The Imps travel to Huddersfield Town on Saturday 14 December as they return to Sky Bet League One action following victory in the Vertu Trophy (3pm KO).
Read up on the thoughts of both Michael Skubala and midfielder Conor McGrandles, along with important match information in this preview.
Skubala’s take:
“They’ve got a good style, they do it differently. What you’re starting to see is the bigger clubs migrate to the top of the league which you were always going to see. The teams with real strength in depth are starting to come good. On our day we believe we can compete with anybody. They’re really good at home, they’re an effective team who are good at set pieces and get the ball in the box to put you under pressure.
“We want to be solid, but also try to affect the game and go and win the game. Every game that we go into, whether we get the performance or not, we believe we can go and beat teams from top to bottom. At the minute it’s not quite landed the way we’ve wanted it to in the league, but we’ve just got to keep going.
“Set pieces are a huge part of football, they make up almost 33% of goals in games. When you need to defend them you need the right profiles to help you defend them on the pitch especially against a team that are good at them, but we also want to score from them ourselves. We do a lot of work on set pieces. Huddersfield are a strong team at set pieces, and they’re good at getting them - they’re quite physically dominant. Conversely we need to stand up to that and put our own stamp on it at the other end of the pitch.”
McGrandles’ thoughts:
“It’s going to be another tough game. In a lot of the games we’ve been quite unlucky not to get the results we deserved or the points we deserved. There’s been games where we’ve actually performed well and not taken the chances or been sloppy in defensive moments.
“Even though we’ve not won in the league in a while, the confidence in the camp is still really high, and we’ll go into the game on Saturday believing we can get three points.
“There’s not been any or many games where we’ve come out thinking we deserved to lose the game. That definitely breeds confidence, we just need to brush up on the final moments in both boxes and when we do that we’ll really kick on.”
A look at the opposition:
Having endured a difficult spell towards the end of September, Michael Duff has got his Terriers side ticking of late.
Huddersfield sit fourth in the division with 35 points to their name from 18 games, winning their past four consecutive league matches.
Their most recent result was an impressive 2-1 away win at fast-starters Mansfield Town, but they did succumb to a 3-1 defeat in the Vertu Trophy at Bolton Wanderers in midweek.
It will be the first time the Imps have met the Terriers in a league match for 20 years, but the two sides did play in the Carabao Cup in 2019 where Danny Cowley’s men emerged victorious thanks to a strike from Harry Anderson.
League form: DWWWW
Top scorer: Ben Wiles (6 goals)
Match information:
City will play in their all black strip for the second straight away league matchday, and you can get yours HERE.
Alan Young has been named as the referee for tomorrow afternoon’s game, with Kevin Mulraine and Mark Cunliffe chosen to be his assistants. James Bancroft is the fourth official.
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