Martin Drury praises Huddersfield’s team spirit after win over AFC Wimbledon

Huddersfield head coach Martin Drury could barely have hoped for a better start to the League One campaign as his side claimed a 3-0 win over Wimbledon.

The hosts stormed to a two-goal lead thanks to a Derensili Sanches Fernandes brace before being reduced to ten men, with Bali Mumba shown a straight red card for serious foul play.

But substitute Bojan Radulovi rounded off the victory and get the now-permanent head coach off to a winning start.

Drury said: “It’s always tough first game of the season. It has a different feel to it, and the players have not been in the stadium with that amount of fans for three or four months.

“But I loved what the players did today in terms of what I was hearing from them in the changing room before the game, what I was hearing at half time, what I saw and heard and felt after the game.

“I speak a lot about culture, and as much as we can sit here and talk about football and tactics and all that, the thing I was really pleased with was the feel of the performance, the feel of the players, and the connection between them all.

“They wanted to win that game of football at all costs, and I thought we saw that. I thought they were resolute second half, and credit to them.

“We’ve been questioned last season, we’ve been questioned in pre-season, we’ve been questioned last week – which is natural in football, you’re going to get that – but I thought the players showed courage.”

Wimbledon manager Johnnie Jackson said: “We were well beaten, to be honest. I thought they were the better team than us pretty much throughout.

“We’ve had a lot of possession and territory because they’ve gone down to 10, but we didn’t do enough to take advantage of that.

“The way we started the game gave us no way into it really. Huddersfield are a really good team, they’ve got good players, and you can lose here – but we didn’t even give ourselves a chance to get something.

“That’s my biggest disappointment, the way that we started the game. We spoke all week about how we wanted to start, what we wanted to do, put them on the back foot…and then after four minutes we’re in their half, we get countered on, and we’re behind.

“Obviously that’s not good enough from my point of view. We sort of huffed and puffed, but we haven’t done enough.

“We score a disallowed goal that should stand, to be fair, and then who knows at 2-1, who knows…but I can’t stand here and complain about decisions when we’ve been beaten like that.”