Darren Moore rues ‘silly’ defending as Port Vale suffer heavy Huddersfield loss

Under-fire Port Vale manager Darren Moore was left hugely disappointed at his side’s “silly” defending as they fell to a 5-0 League One defeat away to his former club Huddersfield.

Leo Castledine scored a brace with additional goals from Ryan Ledson, Bojan Radulovic and Alfie May to leave Vale rooted to the bottom of the table and without a win in 11 games.

The away end at Accu Stadium made its dissatisfaction with Moore’s management clear, but the Vale boss insisted they still had time to turn things around.

He said: “We’ve still got 25 games to play, we’re still not at the halfway point yet. There’s still a lot of games to play.

“But we’re just looking at the next game. There’s enough for us to do just looking at that one without thinking about the rest of the season.

“It was not good enough in terms of competing. In the first 10 minutes we gave away two really silly goals and it meant we had a mountain to climb.

“We knew coming here that we were playing against one of the stronger teams at this level – they are a good team – but we didn’t help ourselves with the two goals we gave away in the first 10 minutes.

“Disappointment is the right word to use about how I am feeling with the group in terms of the manner of the goals we gave away. They were more self-inflicted than they were created by the opposition.

“That gave them a lift and it meant it was a long afternoon for us and a real uphill battle.”

Huddersfield manager Lee Grant was meanwhile delighted his side were able to put on a show and claim the club’s biggest margin of victory since January 2016.

The Terriers boss said: “It’s lovely at this time of year to get people in the stadium and perhaps there’s one or two who have come down to the stadium who haven’t seen us a great deal and the time of year brings them to support their local club.

“It’s nice to be able to give a really good, honest, fair reflection of what I think is who we are and send them away with a really good feeling about the group.

“I’m pleased with the way the group had a bit of freedom about their execution and found different ways to cause some problems.

“We’ve proved now in three different structures, we can cause teams problems and that puts us in a good position in terms of goals scored and the threat we’re offering our opposition.

“The most important part, being really honest, is marrying that up with a really ruthless and determined defensive performance that gets us the clean sheet we’ve all been really working hard for.

“I’m really, really pleased about that.”