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Post by emretezzy on May 15, 2024 10:18:47 GMT
Not selling Imbula to Juventus. Not letting Hughes speak with Everton. The rot in relegation started when we rewarded failure and begged players who had got us relegated to sign on revised, better, terms. The whole squad should have been for sale at the right price. 5 years deals to Bauer, Etobo, Edwards. Rowetts first window.
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Post by femark on May 15, 2024 10:24:32 GMT
Hughes getting rid of Pulis's back bone and not replacing it! 100% this Getting rid of Huth, Whelan, Walters etc and replacing them with Berahino, Imbula, Wollscheid etc.
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Post by LGH87 on May 15, 2024 10:25:11 GMT
Three 9th places finishes, more goals scored, less goals conceded and the post width / peno shootout away from a league cup final. It absolutely wasn't the Mark Hughes appointment, it was the fact we waited 18 months too long to sack him when it was clear it had gone stale and we needed a change. We beat Liverpool that day as well. I hate that that achievement is overlooked because we lost on penalties. We lost the first leg 1-0 and went to Anfield and beat Liverpool 1-0. What a fucking team. That was a team that was set to push onwards and upwards and the issues followed after that not before it. I walked away that night genuinely feeling like we were about to gate crash the top 6 and firmly establish ourselves amongst them.
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Post by slother on May 15, 2024 10:36:25 GMT
Butland breaking his ankle playing for England.
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Post by 11wilkosinateam on May 15, 2024 10:42:28 GMT
Selling Huth was a terrible mistake Shawcross was never the same player without him. I also think Arnie wanting away after getting a new & improved contract really affected Hughes as the signings that followed were mostly very bad. Having said that sacking Hughes when the club did was bad timing I believe he may have just about kept us. Interestingly, in interviews with some of the players at the time they believe Hughes would have kept us up as well. He always gained more points in the 2nd half of the season than the 1st and from memory we always did use to finish seasons very well under him.
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Post by Olgrligm on May 15, 2024 10:59:25 GMT
Saturday 23rd January 2016, 3:31 pm.
At 0-0 with soon-to-be champions Leicester, Ryan Shawcross is taken off with a nasty back injury that results in a long layoff. At this point, we're an outside bet for European places and, given what Leicester achieved, there was no reason why we shouldn't have been aiming at the top four. We'd just torn apart Man City and Man Utd at home, after all.
Ryan was the key to it all. We hadn't conceded a single goal with him on the pitch for months. He'd set some kind of record for most minutes played by a defender without conceding a goal. He was one of the best defenders in the league and, as previous posts here show, criminally underappreciated.
Without Ryan, we suddenly started losing by big deficits. We lost three consecutive games 3-0. We got into the habit of taking absolute Hastings and he was never the same after the injury.
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Post by estrangedsonoffaye on May 15, 2024 11:01:20 GMT
1863, but also more probably 1868.
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Post by mrcoke on May 15, 2024 11:13:12 GMT
Saturday 23rd January 2016, 3:31 pm. At 0-0 with soon-to-be champions Leicester, Ryan Shawcross is taken off with a nasty back injury that results in a long layoff. At this point, we're an outside bet for European places and, given what Leicester achieved, there was no reason why we shouldn't have been aiming at the top four. We'd just torn apart Man City and Man Utd at home, after all. Ryan was the key to it all. We hadn't conceded a single goal with him on the pitch for months. He'd set some kind of record for most minutes played by a defender without conceding a goal. He was one of the best defenders in the league and, as previous posts here show, criminally underappreciated. Without Ryan, we suddenly started losing by big deficits. We lost three consecutive games 3-0. We got into the habit of taking absolute Hastings and he was never the same after the injury. Good call. In April we lost 3 matches on the trot with 4 goals conceded in each game. The team spirit died. In wasn't just losing our leader, there was no one who stepped up and there was a lack of organised defending. Evidence: www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/stoke-city-defender-marc-wilson-8573906Whilst Hughes made good though risky signings to start with bringing in FBs, which Pulis neglected, and adopting a more attacking style signing creative forwards and using N'Zonzi in a more attacking role, the signings got worse and worse with bad characters one after another. But the root cause of our demise was losing Shawcross and not having a system in place to manage without him. This is a serious management error as we could have lost Shawcross at any time, not just through injury, but a big club coming to sign him.
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Post by benjaminbiscuit on May 15, 2024 11:21:29 GMT
The second the ever incompetent Scholes uttered the word Sustainable and believed the lunatic assumption we could “ beat the market ‘ we were doomed as we had no where near the level of competence to do so never better personified by rhe Jesse now that’s ambition comment made as dig as Arnie who called it spot on even if not in the right manner .
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Post by iglugluk on May 15, 2024 11:26:02 GMT
The second the ever incompetent Scholes uttered the word Sustainable and believed the lunatic assumption we could “ beat the market ‘ we were doomed as we had no where near the level of competence to do so never better personified by rhe Jesse now that’s ambition comment made as dig as Arnie who called it spot on even if not in the right manner . Didn't the push towards the mythical sustainability come from Denise? I seem to remember that.
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Post by nottsover60 on May 15, 2024 11:28:05 GMT
Just said exactly this on the transfer thread. That purchase showed Hughes's mind was unravelling. He had a fixation for Allen, was determined to sign him I think as an upgrade for Whelan who was dropped for the first few months I think until Hughes realised that the team needed him. Luckily for Hughes Allen went on a scoring run so Bojan made way for our new no10. Hughes bought a player who just didn't fit in to a squad which had been playing well. Even when this became obvious Hughes was so stubborn that he refused to accept it and drop him, instead tinkering with the team to try to find a position for Allen. Hughes should have gone the next summer.
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Post by enuntio on May 15, 2024 11:43:18 GMT
During the tenure of Hughes and his decision on freezing Robert Huth out, especially with Ryan Shawcross having his bad back...
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Post by Stretfordpotterer on May 15, 2024 11:45:09 GMT
You can pull it to pieces all you want.
The facts are that as an established mid table premier league club, if you string together 3 or 4 bad transfer windows you are fucked and you will be fucked for a long time.
Unless you string together 3 or 4 good transfer windows you'll continue to be fucked.
We did, and we haven't.
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Post by maninasuitcase on May 15, 2024 11:47:00 GMT
When we left our spiritual home in 1997.
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Post by HarryTheHat on May 15, 2024 11:47:16 GMT
When we let Verlinden go
We'd be playing Champions League by now if we'd kept him
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Post by walrus on May 15, 2024 11:49:53 GMT
The summer Hughes decided he wanted to play 3 at the back after watching Wales at the Euros Three/Five at the back is poison for Stoke. Hopefully Schumacher has learnt his lesson after his failed attempts to play it.
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Post by orfyboothen on May 15, 2024 11:51:16 GMT
After the loss at Liverpool in the Cup We actually had some decent results in the aftermath of that night at Anfield. The Jack Butland England injury was the turning-point... Hughes took ages to get in a decent GK (Lee Grant?) by which point we'd become to expect drubbings against good sides. Haugaard and Given for months on end...nightmare. Check out April, August and September of 2016 for the evidence. Conceding goals at that rate that sapped the life out of the whole thing...
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Post by threepoints on May 15, 2024 11:56:44 GMT
Hughes getting rid of Pulis's back bone and not replacing it! 100% this Getting rid of Huth, Whelan, Walters etc and replacing them with Berahino, Imbula, Wollscheid etc.
Wasn't Huth causing a lot of problems in the squad
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Post by smiler_andy on May 15, 2024 12:01:33 GMT
Not selling Imbula to Juventus. Not letting Hughes speak with Everton. The rot in relegation started when we rewarded failure and begged players who had got us relegated to sign on revised, better, terms. The whole squad should have been for sale at the right price. 5 years deals to Bauer, Etobo, Edwards. Rowetts first window. I agree with the above it was a chain of events that could have been stopped. Even if it was obvious from the outside of the club. Imbula should have been sold to Juventus if they did make a good offer. We have to recognise where we were then in the pecking order. Hughes was great for 3 years if Everton wanted to speak to him it is the challenges in life that they were a bigger club than us and these things happen. Recently most club supporters were not happy that we took their managers even if it didn't work out here. . I think Crouch said later it did not help the dressing room that some took 25% pay cuts when relegated and others got rewarded. Upon relegation there should have been a mass clear out which Swansea did to a degree. We had underperformed for 2 seasons and I could not understand how it made us favourites for promotion. Then the recent habit of sacking managers after 12 months or less does not help to bring confidence in what was happening at the club. Especially when it is after 10 games or so and the new manager is stuck with players they may not want.
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Post by PotterLog on May 15, 2024 12:01:34 GMT
Yeah it was rotten watching the best Stoke team in fifty years put the biggest clubs in England to the sword.
Other rot-setting-in moments include:
Bloody Macari, I knew things were going downhill when I found out we'd have to face Stockport at Wembley That crap 0-0 at home against Leicester under Pulis around 2008, that was a low point Not turning up against Bolton in the FA Cup semi, they battered us and how we went through I'll never know, talk about fluking it.
Plenty rot to talk about in our cursed history
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Post by smiler_andy on May 15, 2024 12:03:40 GMT
100% this Getting rid of Huth, Whelan, Walters etc and replacing them with Berahino, Imbula, Wollscheid etc. Wasn't Huth causing a lot of problems in the squad
Huth had been out injured and could not get in the team as the team was playing well at the time. Unfortunately for us things went pear shape and Huth won the Premier League with Leicester.
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Post by banksy1art on May 15, 2024 12:11:17 GMT
Quite an interesting discussion:
For me, it was the Mark Hughes appointment.
under Mark Hughes we played the best football we have ever seen, with players such as Arnie, Shaq, bojan, joselu, Nzonzi etc. 2015/16 season was our greatest season since 1972! Horrible take
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Post by Gods on May 15, 2024 12:14:13 GMT
Sparky delivered the only 3 consecutive top half / top flight finishes in the history of the football club and the best football I've seen since the first coming of Alan Hudson!
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Post by bayernoatcake on May 15, 2024 12:26:46 GMT
25 July 2016
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Post by nottsover60 on May 15, 2024 12:32:10 GMT
Sparky delivered the only 3 consecutive top half / top flight finishes in the history of the football club and the best football I've seen since the first coming of Alan Hudson! And then after those three seasons his main transfers were Allen, Berahino and Bony backed up with the likes of Sobhi, Sidwell, Haugaard and Sweeney. The only transfers which you could argue benefited the team were BMI and Lee Grant. On the back of three successive top half finishes that was an appalling window.
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Post by onionman on May 15, 2024 12:35:14 GMT
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Post by flea79 on May 15, 2024 12:35:34 GMT
the day we hired Paul Shambert
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Post by walrus on May 15, 2024 13:12:21 GMT
So far we have:
Appointing Mark Hughes Appointing Paul Lambert Not sacking Mark Hughes earlier Not sticking with Mark Hughes Signing Allen Selling Huth Shawcross’s injury Butland’s injury Switching to a back three system Losing the League Cup semi final
And probably several others I’ve missed
It’s attractive to think there was one neat little turning point that if avoided would have meant the good times never ended but it’s quite clear that it was a multiplicity of issues, be they bad decisions or bad luck, that collectively caused our decline.
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Post by frasier37 on May 15, 2024 13:17:34 GMT
It was after I ate that eat and potato wright's pie in the boothen end....or that cup of piss I had that they call coffee
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Post by Linx on May 15, 2024 13:29:20 GMT
Sparky delivered the only 3 consecutive top half / top flight finishes in the history of the football club and the best football I've seen since the first coming of Alan Hudson! Gods - he could have won us the League and Cup double and stood all the fans a pint and people would still be moaning about Berahino.
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