Lee Novak is leaving Huddersfield Town at the end of the season. Mrs Marco will be upset, as he's her go-to guy when picking first scorers. I'm upset because he scored one of my favourite goals of recent times; it was a beautiful, slow-motion, lob at Brentford - as perfect in my mind as it could be. So he's moving on to pastures new. He's been a very good player for Huddersfield Town and I didn't want him to leave without being the focal point of at least one statistical post. So here's Lee Novak in numbers. I'd love to have got his stats from Gateshead (minute-by-minute particularly) but they were a bit hit and miss. He was prolific there, though.

Quick post with just two graphs today and a little description of what each one shows.

James Vaughan is clearly a very talented footballer; his 13 goals for Huddersfield Town this season have seen them climb to a position where the team are on the very brink of Championship survival. Vaughan's future, while on loan with the club from Norwich, is very much up in the air. The problem with Vaughan is obvious. He gets injured too often. When fit, when comfortable, he can score goals of all kinds; indeed, I don't remember the last Town player who had a 'trademark overhead kick', as I heard a Vaughan attempt described on a highlights show a few weeks back. He just seems to miss too many games to stay fit and comfortable for long.

We are at that time of the season when little letters are appearing next to football teams' names. It can be good "PGillingham" (though they want the 'C' that Glasgow Rangers are wearing) or, equally, it can be bad, as RBristol City have discovered this morning, as well as - sadly - RStockport County. Best wishes to fans of both of those teams. Hopefully they will taste the glory of CChester soon enough.

Its news to nobody the Championship is ludicrously tight at the moment, with the teams in lower mid-table being so close to one another that relegation spots resemble more a merry-go-round than an actual reflection of inability. I wanted to make a couple of very basic points about quite how tight it is this season.

I've never left a football match early. The traffic's never bothered me as I'm not a driver and, to be honest, I never really understood why those extra five minutes would be that important to anyone. Anyway, that's by the by. I'm not an early leaver.

We're getting to that point of the season where things are beginning to settle - Cardiff at the top being the most obvious example. That means we're at a point where teams have left trails behind them that we can follow. That's the point of this post.

Exposing the truth and the lies about this most divisive of characters

It seems that former Huddersfield Town striker Theo Robinson is returning to Huddersfield Town. Never, in all my time watching football, have I seen a man as unusually polarising of opinion of Theo Robinson.

I think its time we took some of the things people say about Theo and put them under the microscope. Some may be true, some may be not true. Seeing as he's back, we should know which.

Or A Reasoned Point and a Bit of a Rant

Firstly, it was nice to see one of my fellow bloggers here contribute - always nice to get other informed opinion, which it is, and his piece is well worth a read, though in the two games since then things have snowballed a little.

The reasoned point I wanted to make was about the time Mark Robins has had to change anything at the club thus far.

After being installed as manager, he had very little time before Town played Wigan. Following that, he had very little time before they travelled to Forest. To suggest his team were worse than they would have been under Mark Lillis is, I would say, a little unjust. Mark Lillis' team were no match for Derby, crumbling at Pride Park in a way Mark Robins' team did not-so-far-away last night (much the same fate as Simon Grayson's team also suffered not-so-very-far away on New Year's Day, too). So I don't put too much weight in that result. It was the latest in a series of embarrassments and will have been an education to the management team about the myriad failings of the team. Hopefully Saturday, after a touch more time, we will see an improvement.

Right, then. Rant time. Tin hats at the ready.

I'm reading a lot about Mark Robins' appointment and a lot of people use the phrase 'backing'.

I don't comprehend how a supporter can give their 'backing' to a manager. They don't give him funding (directly, or to any great level), they don't see him one-to-one on a regular basis, and they don't have any direct contact with the team. So what are they giving?

Is it just a way of saying 'I won't turn up at games and actively boo the team while trying to sabotage their efforts'? No supporter would do that, surely, which makes 'giving a manager your backing' from the stands something of an empty promise. You can do nothing else. In attending the game (or not) and hoping your team win, which is a fairly generic state of affairs, albeit enacted differently in different people.

I give my backing to Mark Robins because I want him to succeed. It doesn't matter whether I think he was a good or a bad appointment, he seems to be a reasonable chap and he is the manager of the football club I support. I want them to do well, ergo I want him to do well.

Does that make sense?

Wow been a long time since I wrote anything and thought this blog had stopped until trailing through my emails and wondered if this was still going. I apologise to everyone and to the Examiner for abandoning this blog as they gave me this opportunity I hope to write something on a fairly regular basis now.

It has nearly been exactly a year since I last wrote anything and what a turbulent year it's been. I won't go over it into too much detail basically promotion at Wembley, purple patch at the start of the season, massive slump, Simon Grayson sacked and Mark Robins appointed. Quite a lot in a space of a year I'd say but that's football.