News from the bet365 Stadium as Stoke City try to find a way out of five-game winless run
Although Alex Neil can cite accomplishments and defense, he is aware that the specifics of the Championship league standings will ultimately determine his standing and fate as manager of Stoke City.
After seven years of downward spiraling and three years in a Financial Fair Play prison, this year should serve as a significant marker for Stoke, if not a stopgap at the finish line. It offers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a huge reset.
It was always going to be difficult to turn things around and move in the right direction, and while injuries to four key players before a run of difficult games didn’t help, the results and the weaknesses that have been exposed have tried the patience of fans still suffering from the effects of previous campaigns.
Even though Coventry lost their two star players and are only a point better off after their summer rebuild, Mark Robins has earned credit for getting the team up from League Two to last season’s play-off final. This week, however, even he had to publicly plead for patience and confidence that it will work out. No matter how certain Neil is that it’s accurate, it still requires a leap of faith to get that conclusion at Stoke.
“Results dictate how people feel,” he said. “That’s why I was so upset after the Huddersfield game because when you play that well, you have to make it count. If we’d made it count we’d be in a better position because the league table is so tight.
“But the league table is ultimately how you’re judged. I think a lot of our performances have merited more points than we’ve got at the moment but nobody really cares about that, we all want results, we want to win, we want to feel good about our team at the weekend.
“If we don’t win, then we’ve ruined a lot of people’s weekends and that’s hard. It’s quite straightforward how people feel about their team and I get it.
“All I will add at the moment is that we’ve had a lot of obstacles to overcome, a lot of new players to bring in, a lot of players dropping out through injury, which makes it doubly difficult. We just need a little bit of time to get people back fit and get ourselves back up and running and making sure when we do play well, we make that count in our favour and get points on the board.”
Stoke, however, cannot afford to just wait for key players to get fit and firing. There are three games heading into the next international break which look tricky – Bristol City away, Southampton at home, Leicester away – and it doesn’t get much easier when they get back; Sunderland and Leeds at the bet365 Stadium followed by a trip to Middlesbrough for starters.
Whoever is available and whoever the opposition, they have to find a way to win.
Neil said: “No game is written off. I’m not saying that we can’t win games until we have no injuries. We’ve been competing and doing well in matches.
“The point I’m making is that we’ve got players like (Sead) Haksabanovic, (Mehdi) Leris and (Bae) Junho who are playing their first and second games and we’re trying to mould them into a team and win at the same time against some teams who are established and in good form, having worked together for the best part of nine or 12 months.
“That’s tough but the simple fact is that we’re expected to do it, we expect to do it and we have to go out and try to win.”
