Lee Grant's Huddersfield Town narrative heading the wrong way – he needs a rewrite
Just before 10pm on Thursday there was some frantic rewriting in the Mel Booth press box. Goals not only change games, they shift moods and narratives.
Even at about 9.50, the story was about an unconvincing Huddersfield Town 1-0 win over Bolton Wanderers. After a bright first half which needed more cutting edge than the seventh-minute goal Leo Castledine headed at a corner, the Terriers became woefully and worryingly passive but, hey, they were going to get the job done. Just.
But when Sam Dalby and Amario Cozier-Duberry scored in the third and fifth added minutes, the paper covering the cracks dropped off the wall, and the boos rang out.
The power he has been entrusted with in his first managerial job and huge summer investment make for great expectations. When neither results nor the football are meeting them, unhappiness is inevitable.
It is not just Grant's burden, though, and his players appear to be struggling with it.
They hit the ground running this season, winning five of their first seven League One matches, knocking Leicester City and Sunderland out of the League Cup on penalties.
But they have lost four of the next seven, and gone out of the cup. What initially seemed a weakness away has contaminated the Accu Stadium, where a Bolton side who had not won on their travels in 2025-26 inflicted Town's second home defeat, the game after their first.
Having played with energy in the first half just not the killer pass, they seemed to lack the confidence to go for a decisive second goal after the break or the ability to spark it with substitutions, sitting back and waiting for the fate which only in the last few minutes of regulation time looked like it might not come after all.
"You feel with how we're playing and the characters we have that (pushing for a second goal) should very much be the mentality," reflected a bruised Grant. "And yeah, look, it wasn't.
"Real openness and honesty from us as a group is important now because it's certainly not something we want to experience again.
"What I saw for the first half was a group with full belief and trust in what they are, what they want to do and how they want to go and implement that.
"The shift from the first to the second half is also pretty clear. That's not something we can shrug off.
"It would be wrong of me (to reach a conclusion) without lots of conversations, watching the game back, understanding the psychology of what's gone on there by maybe spending the time with the players and actually getting to the heart of the matter.
"In terms of a desire to win and a hunger to keep that clean sheet and hang on, you can see all those things but how we go about that is probably the most important part for us to take away."
Interestingly, plenty of conversations along similar lines had gone on in the near-fortnight since losing at home to 10-man Stockport County.
"We've done a lot of work over the last 10-12 days in particular, certainly around our mentality, how we view ourselves and how we want to be and I think the first half showed a lot of that," said Grant.
"The group feel it enough, they train it enough, we talk about it often enough and we've displayed it enough in games that it's tangible for everybody.
"The work that we've done translated pretty clearly into the first-half performance.
"Performance level, intensity, attitude, intent, there was a real clear change in the second period. We need to discover why.
"My suspicion would be that there's a group that is desperate to win and fight and do what they need to for the clean sheet but go about it perhaps in the wrong way."
Having their weekend game moved to a Thursday for the benefit of Sky Sports and not many others means a long wait to the next one. Grant will spend it questioning himself.
"We learn, we adapt, we grow, we develop, we push," he insisted. "We always start with ourselves first before we put the finger outwardly.
"When I say 'we' I mean coaching staff, players, coaching unit."
The next plotline has an inevitable feel too.
Huddersfield's next game is a week on Saturday at Wycombe Wanderers, managed by Michael Duff who they sacked in March after a run of unconvincing wins turned into a sequence of defeats. It has another loss written all over it.
It is vital for Grant to rewrite that.