Six sliding doors moments that changed the course of Huddersfield Town's season

Nearly a decade before Gwyneth Paltrow’s fateful encounter with a tube train’s doors, Terry Pratchett wrote of the trousers of time, through which one may end up falling down one leg or the other depending on what happens in one particular moment.

Such moments do not just come and go in football. They hang there, calcified in time to be cherished or rued, yet sending ripples into a future that had not yet been written. Every moment of every game decides which leg of those trousers of time a club can end up sliding down, but some end up making a bigger difference than others.

Huddersfield Town have had more than a few of those big moments this season. Here’s the ones that have deposited them at fourth place in the Championship and looking to seal a place in this season’s play-offs.

"I’ll be honest: my idea at the beginning of the [season], in my perspective I was not thinking that Sorba Thomas was one of the first eleven players of the team, but we need to have an open mind and open eyes to see what is the level of each player.”

Even Carlos Corberan had to admit that Sorba Thomas was not particularly in his plans for the starting line-up coming into this season, but necessity birthed one of its revered inventions by striking both of Town’s left-backs with covid for the league-campaign-opening trip to Derby County.

With last season’s occasional fall-back option Aaron Rowe also out injured, Corberan gave Thomas his first Championship start, playing the Welshman at left wing-back in a 3-5-2. The January arrival from non-league duly made himself the star of the show, putting in a hugely promising performance that especially highlighted his brilliance on set pieces as he set up Naby Sarr’s equaliser in a 1-1 draw.

Thomas