Blackburn Rovers vs Huddersfield Town. Sky Bet Championship.
Ewood ParkAttendance16,313.
Report and highlights from the Sky Bet Championship clash between Blackburn Rovers and Huddersfield at Ewood Park as Tony Mowbray's hosts were denied a seventh straight win by the Terriers on Sunday
Sunday 2 January 2022 17:48, UK
Blackburn missed the chance to move within a point of the Championship summit after Huddersfield battled to a deserved 0-0 draw at Ewood Park.
With promotion rivals Bournemouth and Fulham both out of action due to postponements, Rovers had a chance to apply pressure in the race for the Premier League but were thwarted by the resolute Terriers who were able to withstand
early pressure from the league's form side which saw Reda Khadra hit the woodwork.
Substitute Sam Gallagher saw an effort cleared off the line late on and Rovers could not find the breakthrough to extend their six-match winning run. They are unbeaten in nine and move up to second, a point ahead of Fulham who have played two fewer games.
The visitors had the best chances through Duane Holmes and survived a late onslaught to remain in sixth place. They are now unbeaten in six and four points on the road at Blackburn and Nottingham Forest will have cheered manager Carlos Corberan, who is isolating after testing positive for Covid.
Rovers named an unchanged XI for the third consecutive game while the Terriers drafted in Josh Koroma ahead of the unwell Danny Ward, and Tom Lees returned after passing concussion protocols.
A torrential downpour before the game made conditions difficult but Rovers adapted quickest, settling into their pressing game which engineered a chance for John Buckley in the opening minutes, who saw his shot blocked, before Khadra was sent clear in the seventh minute, only to see his ferocious effort clatter the crossbar.
But the Terriers weathered the storm and Holmes should have opened the scoring midway through the half but directed his close-range diving header straight at Thomas Kaminski. The game became disjointed thereafter, though Blackburn were incensed that Ben Brereton Diaz's 30th-minute penalty claims were waved away by referee Keith Stroud, who subsequently booked Tony Mowbray for his continued protests.
Despite Blackburn's early dominance, they did not register a shot on target in the first half and set about trying to change that early on, though Harry Pickering could only head Joe Rothwell's corner over.
The game increasingly felt like it would be settled by a single chance and Huddersfield's best came for Holmes in the 63rd minute when he brilliantly controlled a long ball before surging beyond the Blackburn defence but the angle was against him and he struck the side netting.
Blackburn finished strongly, as Rothwell's curling free-kick drifted just over before the final frenetic minutes saw Gallagher's flicked header cleared off the line by Sorba Thomas, and in stoppage time, the big striker got on the end of a low cross but his shot was blocked and eventually collected by grateful goalkeeper Lee Nicholls.
Blackburn's Tony Mowbray: "I don't want to sit here and hammer the referees. I don't know what game they watch, that's all. It's embarrassing. You've got to know when a foul is a foul. You've got to understand it. Keith's a pretty experienced referee and I thought he got a lot wrong today. Like us, they watch the Premier League and see the carnage going on with VAR at the moment.
"Who knows what a foul is and what isn't a foul, and they try to be too clever sometimes. I watched the Brereton penalties. It's two penalties, never mind one. The first one, if Ben goes over because the ball goes over because the boy makes contact, it's a penalty, he can't deny it. Yet Ben stays on his feet. He's punished for being an honest kid who wanted to go through and ram it into the net. Hopefully he's somewhere else next week."
Huddersfield coach Danny Schofield: "We knew we would be defending during the game due to their attacking threat. I think the structure in defence was really good, changed things a little bit, defended the space really well. We rode our luck at times on certain occasions but we've got a real good group of players who have got a real fighting spirit. They typify the Terriers spirit and that helped us get the point today.
"They (the central defenders) are developing a real relationship between all three, plus Lee Nicholls. Understanding each other's strengths and weaknesses, so it's progressing really nicely. We identified that Blackburn are fantastic in attack, have a lot of good players. We identified that if we lost the ball in the centre of the pitch, they would attack with speed. We tried to nullify that, although they did at times. We try to prepare as well as we can and we're doing alright at the minute."
