Waving flag with Stoke City football club logo. Editorial 3D
I want to see Stoke City stick with the same formation from game to game
Stoke City legend Mike Pejic reviews the week at the bet365 Stadium
There are always problems to solve in football. Finding solutions is the key to success.
It’s been a tough three weeks for Stoke City in terms of results, some tricky games at a time when they’ve had some key players injured. You have different peaks and troughs through a season, most teams have blips, and it’s a difficult time for the club at the moment.
We’ve got another difficult month to come on paper, with Sunderland, Leeds and Middlesbrough up next in the first week after the international break. It will help, and I think it would have helped in the last couple of months, to have a consistent approach from game to game.
So yes, we can talk about injuries but Alex Neil had pre-season, and he’d had pretty much a whole season before that, we’d had decent away form last year with players we’ve got rid of and now the manager has brought his own players in, loads of them, and that should mean the strength in depth.
I was surprised to see that he waited until the 88th minute against Leicester to use Dwight Gayle and Sead Haksabanovic and that Andre Vidigal and Wesley weren’t used at all. Again we had a change of system, this time to 4-4-2. We could have lined up with a back four and three in midfield, which would have protected Josh Laurent as emergency centre-back. That would have given him a choice between Bae Junho, Haksabanovic, Mehdi Leris, Nathan Lowe, Gayle, Nikola Jojic, Wesley and Vidigal up front.
You’ve still got protection in wide areas, you’ve still got protection in the middle and it’s a system that we’ve used before rather than preparing it in one day between the Southampton and Leicester matches. It’s a selection to suit the squad that has been put together.
Don’t throw a game away, challenge yourself and your players to come up with the goods. You have to solve the problem. This is the challenge I have this week or this match and I have to find the answer.
We had square pegs in round holes at left-back and centre-half but how do we mitigate it? I think three in midfield and two wide would have solved the problem without putting us on the back foot quite so much.
Back yourself, back your players whether you’re playing the top team or the bottom. We have to come up with the goods.
