Fri 08 Jun - Posted in Breaking News
Time to read: 2mins
After the dust had settled on a rollercoaster 2017/18 season, Tom Huddlestone sat down to reflect on the best moments and compare the campaign just gone with his previous spell at Derby County.
Huddlestone returned to the Sky Bet Championship Play-Offs with the Rams for the first time in 13 years when he stepped out at Pride Park Stadium against Fulham in May.
In 2005, the midfielder played all 180 minutes of Derby’s semi-final tie with Preston North End, so, what has changed during that time?
“There are a lot more footballing teams from when I was with Derby before,” he explained.
“There is a lot more football being played and a lot of different styles, and also with the quality of the managers in the league, it’s very different to what it was where I was here the first time around.
“It’s gone pretty quick, there have been a lot of ups and downs and it is disappointing that it’s ended one game short of what we would have liked.”
When Huddlestone left the club during the summer after the defeat to Preston - when, incidentally, current Derby striker David Nugent bagged the opening goal - he did so without scoring in his 92 appearances.
It took him until the 30th game of his first season back with Derby to break his duck, but surprisingly, that wasn’t his favourite moment of the campaign…
He said: “The Forest game at home, to score so early and beat them again was a good feeling.
“It was more of a relief than anything else, it was nice to get that out of the way.”
Despite achieving the goal of finishing the season in the top-six and securing a place in the play-offs, the feeling was one of disappointment after the campaign came to an end at Craven Cottage.
Huddlestone felt that the Rams needed to take more of an advantage into the second leg, but he attempted to put the achieving into perspective by assessing the clubs that Derby were up against for most of the season.
“We probably finished where we expected. If you look at the teams above us, Wolves, Villa and Middlesbrough all spent a lot of money, and Fulham had an unbelievable end to the season,” he said.
“Cardiff are the only team on a smaller budget that finished above us.
“Our target was to finish in the play-offs but we came up against a better team over two legs.
“We got into six or seven good positions on Friday night and if we had have taken a two or three-goal lead down to Craven Cottage, it would have been a different story.”
