Stoke have always been my first love, and this week they reached new modern day heightsby qualifying for the last 32 of the Europa League. Tottenham, Fulham, Celtic, Birmingham all failed to make it this far. We are joined by Man City and Man Yoohoo, who were piss poor in the Champions League and get a second chance in the Europa along with 6 other Champions League rejects – in my unvalued opinion, this stinks and makes an absolute mockery of the hard work done by the Europa qualifiers, UEFA seem to want to give “Europes elite losers” every opportunity of generating huge amounts of income (TV & competition prize money) rather than allowing the “B” class of teams to maximise their potential.
2011 for Stoke has seen some impressive acheivements, FA Cup finalists for the first time, a long European run (to date P10 W7 D2 L1), and after a hiccup in the league, back up to 8th place after 16 games. Pulis now has a good squad where he can field 2 different teams if he wants to – as he did this week against Besiktas, which was a different team to that fielded in the league. And who could ever imagine we would be getting people like Johnathan Woodgate, Matthew Upson, Peter Crouch, Cameron Jerome, Kenwyne Jones to join lowly old Stoke. And for Tony Pulis, a man who gets on with the job, shyes away from the media and instills a work ethic in the players that is exceptional. If they have a bad game, he talks to them, work on it in training and sticks by them, he doesn’t air his dirty laundry in public. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of him, just ask James Beattie. But there is no denying, he has exceptional managerial qualities that no Stoke fan should ever ever forget.
Me and the boy went along to the Family Christmas night in the clubhouse last night, only to see the same old 30 or so faces. We had a win in the grand draw, a meal for 4 at the Greyhound one Sunday. Triffic. As a footnote to this, where was the chairman ? or even the club secretary ? neither were there, so the next time they harp on about people not attending events at the clubhouse I may gently remind of their non attendance to the family Xmas party.
Today saw the reverse fixture of last week, I’d agreed to take the lad to the game as it wasn’t too far away. It was bloody freezing, as it has been all week, and necessitated several layers on every exposed part. We started with the same starting team as last week. Wintertons ground is a nice little community ground just north east of Scunthorpe. We did not start very well, in fact in the first 45 minutes we were atrocious, apart from Wayne Wallace, no one else was at the races. Winterton played like a team who wanted to get revenge for last weeks loss, everyone had a spring in their step. Their No8 was a threat all half, and set up their best play. They scored on 22, it wasnt until 35th minute before we had a reasonable chance, which came from Wallace, where he exchanged passes with one or two before firing a shot and hitting the post. They then scored 2 in a minute just before half time, the second of these i missed as i was updating te official twitter site of the other.
There were one or twoquizzical decisions from the ref, but in truth we only had ourselves to blame for the scoreline. They wanted it more than us.
The second half and we had made a change, Nathan Cooke came off for Billy Logan who promptly scored after 2 minutes. We made more of a fist of it, and had numerous chances which on another day may have gone in. But in truth, the hosts had done more than enough to win.
There are a few players who today will need to reflect on their performances, which are not one offs, but a culmination of a few games where they have been ineffectual. There are guys on the sidelines, who when they come on, like today, actually make a difference to the dynamic of our team. The manager is paid to make the choices and tactics, but I wonder if his reading of the game is the same as those in the circle I stood with today – I dont think this is the case. Some serious decisions and words need to be made before the Boxing Day game with Scarborough.
If there is any Christmas cheer, it was on hearing Scarborough losing to Barton after having a 3-1 lead. lmao deluded tossers.
