Despite the many highs of promotion and then staying for 10 years in the Prem, an FA cup final and travelling to Europe, this is still my favourite season following Stoke.
@peteoconn I miss proper football. It’s so bland and sterile now with recycling the ball seemingly more important than sticking it in the net. I know I’m old fashioned but I want to see high octane stuff, big challenges and players skinning their marker and getting shots and crosses off.
Might have dropped on watching the Hearts game and folk may say it’s not always like that but for pure spectacle, I enjoyed it way more than any English
game I’ve seen for ages. Much less side to side and far more endeavour and blood and thunder. Felt like “real” football to me.
@StokeMark@gazproc_6 I was working on Ash not coming back but yeah of course. As for Wilmo, I don’t mind him and he’s been ok overall but I wonder if it’s time for a fresh start for him and us.
In reality, even some of our supposedly better players aren’t actually very good or more importantly effective in key moments. Of course the manager takes final responsibility but in the main you end up in the table where your players are suited to and for us, that’s bottom half.
@fergo_paul He has a large part to play I agree but who the fuck is scouting these players? Feels like we rely solely on stats and don’t carry out much (any) due diligence finding out about players character and mentality. Sometime it feels like we’ve not even watched them live!
@fergo_paul Generally it comes down to us signing players who aren’t good enough and that’s in pretty much every area of the pitch. To me we keep trying to be clever in the hope one sells for a fortune. We can’t afford to gamble as we have on untried players for 2,3 or sometimes £4m though.
@fergo_paul I wasn’t a fan of the Mubama signing. If he’d been a squad player then that would have been fine but once he got that 9 shirt the writing was on the wall for me if our expectations were he’d be our focal point for the season.
@gazproc_6 Other than Vik, Junior, Sorba and Lawal at a push (given he’s always injured) if you could somehow wave a magic wand and start again not sure many wouldn’t do it would they?
@Dave50525946@markeltro@Bunnyduckmag Scary to think we need work in the goalkeeping area as we have zero back up, the defence needs work, midfield is a wasteland, out wide looks like we could be in for upheaval and our goal scoring options up front are possibly as bad as I can ever recall. Other than that it’s OK 🫣
McBurnie. 17 goals, 8 assists. Free transfer. Or spunk north of £10m on the likes of Smit, Cisse, Rigo and Bozenik. Plus get loans like Mubama and Rak Sayki. Good job we have experts at Stoke with access to groundbreaking analysis of the gems we keep signing. Fuck my life.
@marcalmond7@PitterPotter619 Not for me although wouldn’t be averse to having one around the squad. We need to totally overhaul midfield and up front at the bare minimum.
@Dave50525946@Bunnyduckmag Just done a bit of searching and I’ve seen £25k a week quoted. Now of course that’s not peanuts but you’d think still within reach given the fees we’ve spent?
@marcalmond7@PitterPotter619 Think that’s a fair point but I would also say we do actually get into good positions but most of our players either refuse to pull the trigger or take too much time. Take today, we actually got into loads of decent situations yet never remotely looked like scoring.
@Dave50525946 Maybe mate but I’d have rather used some of the money on that than those transfer fees for eBay we ended up with. You can’t sign everyone and I am realistic BUT we keep signing duds and lots of them. Our hit rate is phenomenally bad.