Huddersfield Town must handle promotion pressure better than Bournemouth as league table narrows

Tom Ince has a strange habit of coming up big for Huddersfield Town when you least expect it.

The winger’s one-season spell at the club in 2017/18 would have been almost entirely unremarkable if he hadn’t been the man to score the winning goal against Watford in what would prove to be Town’s final victory of the season, pushing David Wagner’s side seven points clear of the drop ahead of a gruelling final run-in against Everton, Manchester City, Chelsea and Arsenal.

The psychological importance of that goal and those three points. As sheer fortune would have it, Ince himself had spoken to the Examiner just a few days before that game and prophesised how important that victory would be, saying: "Three points next week is a massive game-changer for us as far as the table and as far as staying up is concerned."

Four years later, a big Ince goal has once again gone a long way to keeping his sides’ heads above water and done the Terriers a massive favour – even if that will obviously have been the furthest thing from his mind as he scored a late equaliser for Reading away to Bournemouth on Tuesday night.

With Barnsley applying pressure from below having finally remembered how to win football matches, taking a point away from the side currently sitting second in the table could prove to be huge in Reading’s season. But it could be just as huge for Ince’s former club, too.

Bournemouth have now dropped points in three of their last four games, including draws at home to two of the bottom four. If Town draw at Millwall on Wednesday night, they will have maintained their two-point gap to second place despite Bournemouth burning through one of the four games in hand they had at the beginning of March. Win, and Carlos Corberan’s side