Following the international break, Stoke City’s awful return to action began with a 3-0 home loss to Blackburn Rovers. The talking points from the bet365 Stadium are listed below.
The fact that there was no sponsor’s man of the match speaks volumes, and if there had been, the boy from the halftime challenge would have been the front-runner. Nathan Heaney was the player who inspired fans to sing with the greatest enthusiasm of any player.
There was a great deal of possession, but there was also no real threat or purpose. It whirled in circles in the centre, akin to a football washing machine. In the opening half, Daniel Johnson was in space on the edge of the area and chose to stick with trying to hold the ball rather than take a chance on a shot or risky pass. As a result of his hesitation, he was tackled.
There was no clear leader on either side of the ball to give Stoke much hope for a goal or for a shutout. The main attack was hardly there, and the defence was weak. Ben Pearson and Wouter Burger had 199 touches collectively, while Dwight Gayle only had 15.
It was a depressingly thudding afternoon, and as we were leaving the stadium, the talk revolved around moving forward just a step at a time, then retreating. There is a desire for momentum—to be a team that is difficult to beat even when they are having trouble scoring goals, or even just to be a team moving slowly in the right direction.
Simply put, supporters won’t settle for a 3-0 home loss. Their lack of choice has been the problem.
Even though the defence has only allowed four straight clean sheets, giving up three goals in a single game doesn’t always mean it’s time to tear it up and start over, but these goals were concerning.
The second and third goals were the result of poor collective and individual decision-making, the fourth-minute corner defence was appalling, and it was shocking how easily Blackburn split the defence with a single pass.
According to Alex Neil, there were maybe three or four instances in the game that we simply ignored. The first goal was a simple corner that we simply neglected to handle; the second goal requires us to clear our lines so that the second phase can’t occur; and the third goal involves their boy with the ball and a two-on-one situation with Szmodics outside of us that requires us to manage the space.
“You already know where Sammie Szmodics is going to go; he has been doing it the entire game and will enter from behind. Rather, we move in the direction of the ball, and he makes a clean pass. What an absurdly bad decision that was.
Stoke has many options when it comes to attacking, but sooner or later, it needs to be firing far more dangerously than it does now.
“We haven’t scored enough goals in the last couple of games,” Neil stated. We merely haven’t created enough quality opportunities, even though we’ve had equal control over those games as the opposition has. You can see why Sammie Szmodics leads the league in goal scoring right now: he is a true threat, swift and eager to get into the most dangerous positions to cause you problems, and strong and quick enough to do so. He can get away from you if you don’t see that run fast enough.
“I will say that, from what I’ve seen, Blackburn is pretty much always passive once a team gets ahead. They are among the league’s most aggressive teams; I’ve seen them about nine times this season. They didn’t act all that hostile towards us today. After they took the lead, they sat behind the ball and gave us the assignment of attempting to break them so they could counterattack and score. We lacked sufficient resources to dismantle them.
Which is why giving up such a soft opening goal was doubly frustrating.
Neil declared, “It was going to be a shoot-out.” You can see why Blackburn has only drawn one game this season. In doing so, they’ll either inflict damage to a team and defeat them, or suffer harm and fall short. We were harmed by them, but we were unable to hurt them enough.
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