What Gary Rowett told Mark Robins about Stoke City with advice 'no one will want to hear'
Gary Rowett believes that Mark Robins can be the manager to finally turn the tide at Stoke City as long as he has the patience and support to do so.
Rowett was back at Stoke at the weekend to play out a 0-0 draw with Oxford United, who he had taken on just before Christmas – taking 18 points from the first 24 available to haul them up from second-bottom to 15th in the Championship.
It is now past six years since he was in the opposite dug out and Stoke have chewed and spat out five bosses since then without being able to post even a top half finish. Robins is the sixth and his first task is to make sure the Potters stay in the Championship but, hopefully, with a long road leading in the right direction beyond that.
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Rowett said: “I spoke to Mark before and I echoed what he said, which was that it’s a really good club, it’s a big club, and it just needs a little bit of time to get it back where it needs to be. That patience is going to be crucial, that support is going to be crucial. Mark knows the division, he knows what he needs and, not that anyone needs my advice – and I’m sure it won’t be as welcome here as it might be at some other clubs – but my advice is to get behind him, give him time and allow him to build it. Sometimes to get where you want to be it might not be as quick as you’d like it to be.
“He’s a good guy, a good person and it’s a good club, isn’t it? I’d never say anything different regardless of my own experiences here.”
It had been put to Robins in his first press conference that Stoke had been dubbed an impossible job but he didn’t buy that and neither did Rowett, even if he had only had half-a-season’s crack at it.
“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “I think it’s a difficult job and it’s difficult for many reasons but there are lots of difficult jobs in the Championship. You don’t often get a job if it’s easy, you get it if the club hasn’t been winning or there’s been a turnover of managers and sometimes the squad is a little bit different from different managers building and that’s why you need time. You need time to build and shape it in your own way.
“If you look at what Mark did at Coventry, he did a phenomenal job and I’d expect him to do that here too.”
Rowett spent three years at Millwall after leaving Stoke, pulling them away from relegation trouble to fight for a spot in the play-offs. He was away from the frontline for a year before his appointment by Oxford and he couldn’t have asked for a better first month.
He said: “Sometimes, actually, it’s quite nice to enjoy yourself outside of football. You can do normal things, spend time with your family. But it’s interesting, when you do go back in, you want to go in somewhere where there’s just that feeling that it’s a good fit, that I can try to help build something with good people. That’s what you want and it’s been a really good experience so far.
“When you’ve been out for a while you’re never quite sure where you’re going to land. You could be abroad somewhere, you could be in League One, you could be in the Championship, you never quite know. When you’re eight games in and it feels like a nice fit and it’s been quite positive, of course, then that’s an enjoyable place to be.”
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