A Tough Start And Lack Of Transfer Activity Spells Trouble For Stoke City

A Tough Start And Lack Of Transfer Activity Spells Trouble For Stoke City
08:53, 10 Aug 2017

Dark clouds are gathering in Stoke-on-Trent. Another drearily nondescript campaign for Mark Hughes has confirmed the failure of the club’s ambitious transformation project and, after a disastrous summer, there are ominous signs that Stoke City face a tough relegation battle. The fans have every right to be worried.

Since Hughes’s appointment the Potters have attempted to abandon the Tony Pulis model in favour of a more glamorous system, but a dreadful run of eight points from their final ten Premier League games appears to have panicked the club hierarchy into reverting to type. Marko Arnautovic has forced an exit, while Kurt Zouma and Darren Fletcher – two powerful, no-nonsense Pulis types – have joined the ranks. It is difficult to see how this tactical regression, along with Hughes’s own waning influence and a horrible fixture list, can end in anything other than disaster for Stoke.

Arnautovic and Jonathan Walters created or scored 17 of Stoke’s measly 45 league goals last campaign (38%), and at the time of writing not a single player has been signed to fill the gap. Peter Crouch, their top goalscorer with seven, is now 36-years-old and cannot be expected to lead for the whole campaign. It is very difficult to see where Stoke’s goals will come from, particular given that their poor run of form in April and May will have taken a huge psychological toll on this team.

Mentality is a serious issue at Stoke. Bojan, Xherdan Shaqiri, and Sadio Berahino are all exciting forwards capable of combining to good effect in the final third, but all three players struggle to stay in form, struggle to stay motivated when heads are dropping, and refuse to help out defensively. A dangerous spiral of low morale and heavy defeats seems likely to follow; Hughes has been using a 3-4-2-1 formation in pre-season with the above three combining up front, but unless Stoke hit the ground running their flair players will ultimately let them down.

A tough fixture list only compounds the misery. They play five of last season’s top seven in the first eight fixtures, games in which they earned just three points from the corresponding fixtures in 2016/17 (excluding their trip to Newcastle in September). Hughes has always struggled against the top sides, and if early results go against them it will be very difficult to claw things back.

The Premier League is particularly strong this year thanks to an influx of astute tacticians in both halves of the table, which leaves Hughes – and his collection of flaky forwards – in serious trouble should they reside in the bottom three by October.

And motivation isn’t just a problem among Stoke’s forwards. The consolidation of the Premier League’s top seven has the potential to negatively impact upon the work-rate of those mid-table clubs; with little to chase it is easy to imagine players switching off once Europa League qualification moves quickly out of sight. Fighting desperately for every point has become harder in the age of frequent managerial changes, and therefore should Stoke fail to excite the fans with some early season wins their players could lose faith in the manager – and lose their edge.

A perfect storm of factors appears to have left Hughes in a dreadful position as we approach the beginning of the new Premier League season. It would be a big surprise if he is still managing the club by the end of the season – and an even bigger surprise if Stoke avoid a relegation dogfight in 2017/18.

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