Matty Pearson's potentially season-ending injury could rob Huddersfield Town of key strength

The last thing any of the Championship play-off contenders need right now is injuries to key players, but that’s the situation Huddersfield Town face with the news that Matty Pearson has picked up a knee injury in training-ground tackle that is likely to keep him out for the next few weeks.

That means that the centre-back’s season may well now be over, and that is a big blow. Since arriving from Luton Town in the summer, Pearson has rarely been short of magisterial at the back, more than making up for his relative lack of finesse compared with colleague Tom Lees and Levi Colwill by putting in a series of reliable, assured and always battling performances. That early-season flurry of goals certainly didn’t hurt, either.

The one silver lining for Town after losing such an important player is that centre-back is the position where Town could most afford to lose someone. Town do not have a natural defensive midfielder as back-up to Hogg, no other player who can do what Lewis O’Brien does, nobody for the right wing who presents as much of a threat as Sorba Thomas, nobody up front who can match Danny Ward’s all-round game.

Town’s strength in central defence is such that Pearson was even dropped to the bench in the final game before picking up his knee injury, with Lees and Colwill the preferred pairing in a back four flanked by Ollie Turton and Harry Toffolo. Corberan has shown a strong preference for playing a right-footer and a left-footer when fielding two centre-backs, and while Pearson and Lees’ form as a duo had taken precedence over that for a spell, the latter’s withdrawal at the break against Bournemouth felt like a decisive moment: the head coach wanted to get back to the ol’ leftie-rightie partnership to