Two-faced Huddersfield Town need to summon up their best selves for high stakes games

You’d rather have points on the board than games in hand any day, but that doesn’t make it any less nerve-wracking to watch a round of midweek fixtures your team is not involved in. The way the Championship is at the moment, any points dropped by one rival will invariably be overshadowed by the three another play-off contender has earned.

Tuesday and Wednesday evening were a classic good news/bad news scenario for Huddersfield Town: Good news: Luton drew, meaning Huddersfield Town remain third going into this weekend’s fixtures – and a head to head with the Hatters themselves on Monday evening. Bad news: Nottingham Forest and Sheffield United both won, moving another two sides within two points of the Terriers, with Steve Cooper’s rampant side still holding two games in hand.

Good news: Middlesbrough and Queens Park Rangers both lost, meaning the gap to seventh is four points. Bad news: Boro still have another game in hand, which if won would cut the gap down to just a single point. And what fun, we get to do it all again this weekend, with Town not playing until Monday evening!

If the play-off race is currently tight enough to be measured at atomic level, then by this time next week we could be down to nucleons and quarks. Ultimately, though, the only one of the chasing pack who can catch Carlos Corberan’s side on the basis of games in hand alone are Forest. That means that Town remain masters of their own fates over the remaining six games: if they get them right, they don’t need to worry one bit about what anyone else is doing. That point is about as facile as not to be worth saying, but no less true for it.

The question, then, is which Huddersfield Town we are going to get over the remaining games. Will it be the