Saturday's result in a different perspective

[nutty nigel 7,902]

I can''t find the relevent thread now but a poster late last week commented on the players that Soke City had managed to get together in the last few weeks, he was surprised at the apparent strength of their team. Since then I think us fans have been a bit guilty of assuming "we should beat sides like this" because of their recent history and league position. Now I''m not excusing the manner of defeat and would be disappointed to lose 5-0 to any team in this league, but I feel we have underestimated Stoke.

Stoke City have a new manager who is being backed by a new chairman to the tune that they managed to get in loan players the calibre of Hendrie from Villa and Liverpool''s Diao just this month. They already had a defence full of premiership experience in Duberry, Higginbotham and Griffin. Chadwick and Russel are very good players at this level and Sidebe, Fuller, Bangoura and Pericard are a handful for any team. To be fair, and to quote from another thread, they would be a significant challenge to any team in this league, let alone us with a small squad with key players missing.

Let''s hope our Board can back our new manager and bring in a couple of decent loan players. Of course it''s much harder for us for geographical reasons, which shows how well we actually did to get Huckerby and Crouch here in 2003.