Huddersfield Town: The season in numbers

May 9 2009 by Dougie Thomson, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

THREE managers, seven coaches, 32 players (including 11 new signings and four loans) and 68 points are among the numbers which sum up Town’s centenary campaign.

But nine is the one which really matters to the supporters.

That’s where Town disappointingly finished in the League I table and including next season, it’s the length of time the club have been out of English football’s top two divisions.

It’s not quite the worst spell in the wilderness – there were 10 seasons between relegation from the original Second Division under Ian Greaves in 1973 and promotion from the Third under Mick Buxton in 1983.

But incoming chairman Dean Hoyle – he officially replaces Ken Davy on May 22 – won’t want to contemplate equalling that particular club record.

This, of course, was to be the season when Town finally slammed the door on League I firmly shut, and at this time last year, everything seemed in place.

Town had finished the season with four straight wins and unbeaten in six matches under the caretaker stewardship of Gerry Murphy (of whom more later), had, in Stan Ternent, a new and experienced manager promising to bring in the players capable of winning promotion, and had launched a bold season-ticket initiative which promised the highest average home crowd since the heady days of top-flight football at Leeds Road in the early seventies.

That didn’t quite materialise, because despite final sales of 16,265, a new club record, the average crowd for the 23 league fixtures at the Galpharm was 13,276, less than the 14,029 figure for the Division I (now Championship) campaign of 1999-2000.

The hoped-for attendance figure wasn’t the only thing which didn’t quite happen.

To be fair to Ternent, he warned that success doesn’t always come immediately, saying in his eve-of-season Examiner column: “Winning promotion isn’t like going into a chip shop and ordering a takeaway.”

But having to wait five games for a first league victory (2-1 at Cheltenham on September 6) was hard for everyone to stomach.

Ternent had signed eight new players – Andy Butler, Ian Craney, Jim Goodwin, Chris Lucketti, Michael Flynn, Keigan Parker, Gary Roberts and David Unsworth – plus long-term ‘project’ Tom Denton – but it was a loan arrival, Derby’s Liam Dickinson, who was to have the biggest impact in the early stages of the season.