Sorba Thomas' loss of form gives Huddersfield Town difficult decision to make

That Sorba Thomas’ touch has been poor has been plain to see, and the numbers back it up. Last season he was successful in 44% of his dribbles; this season, it’s just 10%. His number of unsuccessful touches per 90 minutes has also nearly doubled, from 2.3 to 4.0.

Defensively, too, there has been a drop-off – possibly in part because he spent a long spell at wing-back last season before moving to the wing. Even with that in mind, though, he is only committing to about a third as many challenges as last season (2.2 per 90 minutes vs 0.8) – though he is at least winning a slightly higher percentage of them (31.8% vs 37.5%).

This is not the first time we have seen Thomas go through a rough patch. After starting in scintillating form last year, he had a notable dip in form from around the middle of September through to the middle of December, with the odd good performance peppered in. Nonetheless, he was able to claim four assists over that spell, split evenly between contributions from open play and from set pieces.

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Even that has abandoned him this time, though. Thomas is putting in roughly the same number of crosses and corners per 90 minutes as last season, but his accuracy has dropped dramatically: his crossing accuracy is down from 25% to 19.5%.

His corner balls, too, are finding the mark just 16% of the time now compared with 39% last season. Accordingly, the winger has created about half as many shots for teammates from his crosses and less than half as many from his corners.

Despite a long and gruelling campaign last year followed by an early start to the season, we don’t really accept the notion that Town’s players are simply