SATURDAY'S defeat at Everton means we can no longer kid ourselves that we're not involved in this season's relegation battle.
We go into this weekend's game against Aston Villa knowing that a continuation of our current poor run of form would leave us in the thick of things.
WORRYING TIMES: Stoke's 1-0 defeat at Everton on Saturday leaves the club perilously close to the Premier League relegation spots.
Our heavyweight 350gsm business cards have FREE UV coating, FREE next day delivery & VAT included. Choose from 100s of pre-designed templates or upload your own artwork. Orders dispatched within 24hr
We have been found wanting in too many areas and are paying the price for our failure to deal with the issues and problems which have beset us in this present three-month run and also over the past two seasons as a whole.
The truth is we don't have time for any blood-letting right now – we have to do all we can to make sure the unthinkable doesn't happen and The Potters slide out of the Premier League.
We seem to very much have our fate still in our own hands. We have a four-point cushion to the last relegation place and we have seven games remaining, four of which are at home and five against teams who are still looking for points to avoid the drop themselves.
Appearances can be deceptive though. A team which has won just one of its previous 12 games can ill-afford to go presuming that any of our remaining fixtures are going to be guaranteed wins for us.
At home we still have to face Aston Villa and Norwich, both of whom will be thinking that they can come to the Britannia Stadium and get some badly-needed points.
It is possible that United could seal the title on our ground, so they'll have something big to play for, while Spurs will be trying to tie up that priceless Champions League spot.
Away from home we have to visit QPR, Sunderland and Southampton, and we can be sure that none of those will be easy games, given what's at stake and our own pitiful return from away games.
In most seasons 37 or 38 points would usually be enough to guarantee survival, but every now and then it's not. The record number of points anybody has been relegated with is 42, by West Ham a good few years ago, while Blackpool went down on 39 points a couple of seasons back.
You'd like to think that we are capable of that, but our confidence and belief have clearly taken a big dent over the past few weeks.
Our insistence on trying to keep things as tight as possible means that goalscoring chances are nearly always going to be at a premium, so we can't afford to be wasteful with those we do create.
However, we didn't put them away, so The Toffees were able to join the ranks of other sides, such as Fulham, West Ham and Newcastle, who've been able to take three points off us without doing all that much to deserve them.
We're the lowest scorers in the entire country over the past two years and in 16 away games so far in this campaign we have won just once and scored only nine goals.
When we address these issues and do what we can to affect the changes necessary to get us out of this mess we've allowed ourselves to be drawn into then we'll be okay.
That takes some new and innovative thinking from the management team, better finishing from the players and a rock-solid support from Stoke fans.
We can't be afraid to try new things and that doesn't mean we have to make irrational and wild decisions with the team.
Peter Crouch has shown himself to be a totally model professional since he came to the club, but at the moment he has just one goal to his name in the last six calendar months.
When he was injured against Newcastle we stuck Kenwyne Jones into the starting line-up and he scored three goals in December alone.
Our manager talked about doing exactly that last week, but then left him on the bench at Goodison Park, even though we still had one substitution left.
These suggestions might not be the answer to our problems, but perhaps it's something like this which could provide the spark we're missing.
We have now failed to score in NINE of our last 14 games (since scoring three against both Liverpool and Southampton), so something needs to give... and quickly.
We can't allow that trend to continue without risking everything we have fought so tirelessly for over the past few years.
No comments:
Post a Comment