At Liverpool Allen gained a following for his chickens, beard and Pirlo like appearance, he was a fringe player in the squad and his fan following reflected this. With his move to Stoke all has changed for Allen, as he has now moved to full ‘God’ status with the ground he walks on being worshiped by every fan. The only silver lining in the great black cumulonimbus that is Stoke’s season, Allen appears to have united the fan base behind a player for the first time since Ricardo Fuller. This begs one question “just how good is Joe Allen?”
His play style is the first area that answers the above question with a loud and sassy “damn good”. Probably the most damning stat from last season was that cumulatively Stoke covered the second least ground of all teams in the league, only above that awful Aston Villa side. Allen has taken this stat, crumpled it into a ball and then dribbled it down the road to the nearest recycling centre. You only have to look at his heatmap from this weekend’s match with West Brom to see how Joe was well and truly everywhere. Allen has provided a slow and immobile team with the desire to chase down every single lost cause, and it is this that the fans truly support.
When Ramadan Sobhi joined Stoke City for £5 million in the summer, there was a degree of expectancy on the young man’s shoulders before he had even set foot on British soil. Nothing short of a legion of Egyptian fans took to social media to explain to Stoke fans what the club were getting themselves in for.
A promising, skilful and pacey winger, described as one of the most exciting Egyptian exports since none other than Middlesbrough’s Mido. However, for Stoke fans there was also a hint of apprehension. In recent years the club has not been known to bring in young talent, so how would Sobhi fit into the side?
This is going to be one of the most decisive episodes of After the Whistle yet. Saturday’s performance did one of two things for you… The fact that we yet again failed to win, against what is a bang average/below average side, meant that you were pushed over the edge and can see no way back for Hughes. Or, you saw the positives and decided that because of the manner in which we went down fighting, and it gave you hope.
My name isn’t the Pessimistic Stokie for nothing, I’ll give you one guess which side of the fence I fell on…
Issue 1.) Set pieces
The biggest elephant in the room surely? Our failure to defend at set pieces has yet again cost us points, and these two points dropped could be the most vital that we’ve lost in a long time. I don’t know how it is possible for a team to be so poor at defending from a set piece, but team after team are taking advantage of it, and it should come as no surprise that Tony Pulis’ West Brom have done it again.
Marc Wilson left after saying we do no training at defending, whilst I don’t believe that, it is becoming a worry that despite multiple staff members coming out in the past few weeks saying how hard we are working at defending, we still have the very same issues time and time again.
Issue 2.) Failing to finish off a game
Just like against Hull in midweek we once again went 1-0 up against a lesser opposition. The only difference, this time, was that we had actually looked solid at the back all game and we had dominated up front. However, failure to push on and finish off a game came back once again to bite us.
In total, Stoke had 2 shots on target, given how much we dominated the game that simply isn’t good enough. Shaqiri looked incredible in his return match, and I genuinely believe that he put in one of his best performances in a Stoke shirt. However, the failure of our strikers and midfielders to do anything creative or with a killer instinct once inside the opponent’s final third really let us down.
For a team that has ambitions (Nearly impossible at this stage) of Europe, only recording two shots on target is a serious issue. Hughes (Or whoever comes in next), needs to start figuring out why we lack such an important killer instinct.
Issue 3.) Substitutions
Jesus christ I feel like I say this most weeks. Mark Hughes is the worst manager for making substitutions that impact our game in a positive way. Why bring Crouch on for Bony at that stage of the game when you could have brought on Diouf, and pushed Diouf out wide and brought on Crouch at a later stage when Shaqiri had to go off? However, it gets worse, because the fact that he brought Charlie Adam (Who was awful on Wednesday) on for Joe Allen blows my mind. If it was to sure up our defence then I would say that we should never feel safe enough to defend a one goal lead, two should be our minimum.
Hughes could have brought on either Imbula or Bojan (Who didn’t even play on Wednesday) and our team would have looked X100 better going into the final few minutes.
Issue 4.) Sobhi and Bojan?
Along a similar vein of argument, where the hell was Sobhi? After his performance against Hull there was absolutely no reason for him not to be included in the match day squad. And Bojan had been completely rested in midweek but still didn’t make it onto the pitch? It is decisions like these that seriously make me question whether or not Hughes is the right person for us anymore. He seems to lack a complete sense of tactics, or even an ideology of how he wants to play football anymore. Bojan was Hughes’ star player in his first year, now he is an afterthought.
The decision to put Charlie Adam in the squad over Sobhi, a ready-made winger (Which was exactly what we needed given that Shaqiri was just returning from injury and wouldn’t see 90 minutes) is absolutely unforgivable and I am of the firm belief that Hughes’ substitutions cost us that game.
Issue 5.) No clean sheet since March? Wow…
Who the hell would have thought this would be the case when Butland first got injured? Our inability to keep out the opposition is increasingly scary. Teams must be coming to the bet365 with the expectation of scoring goals, which should have every Stoke player livid. Our team needs to start finding the key to clean sheets, otherwise, our luck isn’t going to turn around anytime soon.
Admittedly our defence did look much more solid this weekend, however, this was no doubt down to the fact that Hughes played two CDM’s in Cameron and Whelan, rather than the usual one. So… Hughes nearly made a smart decision, however, playing two CDM’s stifled our creativity going forward, and when all was said and done we failed to keep the ball out of our own net.
It’s all looking pretty dull at the moment and I’ve ran out of excuses for saying #HughesOut, so I put the question to you all. Given how we have played recently and given our lack of clean sheets, what is the answer to all our problems? Should we replace Hughes with the likes of Mancini? Should we fresh some young blood in the team? Should we drop the Pulis era players? Let us know in the comments if you’re reading on Facebook, or drop us a reply if you’re on Twitter.
With both the Mirror and Daily Express writing articles that verged on insulting it is time for the siege mentality to return to Stoke City. Ignoring the debate that surrounds our manager it is time for every fan to make the atmosphere for this crucial clash as confrontational, against the opposition of course, and loud as possible. Some excellent pieces have already been written on the atmosphere, and I direct you to read the Wizard’s and Duck Magazine’s take on this after you’ve read my thoughts.
The Brit bet is at its loudest when something goes against us. We have had smatterings of this so far this season, the stand out being after Mark Hughes was sent to the stands in the Spurs game, and as a whole the volume appears to be increasing. But much like Sparky’s squad the fans have not yet had their ‘90 minute’ performance, and for those attending the game it is time to give it your all for 90 minutes. It is well and truly time for the Bear Pit to return, and to truly bring it back an attitude of Stoke versus everyone is required. So to encourage this I have collected some light ‘encouragement’ for this attitude.
This is the most amount of pressure Mark Hughes has had to deal with as Stoke City manager. A disastrous league start – rock bottom with one point in five games, three goals scored and fourteen conceded – coupled with being knocked out of the EFL Cup has led to fans calling for his head, players having questions to answer and, for the first time in over three years, Peter Coates has had to publicly deny that he will sack his manager. It’s a very sensitive time for supporters as fans have widely varying views on how long the manager should be given before action should be taken. To mix in some method into this madness, we’ve grabbed two of the regular bloggers to have their say on the manager’s situation. We’ve got Tom Thrower, whose primarily Hughes Out; and Ben Rowley, whose Hughes In (at least for now). Both have given five reasons as to back their case, here they are:
Four defeats in a row. Three of them extremely heavy ones. In any situation, good or bad, many of us adore talking about our Stoke City but it’s never really the same as having a good, old moan about everything that is going on, or not going on, with our football team. In the midst of one of our worst starts to a season in recent memory it hasn’t just been the fans that have had a lot to say about what is going wrong for the Potters.
The players, staff and even the big dog chairman, Peter Coates, have all had their say on this torrid patch of form we find ourselves in. HughesIn or HughesOut this blog is not; I merely aim to sift through the dirt to find the nuggets of gold from the plethora of quotes released by figures in the club over the past week.
It is a dark time for Mark Hughes fans. Despite destroying the initial Hughes Out campaign, their troops have driven pro-Hughes fans from the bet365 and have pursued them all across Staffordshire. Evading the dreaded too much passing backwards argument, a group of freedom fighters have established a new argument in favour of retaining Sparky. The evil Hughes Out campaigners are obsessed with using last year’s results, and have sent out thousands of remote tweets into the far reaches of the internet. . .
Okay now for the serious part of the article, it is misleading to suggest that last season’s bad run of form should come into the consideration for the current predicament. The main reason for this is the change in the squad, especially throughout the sides’ spine. Three totally new signings (Martins Indi, Allen and Bony) along with the return of Given and Shawcross from injury, have led to a completely new spine for the side, relatively to the one that ended last season. This suggests that there is no need to be overly concerned with our opening performances and they can be put down to the traditionally slow start that we have.
Beginning to become a bit embarrassing, isn’t it? Today (Or yesterday depending on when this gets put up), a second half capitulation from Stoke saw Spurs as the away side romp to a 4-0 victory. After what seemed like a very promising first 20 minutes, Stoke decided that they wanted to make my job a rather easy one, and once the first goal had gone in there was never really any sign of us getting back into the game.
Usually when I sit down to write these blogs I have to take some time, usually about 10 or 15 minutes just to finalise what the five points that I want to pick apart are… not the case today. The following five issues with today’s game flow right off the tongue, so let’s not waste any more time and get straight down to it…
There is no argument over the fact that injuries have plagued Stoke City over the last 18 months. Beginning with the injury to Ryan Shawcross’ back, the physio treatment room at Clayton Wood has always had a patient ever since. It appears that the injury curse is still lingering over the club, as key players have begun this season in the stands rather than on the pitch. Yet, it is the circumstances for all these injuries that have thrown fans and led to confusion and even in some cases anger.
The first to suffer a mysterious injury set back at the beginning of the season was Glen Johnson, arguably the best signing that Hughes has made at the club. He ended the 2015/16 on the sidelines with an injury suffered in the Bournemouth match that looked innocuous at worst. The club suggested that the final day of the season against West Ham would be the most likely return date, and unfortunately Johnson could not recover in time for this. Obviously this is normal and most fans would agree it was not worth the risk playing him in such a dead rubber.
Once more the start of a Stoke City season hasn’t provided much to write home about it, or has it? Let’s take a look and try to take a positive out of everything.
1. We have our 20 goal a season striker
Wilfried Bony scores goals. When he was given a starting position at Swansea he averaged just under a goal every two games. Diouf scores every four games, Walters every five games and Crouch every five too, for comparison. We will give him the run of games and consistency he needs and he will bang them in for us, I’m sure of it.
