Stoke City legend Mike Pejic runs the rule over the latest news from the bet365 Stadium
The big item on the top of my list of priorities for Stoke City this season has been to sort out home form and so far, so good.
A thumping win over Rotherham was followed by beating West Brom in the cup and, after a tough day at Ipswich last weekend, fingers crossed they can carry on the momentum this afternoon against Watford.
You go for a win in each match, particularly at home, but the most important thing when we look back in nine months’ time will be that we haven’t lost many either, certainly not at the rate that we have been doing over the last couple of years. Home form is pivotal, the absolute backbone to everything. We have to be better at breaking teams down and finding ways to win as well as being tough to beat.
Last season we conceded too many goals while we were running backwards, chasing, rather than coming onto the ball. When you see a team running backwards it usually spells big trouble because they’re trying to fill gaps that shouldn’t have been there in the first place. We were stretched too easily from side to side and end to end and the spaces we left made it too easy for the opposition to find a way through. We got no points from lots of games when we had dominated possession and territory.
Alex Neil has been given a chance to shape a squad to resolve that and we are already getting to see the different kind of tests we will face across the course of a Championship season.
Most matches in this division are anybody’s on the day but you will come up against lots of different systems, tactics and ways of playing. You have to come up with the answers, especially when it’s your home match.
Neil looks like he’s got a formation to hang his hat on with a 4-3-3 and it will be an interesting contest against Watford, who don’t often give managers the chance to lay the kind of foundations that Neil has been tasked with doing over the last 12 months.
They have an expectation of being in the Premier League and the slightest blip means the trigger is pulled. Bye bye, onto the next one!
For most of us, we will see the division settle down after about 10 or 11 games and a quarter of the season. We should have a clear idea of how good everyone’s business has been and how they can face up over the course of a campaign, even if there is nearly always a team that makes a late charge as well.
IT has been all change in the Saudi Arabia League as well this summer and how.
Not many of us could have named many clubs playing in that division until recently but now we have household names going out there, some world class players.
It doesn’t take a genius to work out why when you see that Neymar will earn a reported £2.5m a week. It’s crazy and frankly, it’s grotesque.
When I fell in love with football, the dream was about winning trophies. Now it feels like the bottom line is about money. Even when the talk is about winning the league or qualifying for Europe the second sentence is about what that will mean for budgets.
When that balance swings, we put the game in jeopardy and I feel for the supporters who might lose something pretty special.
THE Women’s World Cup, on the other hand, has been a heartwarming, brilliant competition and congratulations to England on reaching the final.
The FA was starting to get it together about women’s football back when I was working there and it’s been a long journey from Hope Powell through Phil Neville to where we are now, starting by getting more qualified women coaches.
This is what we’ve all been waiting for, the run from England and the tournament. The standard has been superb and so has the entertainment.
The group stages gave us shocks, including Nigeria going through instead of Canada, Jamaica instead of Brazil, South Africa instead of Italy and Morocco – with a world ranking of 72 – making sure Germany were on the first plane home. Sweden beat the United States in the quarters.
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