This weekend, Jurgen Klopp meets his old friend David Wagner for the first time in the Premier League in what is sure to be a frantic game of football between one side in crisis and the other revelling in the good times.
The roles are the opposite to what you might have expected, though, given their respective managerial jobs. It is Klopp who is fighting off the critics at one of Europe’s grandest old clubs, and Wagner who is on a high at a club perhaps best known these days as strugglers from a rugby league town.
Defeat for Liverpool this weekend, then, could be nigh-on catastrophic given that newly-promoted Huddersfield represent the Reds’ most winnable league fixture in a while, and that the last time they won in the Premier League was on September 23rd. It’s clear that losing would cause plenty of talk about Klopp’s future. The manner of defeat last week already set tongues wagging.
For the Terriers, too, victory is almost as unthinkable. But in a very different way.
Whilst it might be true in the 21st century that Huddersfield is a town more proud of its heritage as the home of rugby league than its football team’s former glories, the Terriers were the first team ever to win three English league titles in a row, between 1923/24 and 1925/26. That feat has been matched since, but only by Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United.
They won’t win the league this season either, but if victory this weekend could conjure an ominous sign for Jurgen Klopp, then it will end October spookily for Huddersfield, too.
On March 13th 1926, the Terriers beat Manchester United 5-0 at their old Leeds Road home. The very next week, they travelled to Anfield to play Liverpool, winning 2-1. Both wins helped them on their way to their third league title in a row, which they won by five points. They were the greatest team in the land, but when you’ve reached the top there’s nowhere else to go. They haven’t won a major trophy since.
That wasn’t actually the last time Huddersfield beat Manchester United and Liverpool in successive top flight fixtures, but you still have to go back to September 1930, when the Terriers beat United twice and Liverpool once in the space of five days. That year ended in a fifth place finish, which is probably as unobtainable as first for Wagner’s side this season.
Those were the glory years, but that was a very different time. It has been almost a century since Huddersfield could even dream of winning two in a row over the two clubs who have, in the intervening decades, superseded the West Yorkshire side and established themselves as the powerhouses of English football.
Two weeks at the start of a Premier League season won’t undo all of that, but it is worth remembering that, although a Huddersfield win this weekend will make the story firmly about Liverpool’s failure rather than the Terriers’ success, victory for the newly-promoted Yorkshire side is probably a much more interesting angle.
