Jon Stead sees pride in Huddersfield show and says play-off hopes remain alive

Huddersfield co-interim head coach Jon Stead insists his side will keep fighting for a play-off place despite suffering a significant blow in a 3-3 draw at home to Wycombe.

The Terriers were 2-1 up in the 90th minute and regained their lead after Wycombe equalised, only to concede again 12 minutes into stoppage time.

Stead said: “It’s an emotional afternoon for everybody. We have a massive amount of pride in the players, and just want them to be rewarded for everything that they’re doing.

“It was obviously another wild game, especially towards the end, and exciting for people to watch, I’m sure – not to be involved in it, because it’ll be the death of us at some point, I think.

“But it’s frustration and disappointment – but then pride along with it. It’s really difficult to kind of pick the bones out of it and actually understand how I feel.”

Stead rejected the notion that Huddersfield were now out of the play-off picture, however, saying: “No, absolutely not.

“Anybody who watches that can’t say we’re ever going to concede in this fight, because that is a team that is fully invested.

“We’re going to get around them and pick them up a little bit because, emotionally, that’s tough to take for any person, especially when you’ve put the effort in that they have on the pitch.

“We’ll pick them up, reset, refocus, get them raring to go again on Tuesday against Cardiff, and see what that brings.”

Wycombe assistant coach Alex Morris was left frustrated that his side left it so late to start posing a threat, with even their first-half opener coming against the run of play.

He said: “We showed a hell of a lot of character in the latter stages of the game.

“We were chasing the game and had to make a number of switches to try and come up with solutions. We forced some pressure towards the end of the game and managed to get that late equaliser.

“The only disappointment for us is the boys didn’t show enough in the vast majority of the game to replicate the pressure and quality that we showed in that last 10 minutes or so. If we had, we feel that the outcome of the game would have been different.

“We believe that if we’d played anywhere near our levels, we’d have had a really good opportunity to have won this game.

“We’ve got to ask ourselves the question: why did we perform as well as we did in the latter stages of the game?

“But it took us going behind to trigger that and be the catalyst for us to produce what everybody saw in that last 10 or 15 minutes.”