Rip Roaring Potters

Potters at Sunderland – In the eyes of mystical descent

by northy on 02/02/10 at 8:56 am

A dour game for sure at the stadium of light last night, here regular oatcake messageboard and rip roaring potters contributor mystical descent gives us his lowdown on proceedings. Thanks for the review mate.

Player Ratings first:

Sorensen – 6 – Not a lot to do, competent on crosses

Huth – 6.5 – Had a strong game with Shawcross and completely nullified Bent. Infuriatingly referred to by the commentator as ‘Hoot’ and a silly moment with his arm near the end.

Faye – 6 – Please, please can we stop playing unfit players?

Shawcross – 7 – Made Bent anonymous and maybe got lucky with Jones, but our best player on the night. MotM.

Higginbotham – 7 – Very solid at the back, typically decent distribution, excellent saving header towards the end.

Wilkinson – 6 – Kept Reid quiet. Stupid booking.

Everyone else – 5 – The only exception to this is Diao, who gets a 4. In some cases, 5 is a generous mark, in others it is slightly harsh. Consider it 5±0.5. I don’t think one player in our midfield or forward line played anywhere near the top of their ability.

It would be very easy to just do a hatchet job on tonight’s match. It wasn’t much of a spectacle, there were only two clear cut chances and we never really got going. It should not be forgotten, however, that this was a full strength Sunderland team with their first choice pairing of Cana and Cattermole in midfield. Now while I’d have expected us to have a chance against that pair with any two of Whelan, Delap and Whitehead, it was never going to be a contest with Diao and Whelan in the middle for us. We’ve got a solid point away from home against an established Premiership team. The one way in which the game did stand out as a flagship Premiership match was that neither team engaged in the petty cheating, diving and other assorted antics that pretty much every other game I’ve seen has featured. Typically, Richard Scudamore looked unamused by the lack of effeminate players falling all over the place and would much rather have been watching Wayne Rooney diving and screaming at the referee. That’s twice now that we’ve played Sunderland and they’ve played just as fairly as us, so fair play to them.

You can’t help but think that it could have been so much more for Stoke, though. For one, the central midfield was too weak. You have to feel for Whelan as he had Diao alongside him, but he was absolutely woeful and simply proved just how consistent he is. One good game, one bad game. I cannot understand why Delap was not in the team. He offers just as much as Whelan or Whitehead and when we have a midfield that is going to create as few a chances as ours, the long throw would have been an added threat. You can argue about its effectiveness, but often it forces defenders clear the ball up the middle of the pitch instead of straight out or puts them under immense pressure as indecision sets in, as well as guaranteeing that we get the ball into the opposition box 10 times every single game. Of the three throw-ins tonight, 1 caused havoc in the box, which is a pretty decent rate and would suggest that over the course of the game something may well have dropped. It gives us a better chance of scoring than giving the ball away in our own half or punting it short of Mama, that’s for certain.

That brings me to Mamady Sidibe. Let’s start off with some facts here. Our system revolves around the target man in the team, who wins the ball in the air and links up the play, whilst harrying the opposition central midfield when they have the ball. This means that Tuncay and Fuller cannot play together effectively with any great consistency. People point towards the second half of the home game against Wigan, but forget that both our goals came from set pieces (the first less so, but if not a set piece it was a long ball forward to the big man) and that in the first half we were absolutely woeful. There was no link up play, no scraps for Fuller to chase and Tuncay was not physical enough to do much in the air. In the second half the game opened up a bit and that helped us. Another fact is this: Tuncay is not an out and out striker (check out his goalscoring record), but a link up man in a different mould to the one we are used to. He gets the ball at his feet and brings other players into the game. That’s fair enough, but does that work in our system and it certainly won’t work with any single one of our central midfield players. There’s a place for him in our team, and that place is on the right wing, where he will continue to ensure that our attacks have much more longevity. That is why we need a target man in the team, to win the ball in the air and flick it on to Fuller. That allows us to keep the ball in the opposition half and apply pressure. As it stands, we have a choice between a half-fit Mama and a half-fit, sulking Beattie. It’s not even worth mentioning the now excommunicated Kitson who will not get a look in. A half fit Mama is therefore going to get the nod every time, but unfortunately it means he’s coming in for a lot of unfair criticism. Yes, he’s been playing poorly, but the team performances have improved and he’s not playing anywhere near the level he plays at when fully fit. He’s not as mobile and he’s not as good in the air, which means that the two biggest strengths in his game are missing. It begs the question of why we did not manage to bring a fully fit target man in this January, instead of just bringing in a not entirely necessary goalkeeper? We need one, else it is really, really going to cost us. A list of dream targets would include the perhaps not 100% feasible Jones, Davies, Zigic and Cole. Other possibilities would include Heskey. Surely we’ve got a scouting network in place to pick up potential players for that role in the lower leagues and foreign countries? Dave Kemp is apparently the only man TP trusts when it comes to ‘[his] kind of player’, so is there anything in the Americas? For me, it is the most disappointing part of the transfer window, as it means that a good servant to Stoke City is finding himself hung out to dry. A fully fit target man tonight would have seen us grab 3 points.

The team was, unfortunately, baffling. We insisted on including Salif Diao, who has looked less and less up to the task of playing as a Premier League anchorman and again had three central midfielders on the pitch in a 4-4-1-1 system. The team was a pretty simple one to put out, and yet it was quite bizarre. We had Tuncay up front as the lone striker ploughing a very lonely furrow and Faye picked when he really needs a rest to recover from his injury. Our best attacking threat, Fuller, was again dropped and our best central midfield was relegated to the bench and brought on to play out wide. I’d have put out:

Sorensen
Wilkinson
Huth
Shawcross
Higginbotham

Tuncay
Delap
Whelan (maybe Whitehead)
Etherington

Sidibe

Fuller

That’s a much more balanced team and I suspect would have seen us attack much more effectively.

Let’s take a little bit of time (only a little bit, we are Stoke fans after all) to focus on the positives from the game. The versatility of our defence is increasingly impressive and they did mark Bent completely out of the game. We were much more assured when we won the ball, having stopped messing about with it and having reverted to a safety first style of play. Again, a fully fit target man would have probably fed off these scraps and could have played Fuller into the flanks, had he started. Our ability to cope with all eventualities is a very useful one and is something we may have worked on after the defensive mayhem late on in the Hull game. Huth can quite happily alternate between the full back and centre-back positions, as can Higginbotham, who has been absolutely top drawer in both positions since his return to the first team. Every single game he’s played has featured a last gasp tackle or saving header at foot height when covering for another player’s mistake. Shawcross has cemented his reputation as one of the best young defenders in the country. I wouldn’t swap him for Mancienne, that’s for sure. In fact, we’ve seen plenty of English defenders in this country that I most definitely would not swap for him. It’s one area of the team that does not need any work.

So, an underwhelming end to an underwhelming day of deadline transfers. Just as Begovich is not a bad signing, a draw away at a team of a similar standard to us is not a bad result. You just can’t help but speculate that it could have been more.

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