Getting Nostalgic For Nicky Mohan

The thing I have found hardest to cope with since we got into the Premier League is a slightly odd one.

It’s not about the teams we have played, the ticket prices, the players we face each week, it’s something rather more prosaic than that.

It’s this: All of a sudden people who aren’t Stoke supporters care about us, and moreover, they think they can have an opinion on what we do.

I work for a group of companies that makes its money from Football mainly and not surprisingly most of the people that work with me are keen on the sport. A lot go to matches each week so aren’t totally uninformed, but still.

The situation is made worse by the fact we have Sky Sports News on at work. This is a good thing. I am sat here now watching Martin Johnson being interviewed, and it’s not a bad thing to look at Natalie Sawyer, let’s be honest. But it presents its own problems. It is particularly annoying when we have lost and you have to watch all five Bolton goals going in again and again, and even if you aren’t looking at the screen there’s always somebody who thinks it’s funny to go “look at this Andy” just as we concede.

Take today for example Luke Young is in the goal of the week section and, although I have been in meetings a lot today I must have seen it 10 times.

With this comes the added problem that because everyone has now heard of our players and this is the first time, really, we have been on a losing streak in years, everyone, all the Birmingham, Villa, Coventry, Man Utd, Liverpool and (spit!) Arsenal supporters in the office think they know what’s wrong.

I have heard them all recently: “you have no plan B,” “you have been sussed out,” “you shouldn’t have signed Crouch,” “you get nothing from Delap’s throws anymore,” “why don’t you keep a settled defence?” “Your full-backs are awful,” “how can you afford to leave Palacios on the bench?” “Glen Whelan is your best midfielder.”

And do you know what? Most of the time they are right (ok not about the Glen Whelan thing) but because they aren’t Stoke supporters, even though I  might think that they are right, or at the very least have a point, I find myself defending my club from ridiculous standpoints.

On Saturday last week I was saying to my brother on the way home: “Rory was awful today, I wouldn’t pick him next week.” But at work on the Monday I heard myself saying “Rory is great player still” Now, Rory has been one of our best players of the last five years, of course he has, but if I was talking to a Stoke supporter I would say something entirely different.

So why don’t I allow non Stoke supporters to have an opinion on my club? Precisely because they ARE non Stoke supporters, that’s why! I have 30 odd years of my life invested in this football club, they wouldn’t know the first thing about us if we hadn’t gone up in 2008.

So I have taken to consoling myself with a thought when they have their opinions: They might know Ryan Shawcross and say he was this or that because of his tackle on Aaron Ramsey, but they wouldn’t have a clue who Nicky Mohan was.

And when you get nostalgic for Nicky Mohan, you really do know we are having a bad run.

Mother Mother, Tell Your Children*

There are certain phrases that set me off.

One is when I watch the news and see something about a terrible tragedy that could have been avoided and people in power talk about “learning the lessons,” another is just about anything David Cameron says.

But in football there are a few too. “Giving 110%” gets right on my wick. When Jamie Redknapp misuses “literally” repeatedly I reserve the right to shout at my tele, but to those you can add “must win game.”

There are two sorts of games that are “must win” – one is a knockout cup game, the other is a game you have to win to stay up/get promoted, whatever. NO other game is a must win.

The first time this terrible phrase reared its ugly head in the recent past was when we played Middlesborough in 2009. A mate walked past me on the way in and wittered that we had to win the game, and got quite irate when I said “there’s nine games after this.” Of course we won the match – and stayed up easily.

The words “must win game” were being used again last night after our latest capitulation, Blackburn, apparently is by turns a must win. A game we simply have to win, a game we can’t lose….whichever variation you choose. And its all wrong. Its no such thing.

To those people I say this: We have 26 games left this season. 25 of which are after the Blackburn game – lets not put too much pressure on the match.

Clearly it’s a very important fixture, to say anything else would be a stupid and crass thing to say. The run we are on is a disgrace, and I will be totally honest, TP, right now doesn’t strike me as a man who knows what to do to get us out of the mess we are in. Its almost like, “well plan A hasn’t worked, lets try Plan A again.”

And in many respects, that is probably why Saturday has extra importance attached to it. I genuinely believe that if that fourth goal of QPR’s had gone in then the fans would have turned on the team for the first time in recent memory and the manager would have had to run the gauntlet too, for the first time since that Plymouth game (which we won) back in 2007.

I used to run a proper Stoke Website then and on that, after that game, I wrote a massive and passionate column about how TP should be sacked, and in which I dared him to prove me wrong. And boy, did he do that! Which goes to prove two things 1) Sacking TP would have been the stupidest thing this club ever did and 2) I know nothing.

But there was a real feeling yesterday of a seething undercurrent – indeed, to borrow a theory off my brother, only the display of Referee Mike Jones saved the team being booed off yesterday and I will admit now to booing them off at Bolton.

So taken in that respect Blackburn is a very, very big game. With our away form we won’t beat Everton, Wolves or Man City and with our confidence being so low we will do well to get a lot out of Spurs at home – and those after Blackburn are the next four games.

There are a lot of things wrong right now – I wrote that on my first ever post on this blog and we had only lost one game – but TP must be given the time to sort it out.

I didn’t want him appointed in 2002, I didn’t want him appointed in 2006 and there have been three occasions since when I have called for his sacking. One after the Forest debacle in 03, one after we got beat by Derby in 05 and brought Chris Clark on to change things and finally after the aforementioned Plymouth game – and I will not make the mistake a fourth time.

We are in trouble, and make no mistake we are in relegation battle, but we will get out of it – with Pulis at the helm – irrespective of whether we beat Blackburn in that “must win game” next Saturday.

* the blog title is the opening line of Bon Jovi's "Keep The Faith"

Part Two: Transfers and The Jordan Rhodes Question

We all know Stoke City have got the best squad of players we have had in a generation. That is beyond dispute.

However, there are issues within that squad and I would argue that, to use the phrase again, we have been papering over the cracks for a little too long.

On 31^st August 2011 we completed a “staggering” transfer swoop, apparently. I begged to differ then and I beg to differ now.

I wasn’t writing this blog at that point, so I am going to look rather like I am being wise after the event, but I am not.

I will come right out and say it: I think Peter Crouch is a terrible signing. I will agree that I have a blind spot towards him and I have always disliked him, but I don’t think he was the right man for Stoke in August and I still don’t think he is the right man for Stoke now.

I will concede that it was a big statement for the club to make and credit to TP for getting his man – but I don’t think he is what we needed, and I will go further, I don’t think he as good as what we had. And at £10m he is not a “squad player” like Cameron Jerome was always going to be.

Crouch is too slow, and having him in the side has made us go even more direct than we ever did before. The very name of this blog should tell you that I couldn’t care less what style of football Stoke play and I have – just like most Stoke fans – stuck up for the club as I think we have played some great stuff over the years. Not this season. We have been all the critics say we are. We are totally reliant on set-pieces, we seemingly do not have any Plan B, and we don’t score goals.

A large part of this obviously is down to the appalling form of our wingers. Both Jermaine Pennant and Matty Etherington are capable of so much more, but this for me again shows the staggering naivety in TP’s transfer dealings. We shouldn’t have been making half arsed moves for Wright-Phillips, Bellamy and Johnson, we should have had a winger in. And when we hadn’t got one, to leave Danny Pugh out of the 25 man squad was breathtakingly daft.

As was the apparent decision to not bring in any full-backs. We have been crying out for full-backs for as long as we have been in this league and yet we still don’t have them. We probably needed one centre half as cover, but we didn’t need two and we didn’t need to be leaving Robert Huth leaving out of the side. We are unbalanced at the back and it’s cost us.

We needed a midfielder and we got him. And a good one too. But then Pulis does what he seems to do once a year and he doesn’t play his new signing because said player isn’t “Stoke fit”  (we still signed him though – unlike Demba Ba). And although I fervently hope I am wrong, it doesn’t half look as though Wilson Palacios is this year’s Eidur Gudjonsen or Tuncay.

And there are two other things we don’t do that are started to leave me scratching my head. We don’t loan players and we don’t sign youngsters.

I was thinking about the former the other day while watching The Football League Show. On it Stephen Pearson scored for Bristol City. And it reminded me of a time where we had a squad full of players borrowed from other clubs. That route is one we have hardly gone down in the last few seasons and I have to confess I am not sure why. TP used to say loaning players was a way “of knowing what you were getting.” Maybe if we still loaned players we would have some better idea of how to fit the players we have into our squad.

And the second point can be summed up in what I like to call “The Jordan Rhodes Question.”

By that I mean we are constantly linked with young lower division players, like we were with Jordan Rhodes – and his Huddersfield team mates Alex Smithies and Anthony Pilkington - a few years back.

I know for a fact that we watched the players on numerous occasions, and for whatever reason we didn’t sign the. Fair enough, but given that we almost never bring our own players through – the Manager refers to Andy Wilkinson as “young Andy” still for heavens sake, and he’s 27 – why aren’t we signing younger players to bolster the squad? We have barely any players between 18-23 in our squad (and as an aside, if Ben Marshall couldn’t make the early season squads, will he ever get into the team?) all of which gives the squad an unbalanced look, and ironically, when Rhodes goes to a bigger club in a year or two, we will talk about how we “nearly signed him” like we did with Scott Sinclair and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain in the recent past.

As I said to start with these are arguments we never thought we would have – given that essentially I am talking about whether our £8m or £10m striker would be better in the team, but things move on, and there are legitimate questions to ask about our squad and transfer policy.

Trying To Make Sense and See Sense

In the first of three articles, Long Ball Football tries to make sense of our recent form:

Now the dust has settled on the debacle of Sunday we can perhaps think about the issues that led us here.

Firstly – and I will keep banging on about this until people see sense – our away form has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with our European campaign. I said this on the first blog I wrote on this site. If the apologists want to make that excuse then perhaps they can explain to me what the problem has been since 2008.

Secondly there is the question of the defence and goalkeeper. Asmir Begovic – again as I wrote on this blog – has clearly been worrying the coaching staff for a while. I saw him make many errors in his warm up at Arsenal, Andy Quy was obviously concerned. I wasn’t in the Reebok so early, but I am told by a mate that same thing happened there.

He hasn’t deserved his place for a while, but equally he hasn’t been able to trust the personnel in front of him, given the loss of form of some, the injuries, and the frankly baffling changes TP has made.

In many ways Begovic’s form has mirrored that of the team. I honestly think this hiding as been coming for a while. We have for too long this season – in the league games – have been papering over the cracks.

It is no exaggeration to say that we could have lost every game we have played. And I would further argue that we have only played well once – against Man Utd, and of course, if Ryan Giggs slots that chance home we would have been defeated in that game too.

Rather like that defeat at Forest in 2003 we must take this defeat as a wake up call. TP and his staff have to go back to the drawing board and work out what they need to tweak.

Tweak is the word I would use advisedly. We must remember that however shameful – and I again use that word advisedly – our display was on Sunday things aren’t THAT bad in general.

We are twelfth in the Premier League, we have been to the FA Cup final and we are all but qualified to the knockout stages for the Europa League. These are still great times to be a Stoke supporter.

We have a good squad, the best team we have had in my lifetime and some expensive international players, but that brings its own problems and its those problems the Club as a whole needs to sort.

More than anything though, anyone who describes Sunday’s loss as a “surprise” or “shock” is plain wrong. The surprise, however, would be if it wasn’t sorted out – fast.

 And in that respect, our next two games are absolutely massive. If we lose them both then its alarm bells time, if we get six points then the blip is over.

What's Worse. Flying or Chris Waddle?

Excellent stuff boys, excellent stuff.

This blog has been critical of Stoke in recent weeks – particularly after the Arsenal game. In fact it’s a good job work and other commitments stopped me writing one on after Monday because I was absolutely fuming.

But tonight we did a professional job.

I am not surprised, because anyone who saw the game two weeks ago knows that Tel Aviv are a bad side, lets be honest. Kiev weren’t great, Thun weren’t either, I wasn’t hugely impressed with Beskitas (although will concede they moved the ball about well) and Kiev weren’t what I expected, but Maccabi are the worst of the lot.

 If we hadn’t been sloppy in the first half we would have been home and dry at the break,  and barring another daft goal conceded we never looked in trouble.

There were plenty of plusses too. Danny Higginbotham’s return, Wilson Palacios playing well – and the not inconsiderable fact that, barring disaster, we are through for the first time in our history to the last 32 of European Cup competition.

There were a couple of negatives too – both personal, so hopefully you will indulge me some contemplation.

Negative one: I wasn’t there. For the third time this season I was watching the game on TV and I have to say…. its crap! I am someone who is used to being there at games. And its annoying me rather. I will admit it too. It’s not a case of money, I wish it was, I would feel less stupid. But the fact is I am petrified of flying– and I mean seriously scared. Like Dennis Bergkamp. I did go to Thun, on the coach, but I didn’t go to Split with my brother (he hasn’t been able to go to the Kiev or Tel Aviv games either, he works in a school)

What happens in the later stages I am not sure – but we will see. I also only get 20 days a year holiday at work and I had used a lot of it by the time the group games came around  - I will admit that, as I have just tweeted, I didn’t expect us to get this far and didn’t think it would be an issue.

But it’s my own fault and boy, I am missing out.

Negative Two: Is a little more light hearted, but no less heartfelt. Chris Waddle. Actually not just Chris Waddle but Martin Keown too. Would it have killed either of these idiots to give us credit? Stoke City, the team no one gave a chance in the Premier League, but are still there, are now the team that no one thought would play in Europe, but are the best placed of all the British sides.

When Fulham were doing this, there was a love in with Uncle Roy Hodgson, Bobby Zamora, whoever. When we are doing it, there is nonsense about our style of play, how Palacios doesn’t fit in, how we bypass midfield. You name it.

Waddle surpassed himself with his constant assertions that Tel Aviv were “keeping the ball” and wittering on about the game plan they needed to beat us.

He has hated us for ages, and was absolutely gutted when we thrashed Bolton (I have watched that on DVD so much I could recite his commentary) but he reasoned tonight that we won that because “Bolton played long ball.”

His coup de grace came when the ref gave Tel Aviv a free kick towards the end. We had the ball, but to Waddle “Maccabi would have preferred the advantage.”

If that’s the level of his insight, then I have got to hope all our remaining away games are on ITV4 – or else find a girlfriend who is a psychiatrist  to cure my fears!

Just Excuses

The best thing about having a blog (or in my case blogs!) is I get to moan about things that annoy me.

And this week we saw a prime example.

We aren’t the only club that does it be any means and we aren’t the worst, however, this blog is about Stoke City, so the focus must be us.

But this idea that when you lose a game of football the first thing you do is get yourself in front of the nearest camera and bleat about referees really vexes me and that’s exactly what TP did this week.

Now I read that yet again he’s moaning to Mike Riley about the decisions that didn’t go our way on Wednesday night.

Having finally seen the highlights last night I will concede that three went against us. The Walters goal (I wrote on Thursday that I didn’t know why it was chalked off from the view I had at the game). The Carragher tackle on Matty Etherington might have been a red card (personally I wouldn’t have sent him off) and the foul on Crouch was a penalty.

Fair enough. But referee Lee Probert didn’t cost us the game. Any more than he cost us the game at Vila two seasons ago when he disallowed Mama Sidibe’s goal or Everton last term when for some reason he decided Tuncay had pushed Leighton Baines.

We lost those games because we missed a host of other chances at Villa and didn’t defend properly for Yakubu’s winner at Goodison. And that is my point.

Football clubs, just like the boxer who blames an injury when he doesn’t turn up in a big title fight, have to take responsibility for what they do in matches.

Manager’s are fond of asking for “consistency” from Ref’s. So lets turn it round. Lets see TP ring Mike Riley after Kenwyne Jones dives at WBA, or Matty dives against West Ham in the Cup Quarter final (you will recall he managed – like we all did – to get upset about their goal which was an obvious handball.) I had brilliant views of both, and said straight away “dive.” I could see it, TP knows it and stil his silence was deafening.

Or where was his admonishment of the ref after Huth’s elbow in the Cup Final? Or this season when Wilko should have gone at Swansea – as soon as that tackle was made I said to the people I was with: “he’s off.”

It’s an obvious cliché, but its true. It evens itself out. Take Sunderland last season. The Cattermole handball was a more or less exact replica of what Danny Pugh did at the other end two season’s before. How we chuckled then. How we fumed last November.

We are fans. We don’t have to see sense or be reasonable. So when we beat Sunderland last season at home with a goal that was miles offside and one that was handball how funny I found it to stand there abusing Steve Bruce.

That’s my job.

The job of the Stoke manager, though, is to be honest in defeat, surely? And I say this not to TP in particular but bosses in general, please, please stop making excuses.

A Thursday Morning (Realistic) Moan

So that’s it for another year. My dream of watching us in a major cup final now rests with FA and Europa Cups and, really, if we are being honest, we were second best last night.

Liverpool were much the better side last night and going in at half-time a goal up was flattering to us in the extreme.

Too many of our players just didn’t (and aren’t) playing very well.

And then I get home to read TP comments that somehow the referee cost us! Personally from my vantage point in Block 22 I didn’t see a lot wrong with the goal Walters had disallowed and I had no chance of seeing whether Crouch was fouled or not just before the end.

But I did see too many of our players getting the basics wrong. Our defending for both goals was shambolic. Our passing was sloppy, and we – as far as I can recall – barely threatened the goal apart from Jones’ header and the Walters “goal.”

And that, I am afraid, has been the way of recent games. We beat a really poor (on the day) Fulham team, were seemingly devoid of ideas at Arsenal and the malaise continued last night.

We continue – despite all the money we have spent – to operate the “square pegs in round holes” philosophy, we have two wingers in the squad, we have barely any cover on the left side and little pace anywhere.

All of which leads me to ask this question: I have already tweeted on this today, but still its worthy of further discussion on the blog.

Is our European form masking what is now an average start to the season?

We have won three games (two, if we are being honest, largely undeserved) drawn three and lost three. All three defeats have seen us give really poor displays and we have only scored seven goals in the league, of which, off the top of my head just two were from open play – one of those even was lucky.

Is that good enough for a strike force that cost over £25m? With the first quarter of the season complete we have mustered just one goal from a player that wasn’t playing up front at the time (Delap’s against Fulham) and that, for a team that relies on goals from defenders as much as we do – is a really worrying trend.

And if final confirmation were needed as to the unsatisfactory nature of things were needed try this: For all the euphoria of the Europa Cup and transfer deadline day “coups” (and having Wilson Palacios back will be like a new signing) we are below Norwich in the table.

And yes, this blog may be bleak today – but I believe it a realistic. Our next four games are winnable. And if we do win at least two then we have at least 18 points, which probably we would settle for.

I do though, honestly believe that things have moved on and that we as a club, as fans, have a right to expect Stoke City to finish somewhere in the top half of the table with the players we have available.

We will need to improve dramatically on the last two weeks domestic showing if we are to do that.

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