Home » It Was Only Stoke

Relax, I’m kidding.

The old, “you can only play the team in front of you ” line is cobblers.

If the phrase has any merit at all, people would wheel it out when their side gets beaten 3-0 by a superior outfit.

No, no matter who you play, you look to yourself when assessing the outcome. 3-0 at home to a sort of mid-table mob is nice work. Not to be sniffed at or denigrated. We won 3-0 and it felt good.

The immediate positive was that Tim copped on to the fragility of a choosing a team without a proper centre mid pairing. This made a significant difference. Sherwood’s other big plus, was well chosen and well timed subs.

Another plus was that despite the pretty , much universal flat response to the West Brom draw, this game gave us a another opportunity to get used to the change of template and the shift of responsibilities that come with that. By which, I mean that the largely pointless animation of the West Brom performance is slowly began to  transform itself into something far more cohesive yesterday.

There were more that one or two glimpses of confidence and so creativity. There were more than one or two reasons to be cheerful.

We still got a 442, but only sort of. Eriksen did his best to twist it a little, and I’d like to see more of that. Whilst he didn’t have a brilliant game, if one to assess him on his set plays, he saw a hell of a lot of the ball and this could well be a path to righteousness in itself.

If you want key passes in the final third, this guy has yards of career form for that. Let’s go looking for that form.

The difference between this game and West Brom is that our passing was far far tighter. Our man of the match Paulinho, revealed what a number of us had suspected from almost the beginning of the season, he was knackered.

Stoke were pretty close to abject. Whilst Hughes has them playing a lot less like Stoke (aside from the occasional attempted manslaughter), they are still dull and were singularly toothless. The desire to hoof the thing towards 3MP must have been close to overwhelming.

Translated, bar perhaps one and a half times, our back four wasn’t tested.

Our back line currently is mess. There’s no other word to describe it. Kaboul? Looking at a few different places online, it’s evident he’s being romanticized as some big French panacea again. When in reality, he far more resembles some bloke with a dicky pancreas.

Bonzo, Dawson, Vlad and ______ [insert name here] is recipe for something inedible. And that is why I’m not relishing the game at Old Trafford. Tim’s remark about “tin hats” might be the first honest thing he’s said – since the putsch.

Against Stoke, you can get sort of get away with a “back in 15 mins” sign hanging on your shop door. Against Manchester United, we may well end up looking uncannily like we did against the Baggies, except against Manchester United, even this Manchester United, we may well find ourselves picking the ball out of our own net maybe 3, possibly 4 times.

So we hope that Paulinho’s knock is just that. Mousa appeared to make off the pitch without the need of oxygen. So with a dash of good fortune, we’ll have a fighting chance in the middle of the park on New Year’s Day.

Mousa had a stormer of a game. Without seeking to deride that, one has to ask the question what Stoke did to prevent him? And the answer is, being Stoke, they reverted to type and sought to rough him up a bit. The correct answer we may well witness at the Theatre Of Screams.

It’s never a shock when teams “do a job” on Mousa, and go two or even three up on him, then he gets panned in the post match player ratings.

Up front, Ade doing what he is paid to at long last. Hurrah! You can bitch and whine all you want about him being frozen out under the last guy, but if anyone can keep a straight face while they tell me the Togoan with the default setting of “shiftless money counter” was an innocent in all that, do get in touch.

Soldado’s penalty set the tone and it couldn’t have come at a better time. You hit the 20 minute mark at The Lane these days without being a goal to the good and warmth of human kindness drains away like puss from cyst with syringe in it.

Mousa’s goal we’ve seen before. It’s a stock goal. Here’s to him having a few more left in stock. The style of Azza’s strike reminded me of an almost joyful but too brief spell under Jol, when PSB and Berba used to drop balls like that into the net almost every game.

Naughton had a cracker of a game. I’m pleased that listening to Hotspur’s Half Hour this week acted as a spur. Fryers was alright. As were Vlad. As was Dawson. Vlad was alright.

And that’s the worry.

I banged on about cohesion after the last game. I’m unconvinced this game witnessed us wholly embracing , effortlessly attuning to Tim’s “voice”, but it was a huge improvement and I’ll happily take that.

If we don’t get a favourable result at Old Trafford, it isn’t a disaster, we’ve Palace up after them and this will give us another opportunity for another run out against another side while we find our way back from the mind numbing hell of AVB.

COCKSHAGBEAVER
[divider]

[button color=”orange” link=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/hotspurshalfhour/HHH_27-12-13.mp3 ” target=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/hotspurshalfhour/HHH_27-12-13.mp3 “]THE END OF THE YEAR SPECIAL[/button]


[divider]

Tags Stoke City
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

162 Comments
newest
oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Follow Us
Latest Newsletter Posts