Mark Robins, walking into a new club for the first time in eight years, is weighing up the similarities and differences of the challenge he is taking on at Stoke City.

Robins faced a catalogue of tests and tasks during his time at Coventry, not least the club being booted out of its home ground and protests against the ownership, but he pulled them up from League Two to compete for promotion to the Premier League.

It must be weird walking into another set-up now, overseeing his first week of training at Clayton Wood – but he knows what is demanded and how he believes he can take Stoke there.

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“After the length I’ve been at the other one…” he told the Sentinel. “Coventry was a long time and we went through a lot at that club together, with supporters, with everybody. To come out, I needed time. I don’t like the old rattle around, merry go round, jump off one and get in another. I don’t like that.

“Really you go into a job and your aim is to stay there and a lot of people’s aim is to stay there, build something, take it on. Sometimes that isn’t the case. Different people, different stages of their careers you have a different outlook on things.

“I’ve really enjoyed building that club up – but I did the same at Rotherham. That was a club in turmoil and then we made sure it had a stable foundation to move forward. The new ownership was massive, Tony Stewart bought the club. I remember playing Stoke when Tony Pulis was here and I think we lost 2-0. It was a tough game for us just after Stoke had been promoted. I don’t remember bits of the game but I remember the result and seeing Tony after the game.

“Wherever I’ve been it’s been a tough job but generally, thankfully, because of the experiences I’ve had and experience I’ve now got, I can see... I’ve done things so you know what you want to do and you know how you’re going to go about it.

“Certainly I also know it’s never the same because each club is unique. The feeling coming here is that this is a big club, no doubt about it. You get pulled away, pulled from side to side to do things that take away from the main event which is what happens out on the grass. That’s why you need to have a really good and experienced team around you who also have that understanding of what the football club is and how you need to operate within it.”

It is the supporters who are the constant and they are the ones, Robins suggests, who set a club’s expectations and DNA. It’s why he’s been so keen to put them front and centre of his planning, to try to start giving them the kind of team that they want to watch.

He said: “If you’re going to achieve anything at any football club you have to have (that support). It’s the first thing I said when I went into Coventry. You have to have that backing of supporters, of that fanbase. Without it, you’re on the back foot. I’ve spoken about the club’s motto, United Strength is Stronger, and that is something that is really important. Really important. Our united strength is stronger. It makes all the difference.

“If we’ve got that and we’re all pulling in the same direction and you have that good will – and the support of the club is unwavering anyway – and they get behind the players, they’ll perform to a better level more often.

“So every club is different but there’s a way you go about things and what people want to watch is winning football. They like to watch good, exciting football and what is good, exciting football to one person might not be the same to someone else.

“There is a collective that go and watch games that have the passion for that football club that drive them on. It’s the heart of the community, the hub of the city. You’ve got to understand that and I understand that while I also know how I like teams to play, what type of players I like and there might be tweaks to that – there will be at any given football club. This is no different.

“But ultimately nothing changes out on the grass. You’ve still got the goals, they don’t move, the pitch dimensions might change from club to club at time to time but they’re very similar. The difference is the people who come to watch you away from home, coming to watch you at home and you’ve got to deliver for them. You’ve got to put a product on the pitch that they’re happy to come to watch and are passionate to get behind. If you can do that, we’ve got a real chance of doing something.

“Everybody talks about this club being set up for the Premier League. It’s seven years, isn’t it, since being in the Premier League and I can’t look at that. I came to watch Stoke playing in Europe, I came to watch home game in that competition, and I know what the passion is, I know what it looks like.

“Then Sparky came in and took over and it looked fantastic, it seemed to take it on – really good finishes in the Premier League until the final year and then it’s been Championship football from then on and the Championship is a really tough division. If you get things wrong initially, it can catch you out. If you spend your money at this level, you can only spend so much of your turnover and regardless of whatever you want to spend you can’t do it. You have to get it right.

“If we get an opportunity at some point we’ve got to make sure it’s right and it’s done properly because otherwise you’re chasing your tail for a long time. I think that’s something that goes hand in hand what I’m asking for from the support. We have to make sure we do things right from a perspective of recruitment.

“Out on the grass I’m really happy with the way things are going and how the staff are operating together. There are some brilliant people here. There’s a lot of good things. We’ve just got to make sure it starts to look better pretty quickly, which is why I brought back Lewis Baker. He’s a Championship player who’s got Championship quality and we need a lot of that, we need more of that. I know he’ll help deliver that.”

It was the Besiktas game when Robins was in the crowd. Everyone who was at that match remembers the atmosphere, including the noise and fire coming out of the away end.

“It was unbelievable,” said Robins. “You know what supporters are like from clubs in Greece and Turkey with all the pyrotechnics and it was a really good game.”

But the home team that night too is perhaps the kind of team that a lot of people will associate with Stoke: a side that was more than the sum of its parts, filled with big players both in terms of character and physique. Is that the end goal for a Robins’ Stoke side?

“I think so but you’ve got to be careful,” he said. “You can’t start looking and admiring what might happen in the future. You’ve got to make sure it’s happening now while you know where you want to take it. It’s really tough, this division. Really, really tough.

“But if you get a bit of momentum going you can make a difference, make inroads into the clubs with the parachute payments. There is obviously a discrepancy with that every season and a club might come down after a few seasons and have three years of parachute payments. It makes things imbalanced and there’s not a level playing field.

“Hopefully things will change and we will have the chance to spend a little bit more and clubs who want to do that can do it. But you don’t put your football club at risk, it’s got to operate right anyway.

“This club has got a really good academy with some really good coaches in there with a lot of experience both here and elsewhere. There’s the likes of Liam Lawrence and Ryan Shawcross, who stepped up brilliantly in the last few weeks, Mamady Sidibe is working here too and I’ve seen Ricardo Fuller too. Rob Kozluk works in the academy.

“It’s really well put together and we’ve got to make sure we’re doing the right things everywhere.”

Robins talked in his first press conference at Stoke about having built about five different teams during his time at Coventry, evolving the side as he went up through the divisions. That wasn't a case of throwing everything out and starting again each time, much like what he has taken on at Stoke and trying to get the best out of what he has inherited while he works towards a long-term objective.

“It’s different," he said. "I’ve walked into a situation with some really good players and for whatever reason things haven’t been really clicking. That can be for a number of reasons, loads of reasons. One might be that players are not able to cope with social media or not being able to cope with expectation levels or whatever.

“Ultimately you have to switch off from social media, switch off from outside noise and concentrate on what you’re doing out on the pitch, out on the grass. The training we’ve done – and it’s only been three or four sessions and one game – there has definitely been a shift in how they’re operating, how they’re moving out on the grass, how the ball’s moving.

“It still takes time to get there but a lot of understanding has to come in and that will happen over a period of time. It’s repetition, it’s the same messages being given all the time. They’ve got to get to a point when they do things more on an automatic basis and understand why they are doing it so they can repeating it as other things change with the opposition. It’s not just about movement, it’s about recognition of what’s happening and where the team are and trying to move people out of position and into other positions to be able to capitalise on any space you can create.

“The game doesn’t change, we’ve just got to work. There’s no easy way, there are no short cuts. It’s a case of working really hard and in a methodical way where nobody is flip flopping from right to left and panicking if we lose a game. You know things will work, it just comes over time.

“Then obviously if you can’t do it in a certain way you may have to try to change how you set up. That may be a formation change and then personnel changes after a while which prompts the renewal of teams and energy and focus. But you want to try to go with players and give them everything you possibly can do and help them have a career that they envisage.

“Sometimes it can be really difficult for any player but particularly for a lad coming from abroad who is trying to settle down and not being able to hit the targets or the levels that they expect to. That can be really difficult and we have to be mindful of that.”

It spoke volumes, perhaps, that only one Stoke player in Robins's first starting XI wasn't in his first full season at the club.

“That was Ben, wasn’t it? Ben Wilmot," he said. "I think that’s something you have to bear in mind too but when you’re looking to try to renew and move it forward there’s a knack to it. You’ve got to understand what you’re trying to do and as you build the team, be aware of how that is going to function.

“I always look at, ‘That player will be able to do this, that player will be able to come in and work like this.’ Sometimes you’re spot on. Sometimes you underestimate them and they go further than you thought, earlier than you thought. Sometimes they just don’t hit the mark and you’ve not got the right mix or the right balance at that time but they might come back.

“It’s how you treat people, how you work with people. It’s not a dictatorship anymore. They have to toe the line and do what is expected of them but generally footballers do that. They are generally professional and do everything they’re asked to do. They’re asked to do a hell of a lot of stuff now in the building and they’ve got community work as well which is important to everyone but particularly at Stoke City.

“We’ve got some really good young, young players who you’ve got to work with and then keep building. They are still under 21 a lot of them and it’s something you have to keep in mind.

“But I’m really looking forward to this. It’s a brilliant club and with the help of everybody, supporters, people in the building, staff, we can make it a success.”

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