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Robert Huth's brilliant 'king of swearing' Tony Pulis love-in
Robert Huth worked under legendary managers such as Jose Mourinho and won a 5,000-1 Premier League title under Claudio Ranieri but he has no hesitation when he’s asked which one was the best for him as a player and who had the best team talks: Tony Pulis.
Pulis broke Stoke City’s transfer record to sign Huth, then just turned 25, from Middlesbrough for £6 million in 2009. The iron-willed centre-half would play nearly 200 times for the club over the next five years, forming one of Potters’ all-time great partnerships with Ryan Shawcross and establish himself as one of the meanest defenders in the top flight.
It didn’t all come to him, however, and he appreciates the leg work put in to make him the player he became.
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Andy Goldstein, on TalkSport, asked him to pick from Pulis, Mourinho, Ranieri and Gareth Southgate for who delivered the best team talks.
“I’ve gone for Pulis,” said Huth. “He was very emotional. He got himself revved up before the team talk so by the time we got to the changing room he was ready to pick a fight with anyone. He was the one who got you up for a game.
“I think most managers definitely thought about what they were going to say. They would make sure they had 10 minutes to themselves to think about all the points they wanted to get across, then once they start they keep going and keep going.
“Pulis was the king of swearing and getting the point across to you when he wasn’t happy with you or needed something out of you.”
He added: “I loved it under Pulis, I really did. When I look back, I knew exactly what it was. Black was black, white was white and there was nothing in between. If we won at the weekend we knew the week was going to be good, if we lost we knew it would be more shape, more intensive work, more pattern of play. But most people loved it because he was always really hard on you to a point when you’d think, ‘Come on, give us a break,’ but he was always fair and that's all I could ask for.”
Southgate, at Middlesbrough, got the nod for being the best manager to join in training and Pulis was probably at the other end of that spectrum. Mourinho could get the angriest – “He had a rant in him and he was brutal. He would send staff in if a training session wasn’t done right. Who sends their own staff in from training?”
But it was Pulis again when Huth was asked who was the best manager for him personally through his long career of more than 400 matches.
“Pulis,” he said. “Pulis was awesome. From a defensive point of view he really moved my game on. Sometimes when you sign for a club they just expect you to be good and play every game and every game but he would take you to the side and say, ‘This is rubbish, this is rubbish, this is what we do on the training pitch to get you better.’
“I had five years at Stoke. Sometimes I’d come in on a Monday having kept a clean sheet and Pulis would say, ‘You lost your man in the 64th minute.’ I’d think, what? Then he’d show me on a video clip and we’d hone in on it in training to try to stop it happening in the future.
“He was the one who really dialled me in on defending and by the end of it I loved it.”
