Huddersfield Town's Michael Duff taking patient approach to help players deal better with pressure

His record gives confidence he can pull it around given time. That might be the hard bit.

Home defeats to Northampton Town and Blackpool four days apart exposed the fragile confidence of a team good enough to be fifth in the early table, poor enough to have donated five terrible goals in that time – compounded on Saturday by Josh Koroma missing a penalty and a sitter either side of scoring.

Relegated last season, the Terriers have a defeatist air when things go badly. They looked bereft of confidence against Blackpool, so losing Michal Helik early to injury after Jonathan Hogg tweaked his groin in the warm-up was painful.

Blackpool scored whilst striker Dom Ballard was off the field after treatment. It came from a Town throw-in, Kyle Joseph heading in after Lasse Sorensen and Herbie Kane were beaten too easily.

Ben Wiles gave the ball away for the second, passing backwards in the first half's sixth added minute.

“We had a fairly long conversation in the dressing room and it was a conversation," said Duff. "But we need to find out what it is.

"We'll have a conversation on Thursday. We can't do a lot of work on the training ground between now and Saturday.

“Have the players become brilliant or terrible? No, it’s consistency in behaviours. It's a softness at the football club and I don't just mean the 11 who started on Tuesday. We've had a couple of cup games where we've completely changed the XI and similar sorts of things happened.

"I don't think it's an accident our best two performances have been away from home.

"A little bit of pressure and the real basics of the game, we come off. We changed half the outfield team (on Tuesday) and it was lethargic, bitty, gappy. We were better in the second half but I warned them, 'Don't get used to playing 1-0 down, 2-0 down football' because it's easy, the pressure's off."

The next two games are away, which might help, but Tuesday's is at in-form Birmingham City, which might not.

"It's about talking, showing, asking players who have been in elite environments," explained Duff.

"They know what a real team-mate looks like. It's not accepting mediocrity. When the pressure is on people start looking after themselves and go ‘I don’t want to get booed’ or ‘I don’t want to make that mistake’."

There are supporter doubts about Duff and his 3-1-4-2 formation. Huddersfield looked better in a back four for the final half-hour, but still nowhere near good enough.

Slow-burners are normal for Duff. Swansea City sacked him after 21 games, but Cheltenham Town got a League Two title in season three. His only year at Barnsley ended in the League One play-off final.

"At my first club I didn't win for nine (league) games," he pointed out. "At Barnsley we took two or three hammerings at home quite early and it took until November to get it going but we got there."

He might need to turn psychologist to get that chance again.