What Stoke City fans did as pressure piles on Narcis Pelach
Stoke City were comfortably beaten on their own pitch by title-chasing Leeds United, resulting in more full-time boos and pressure on head coach Narcis Pelach. Here are the talking points from a foggy bet365 Stadium.
Empty seats say as much as boos
No one really needs reminding about the mood among Stoke fans. Nine games without a win in a wretched division, going through another reset and knowing how much they’d have to get right just to be competitive against some teams, like this Leeds one, in the Championship.
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The attendance was just shy of 25,000 but the kick-off time and form meant that a lot of people with tickets weren’t in their seats. There were barely any in their seats long before the end of a miserable night, which ended with more boos, frustration and discontent.
Matches like this are supposed to be fun but it felt like blooming hard work.
How to set up a team that can’t keep a clean sheet?
Call-ups for Sol Sidibe and Lynden Gooch were not entirely unexpected but it was a puzzle before kick-off trying to fit players into a system without either Eric Bocat or injured Enda Stevens – who have been sharing minutes at left-back – and with both Ben Wilmot and Junior Tchamadeu, who have been sharing minutes at right-back.
Playing five at the back, especially at home, has dug holes deeper for Stoke over the last 30-odds years but, whatever the formation, Stoke were deep and being pushed deeper and few who have watched them this season will have thought they had the concentration levels to carry out the kind of performance that was needed. It’s tough to explain, too, how a defence which gets so far back can still find itself on the wrong side of a striker.
The team clearly isn’t trusted to be more open - Narcis Pelach referred to it as choosing the less worse option - but games like this one end up being the worst of both worlds, a slow and all-too inevitable defeat.
Narcis Pelach faces more stick
It was only a section of Stoke fans who joined in with the away end teasing the head coach about getting sacked but there weren’t exactly many leaping to his defence.
Mitigation, as we’ve said before, will only get you so far and with every match that Stoke don’t win, the same question will keep getting asked. Ultimately, he clearly has to sort out the first or, no matter how patient and thick skinned the board, there will eventually be a different answer.
No one outside of the boardroom will know how much pain they are prepared to take in the here and now in belief that the long-term project will be worth it – and it is obvious, whatever that is, that the squad needs help in the January transfer window.
Stoke need a fit Sam Gallagher plus at least a couple of canny signings to change results and change the mood.
Fog on the Trent
The most similar recent game when the fog was as thick as this at the bet365 was against Nottingham Forest during lockdown, when Chris Hughton was ordered to wear a bib in the technical area because he was disappearing in the gloom.
The first 15 minutes of the first half and the whole of the second half were pretty farcical in terms of football as a spectacle and dismal conditions pretty much reflected the mood as the game went on. Bah. A horrible night all round. Roll on Sunday and Stoke have to get it as close to the opposite as possible.
