bench back in February and March though, we often had to name fewer than nine subs because there weren’t enough options or throw in players from the academy who weren’t ready for Championship football who were just there for the experience of a matchday.
It all just feels reminiscent of those times in my school days when we had a supply teacher who couldn’t keep control. The badly behaved kids would sense their opportunity and run riot. It sounds like Huddersfield Town has been like an out-of-control secondary school class, where the delinquent pupils have taken over. The fact that Breitenreiter is only now talking about it and didn’t manage to sort out these issues directly doesn’t speak volumes about him and his coaching abilities, despite his comments now at least helping to diagnose the issue.
He wouldn’t have come if he had known about all the problems at Huddersfield Town
Like a disgruntled customer trying to return a second-hand car with a gearbox full of sawdust, Breitenreiter feels like he’s been sold a pup. Apparently, the higher-ups told him about some of the issues behind the scenes but not the extent of the culture problems in the dressing room. He believes that no manager would have been willing to take on the job if they had known the extent of the issues that had sunk in.
This feels about as close as Breitenreiter has come to saying he wants to leave the club. He did explicitly say it. In fact, he made a mild reference to not regretting his decision to come, but my impression was that he very much thought he gambled his reputation on taking on a team at the bottom of the English second tier and it’s backfired on him because too many of the players are rotten. The suggestion here was he didn’t have much appetite to drop down into the third tier and risk his reputation even more.
The club needs a culture and identity change from the bottom to the top
I found it most interesting that Breitenreiter talked about a top-to-bottom culture change, not just getting rid of the players that have poisoned the dressing room. So, if we’re looking from the top, that has to include roles such as the Chief Executive and Director of Football (or whatever it’s currently called). Then it filters down to his role as manager because he failed to fix these issues, then the coaches, players, youth team, all the way down to Brooky the kitman (though he’s surely safe, as he must the be the longest serving employee at the club).
I think relegation is a good reason to have a look at everything at the club, see what’s working and what isn’t and make changes where required. Brutal ones if they have to be. I honestly don’t know if Jake Edwards and Mark Cartwright are good at their jobs because it’s hard to see their impact directly, they have more of a gradual effect. But given the current state of things, it’s hard to see how one or both of them haven’t made some fairly large-scale errors to get to the current position.
My impression is that Neil Warnock’s personality was holding an awful lot together and since then all these issues have festered behind the scenes. Forgive the graphic imagery, but we’ve now got to pull off the bandage and treat the gaping wound that’s infected the club. It’ll be interesting to see what changes are made between now and the start of next season to address these deep and wide issues that Breitenreiter suggests exist.
Neil Warnock’s preseason focussed on golf and going to the pub – and they were fit enough to play 90 minutes
It turns out that playing pub teams, having barbecues in Neil Warnock’s back garden and getting drunk aren’t at the cutting edge of sports science when it comes to preparing for a fresh football season. While it was hardly a revelation when Breitenreiter said his team weren’t fit enough, fans have seen the evidence so often this season when we’ve capitulated in the late stages of games, but it was quite shocking for a manager to be so openly critical of another’s methods.
Warnock’s preseason approach comes from another era and, in fairness, values team spirit and togetherness over getting to peak fitness. Warnock always argues that his teams tend to be fit enough anyway, but that’s usually because his man-management can get that “running through brick walls” desire out of players that can draw upon hidden reserves. When Warnock left, so did that ability to get more from the players but they had not done enough of the more traditional preseason training to prepare their bodies the usual way.
While it seems strange to blame the preseason that happened in July 2023 for results in the spring of 2024, there’s no real chance once the season has started to improve upon that base level of fitness because of the intensity of the fixture list in the Championship.
Some players think they are more intelligent than the manager
When Breitenreiter was asked about whether he had tried to reason with the players that have bad attitudes in the squad, he explained that he had tried and failed many times but the problem he has had is that they think they are more intelligent than the manager. This was scathing stuff and almost unbelievable.
Then I thought back to a video the club put out with Darren Moore wearing a microphone during his training session. It was meant to show how great Moore was at working with his squad and how good a coach he was. But I went back at looked at the footage again, and the players are almost all completely ignoring him as he shouts instructions at them. It’s like he’s just background noise and they’re doing something completely different. So ignoring coaches is probably something they’ve become accustomed to by now.
Including caretakers, some of the players at Town will now be on to their eighth, ninth, or for Jonathan Hogg fifteen (!) managers, so I suppose they may now be completely fed up of getting a new manager in every few months who has a different philosophy and style of play. So maybe that’s part of this bad attitude and tendency to ignore instructions. It’s a sad state of affairs though and can’t be allowed to continue. If the players were doing their own thing and we were flying up the league, that would be one thing, but we’re awful and will only get worse if this is allowed to continue.
The atmosphere in the training ground at the start of this week was all wrong
Andre Breitenreiter said that the atmosphere among some of the players at the start of this week was like we had won a promotion. He suggested some players had taken the impact of relegation seriously but others seemingly were not bothered. I just can’t imagine how that could happen, to be quite honest, it’s mind-boggling.
While the full impact of relegation won’t yet be known for a while, it’s pretty usual for the non-footballing members of staff’s jobs to be on the line whenever relegation occurs. So it’s pretty distasteful to think about the people most responsible for the team’s relegation, the players themselves, who are laughing and joking on the first day back at work after relegation was confirmed. I can see why Breitenreiter is so angry.
Many players don’t care about the club
When asked if some players don’t care about the club, rather than sidestepping the question, “For sure,” was the answer that came back from Town’s head coach. He also said that there were “many” who felt this way. He thinks that most teams can cope with two or three players who aren’t good characters but the group of bad influences was too big and the good professionals (Hogg, Lees, Helik) all became injured at key moments and their influence was lost.
Given these comments, it hints that there must be a pretty large contingent of the current squad that is in this group that he’s talking about. So not just the couple of obvious ones that were dropped from the team last weekend, but a significant number of the squad. I’m not going to start listing them off, but given that quite a few names were listed as the positive influences who suffered injuries (Hogg, Ward, Nakayama, Lees, Balker, Helik) then it starts to narrow the field of who he might be talking about.
Two hints that Andre Breitenreiter will be on his way after this game
Finally, while Breitenreiter wouldn’t be drawn on whether he would stay or go, he did drop a little hint that he will be on his way. Towards the end he confirmed that Chris Maxwell will start in goal against Ipswich by saying: “Chris Maxwell deserves to start one game when I’m in charge.” Suggesting this will be his last game in charge and his final opportunity to play the backup keeper in a match. It’s not exactly a smoking gun, but perhaps gives a little hint that Breitenreiter isn’t expecting to hang around for long.
Yorkshire Post writer, Leon Wobschall, gave a similar little nod towards the German’s imminent exit, by signing off from his questions by saying, “Very best of luck Andre and it’s been nice dealing with you”, which suggests that he doesn’t expect to be encountering him in a future press conference for Huddersfield Town. Not that The Yorkshire Post’s resident Town scribbler is likely to have any additional insight than anyone else in the press pack, but clearly he saw this as his last chance to say goodbye to Town’s coach.
While these scathing comments in the press conference might be Breitenreiter’s attempt to clear the decks because he plans on overseeing Town’s reset over the summer, it feels more like someone trying to get their excuses in before leaving a job in which they’ve quite obviously underperformed. I completely believe all these revelations, because it matches up with the evidence we’ve seen on the pitch this season but I think the timing on these comments is more to do with Breitenreiter managing his reputation and venting his frustration rather than showing actual care for the future direction of Huddersfield Town. If he cared about the club (and his job security), keeping his gob shut would probably have been better. But it’s been far more interesting that he’s been willing to spill the beans.
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