Whilst praise for Huddersfield Town and Leeds United has been relentless this season, not enough credit has been given to their Yorkshire rivals Barnsley.
Barnsley are overachieving in the Championship
We’re almost three quarters of the way through the season, and Championship new boys Barnsley are still in the hunt for the play-off’s. Whilst the accomplishments of their Yorkshire rivals Huddersfield Town, Leeds United and even Sheffield Wednesday have seen wave after wave of recognition, Barnsley’s success has been a far quieter affair.
With just 13 games remaining, the Tykes find themselves in ninth place in the Championship, ahead of big spenders like Aston Villa and Wolves. Following a remarkable 2015-16 campaign, which saw the South Yorkshire outfit in the League One relegation zone on Christmas Day but promoted via the play-off’s in May, Paul Heckingbottom’s side appear to have really established themselves in England’s second tier.
Barnsley manager Paul Heckingbottom celebrates with the trophy after winning the Sky Bet Football League One Play-Off Final
Only Burton Albion and Rotherham United were shorter odds to be relegated from the Championship during pre-season, but whilst those two are now in a relegation scrap, the Tykes are a whopping 19 points clear of the drop, and it’s time the club received some kind of praise for their over-achievement this season.
Something about Barnsley appears to be unfashionable. Perhaps they don’t have the allure of an intriguing foreign coach like Huddersfield or Wednesday, the enormous potential and fanbase of Leeds United, or the history of ever having competed among the upper echelons of England’s top tier like all the other three at some stage in their history.
Whilst Leeds United and both Sheffield clubs are often described as ‘sleeping giants’, Barnsley fanzine ‘West Stand Bogs’ recently described the Tykes as ‘awake dwarfs’, a humorous term but one that sums up the club’s current predicament rather well.
Joking aside, there is a definite question mark over Barnsley’s potential as a club. The likes of Wednesday and Huddersfield would have been unlikely to sell their best players to direct divisional rivals midway through a season just as Barnsley did in January, however, the club’s tight wage structure twinned with the astronomical wages being forked out by the likes of Newcastle, Villa and even Fulham, QPR and Derby makes it incredibly difficult to compete.
Barnsley lost players such as Sam Winnall to Sheffield Wednesday in January
Following the departure of Alfie Mawson in the summer, Barnsley lost top talents Conor Hourihane, James Bree and Sam Winnall in January. The biggest blow, Hourihane, is one of the finest players to represent the club since the turn of the millennium.
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On the flip side, Barnsley have by far the youngest squad in the Championship, with an average age of just over 23, an indication that they should only grow as a team. They also have a young manager who was born in Barnsley, played for Barnsley, and is now displaying excellent managerial abilities as the head coach of Barnsley.
How the season will pan out from here on in for the Tykes is hard to call. The mini-exodus of January is bound to hurt, and a top six finish seems very unlikely. A top half finish, on the other hand, is eminently possible, and how most Barnsley fans would’ve bitten your hand off for that before a ball had been kicked this season.
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