The Premier League looks like having numerous vacancies between the sticks, and the Terriers stopper will be present on plenty of shortlists after his stupendous form
It could be a busy summer for goalkeepers in the summer transfer window up in the Premier League. Aston Villa’s World Cup winner Emiliano Martinez has been linked with a move away, as has Brighton and Hove Albion’s Robert Sanchez. Tottenham Hotspur lost faith with Hugo Lloris and finished the season with Fraser Forster in goal. Luton Town have been promoted with Nottingham Forest loanee Ethan Horvath between the sticks, while Forest themselves have fielded a pair of loanees in Dean Henderson and Keylor Navas. And on and on it goes.
That even extends into those sides who have been relegated from the top flight. Ilan Meslier’s future at Leeds United is in doubt, while neither Danny Ward nor Stefan Iversen have made convincing successors to Kasper Schmeichel at Leicester City. (Also, Alex Smithies is a Leicester player – who knew?)
You wouldn’t need to have read that headline or seen that image to know exactly where we’re going with this: Huddersfield Town have the best goalkeeper in the Championship in Lee Nicholls, a player whose near-faultless form over the past two years would make him stand out in the top flight, let alone this division.
If the market in the Premier League and among the more moneyed members of the next season’s Championship is anything like as busy as it is shaping up to be, it would not take a huge amount of trawling through stats databases for any club to identify Nicholls as the right target for them.
Time was that goalkeepers did not generally attract terribly big transfer fees, but things have changed now, and Nicholls is very possibly Town’s most valuable player not just in a figurative sense, but very literally. That is a testament both to the player himself and the job head of goalkeeping Paul Clements has done in coaching a player who had been sitting on a League One bench at Milton Keynes Dons when Town signed him two summers ago.
The new regime waiting to take Town over will be wary not to start off by making deeply unpopular decisions, but even they might find themselves tempted by an offer for Nicholls’ signature that they simply cannot refuse, such is the financial reality of life in the Championship – or at any level, really.
As Town found last summer, replacing your best players can be enormously difficult, but at 30 years old, Nicholls is at the prime age for a keeper looking to step up and play Premier League football for the first time. As with Lewis O’Brien last year, it would be impossible to begrudge him a move that his form has richly deserved if an appropriate opportunity came about at the right price. And if it doesn’t – fabulous. We’ll not say no to another year of watching him shine.
