Honest Mark Robins reflects on whirlwind first six weeks at Stoke City and most important question
Mark Robins took a pause to collect his thoughts when he was asked to reflect on his first six weeks at Stoke City.
There have been 11 matches, a transfer window when the top scorer was recalled, injuries to key players, players returning from long-term absences, Financial Fair Play challenges, coaches leaving, arriving or being moved, a head of recruitment going, a relegation fight to navigate, long mid-week trips, home form to transform and a goal problem to resolve.
There have been encouraging comebacks to beat Hull and Swansea, but difficult away days at Portsmouth, Bristol City and Norwich to leave Stoke sitting 19th heading into back-to-back matches at the bet365 Stadium over the next five days against Middlesbrough (Tuesday, 7.45pm) and Watford (Saturday, 3pm).
READ MORE: Stoke City set to be without five players vs Middlesbrough as Mark Robins waits on key man
They are five points above the bottom three as it stands, 10 points off the top half or five off lower mid-table. Nobody is quite sure how much will be needed to stay up – the bottom five are tracking towards mid-40s but there is time for turnarounds – and beyond that there is potential for another summer of sweeping changes to personnel. Five loan players will return to their parent clubs and eight others around the first team coming to the end of their contracts while there are young players staking their claims to be more involved such as Nathan Lowe, Sol Sidibe and Jaden Dixon.
So, yes, Robins took a breath when the last question at his post-match press conference at Norwich on Saturday asked how pleased he was about the job he had taken on and how equipped Stoke are to pull away from the bottom.
“It’s a brilliant club, needs a lot of work,” he said. “We’ve got 13 games now, 13 games left and plenty of work to do in the here and now and then all the other things will fall into place.
“Generally, players have been really good, really receptive, but they’ve got to understand that you can make mistakes but you can’t make elementary ones and you can’t allow teams to do what we allowed Norwich to do to us today.
“They’re brilliant to work with. Very young. We’re a very young team with loads to learn and they’re learning on the job, a lot of them.
“We’ve had injury problems which we’ve outlined, trying to get people back in, get that experience back in – and it’s not necessarily ready yet, quite ready yet.
“There are those challenges but they’re good enough to stay up if that’s what you’re asking.”
That is the key line at the moment: whether this Stoke squad can make sure the club is in the Championship in 2025/26.
Robins said: “Yeah, they’ve got enough in there to be more than capable of doing it – but you have to go and back that up and not make those types of mistakes because that, to me, looked like it was a giveaway.”
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