Stoke City boss should ditch partnership and choose between two midfielders
There was a big circle around the Stoke City midfield as I was making my notes last weekend.
I was pretty impressed by Oxford United, looking as organised as you’d expect under Gary Rowett and he looked quite happy to have dug out the kind of important point away from home you need to pull or stay away from danger in the Championship.
Stoke’s back four looked pretty balanced with two left footers and two right footers but we missed that player in front of the centre-backs after Tatsuki Seko had been taken out following a poor result at Portsmouth in mid-week.
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Without that right mix in there we didn’t provide enough for Nathan Lowe, who I thought was making clever runs and has a good combination of energy, honesty and willingness. Sometimes he’ll make unnecessary runs but that’s the learning process and he’ll start to understand when you don’t need to pull off and when you do. He was trying all kinds of things but the ball wasn’t coming. What I really don’t to happen is that he stops moving because the passes aren’t coming. We have to make the passes happen.
You need a midfield player to link the passing to someone who can come away from the attacking line like Sam Gallagher – or Andrew Moran, who was in that kind of number 10 position last weekend – but we didn’t have someone in the sitting role who can regain the ball earlier in attacks from the opposition and start your attacks off. It’s a must and it isn’t Wouter Burger or Lewis Baker.
If Baker is on the pitch then Stoke have to keep getting him into those positions around the edge of the box where he can take a shot – and he has to have the desire to get into those spots. He’s got a long pass that we should see more of as well, an ability to suddenly switch play which can catch the opposition out. If he’s not doing it, how long do you stick with him?
Burger can sit a little bit deeper and make passes but I haven’t been convinced over the last couple of weeks that it will work as a pair and it’ll be more like a choice between one or the other for Mark Robins. Ben Pearson will come back and give him another option but, after 10 months out, it’ll be another gamble as to when and how much he can be trusted for such an important task.
I always bang on about building partnerships and if you keep changing personnel then you don’t have much chance to have relationships on the pitch that are successful and make the team greater than the sum of its parts. But you also have to know when it isn’t going to work and you have to be able to send a team out full of players you can trust in their jobs without having to say a word.
You need players who will challenge for it if there is a 50-50 or go to take responsibility to get their head on the ball if it shoots up in the air, that they will try to punch a loose ball or get the toe to a ball in the area that gets a penalty decision at one end or makes a last-ditch intervention at the other. They are the differentials in a match most of the time.
If you’ve got to deliver a 10-yard pass you have to know that a player can deliver it but last Saturday we saw it go out of play on several occasions when a simple ball would have led to a goal-scoring chance. That’s the fine line in football that can get you results and you need players who can do it whatever the situation and instance. You have to come up trumps.
You can talk until you’re blue in the face but you need 11 players like that.
People were having a go at Lewis Koumas last week but the lad’s done well. He was tired against Oxford but he’s put some work in. He tried to get a partnership going with Junior Tchamadeu, who got to the by-line at times. Tchamadeu likes to get forward all the time and it’s a good attacking role if you can get that.
We’ll see what Ali Al-Hamadi comes up with, hopefully starting today at Hull, perhaps Robins will find a bargain or two in the last couple of days of the transfer window and I’m looking forward to seeing Lowe develop over the next few months – but it’ll still all depend who plays behind them and if we can get that midfield flowing.
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