A Rainy Night at Stoke
It has long been said that Lionel Messi, the winner of the Ballon d’Or four years running and the scorer of 313 goals in 379 appearances for Barcelona FC, hasn’t truly been tested until he’s played at Stoke’s Britannia Stadium on a cold and rainy Monday night. The people that allege this claim that he wouldn’t stand up to the physical test of playing against the man-mountains that make up Stoke City’s backline, a far-cry from the types of defenders he usually makes a mockery of in the Spanish League.
Stoke City have enjoyed playing in the top flight of English football for five years following promotion from the Championship in 2008. They reached the FA Cup final in 2011, losing out narrowly to Manchester City in the final, and subsequently qualified for the Europa League in the following season, where they managed to progress through the group stages before losing out to a tough Valencia team. Under Mr Pulis, they managed to finish mid-table in arguably the most competitive and challenging league in the world, four times. Unfortunately, and this is a shame, but that’s all about to end.
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A long, long time ago, a man named Charles Reep set out to find the best way of playing football where the sole intention was winning games, and nothing else. He wanted to find out how he could use the statistics of every game he could get his hands on to work out how teams should play to score more and concede less. He looked at over 2000 games, and spent over 80 hours on each, marking all the passes, shots, tackles, goals etc. Basically he did by hand what Opta’s computers do nowadays in a matters of minutes. He wrote a paper on what he discovered, and it was entitled “Skill and Chance in Association Football”. I won’t bore you with the details but basically he worked out that statistically over 90% of attacking passing moves never lasted longer than four passes and only 2 out of every 9 goals came from passing moves with more than 3 passes. He came to the conclusion that passing was wasteful, in fact the odds of making a pass essentially came down to a 50/50, nothing more than a coin flip. So, he asked, why bother? Why pass the ball around and make pretty patterns on the field? To paraphrase Reiner Calmund (former Sporting Director of Bayer Leverkusen) - football isn’t figure skating... There are no points for style. Instead, it is far more efficient to play just one pass, two max, to get the ball up to the strikers as often as possible, as quickly as possible, with as little chance for all the guys in the middle to mess things up by trying to pass to their mates. To summarise, he had the data to prove “Route One Football” as statistically successful. Peter Crouch, eat your heart out.
According to the authors of “Pay as you Play”, Tony Pulis spent less at Stoke on transfers per point gained than any other long-serving manager in the Premierleague. From this we can see that he didn’t have the money to go out and buy the most creative midfielders, the most skilful wingers or the fastest strikers. Not every manager has £50million to spend on a glorified bench warmer. And yet, the players he did buy, and the formations he utilised, brought the goals and the results and the points he needed to shoot Stoke into “Premierleague success” (depending on your perspective). So how did he do it? Traditionally Stoke City play more long balls, and maintain less possession in the opponents half than any other Premierleague team. Tony Pulis looked at his team and thought, we can’t pass as accurately as the other teams in the league, if we play them at their game, we will lose. So he didn’t. I can’t imagine he read Charles Reep’s paper before setting up his tactics, but the way he sets out Stoke City FC to play certainly tips it’s cap to his findings. He even got Rory Delap to play route one from the throw-ins. Delap often made it seem like trying to throw it to his team mates would have been a wasted venture and that trying to throw it straight into the goal was a much more efficient option... which in the 2010/11 season, Stoke made a record of by trying 550 times. Tony Pulis knew he had to keep the ball away from the other team as much as possible just so they had less time with the ball to try and score, he didnt want his team to pass the ball about because he knew they would lose it in midfield and giving up possession in your own half all the time is a rubbish tactic. He utilised time wasting, route one football, scored more goals from long throws than any other team, and relied on set pieces for over half of the goals Stoke did score.
If Stoke City FC had tried to play in any other way than this, if they had tried to pass the ball around and score nice looking goals, worthy of any highlight reel, they would certainly not have enjoyed the success they have had in the Premierleague, the FA Cup and even the Europa League over the last five seasons. They would have fallen back down to the Championship and maybe even League One where the quality of most of their players are more accustomed. It’s a good thing they have Tony Pulis at the helm to continue defying all the odds of their relegation every season, to continue playing anti-football in a way that brings more success than their chairman could ever have dreamed of for the pennies that he invests. It’s a good thing that we can continue the tradition of debating in the pub as to whether the world greatest players would stand up to “the rainy night at Stoke test”. It’s certainly a good thing they haven’t replaced him with Mark Hughes, a man who was deemed a flop at Fulham by their chairman Al Fayed, a man who a year later signed an entire new team at QPR in 2012 and then went on a 12 game streak without winning before being sacked, again.
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I expect Stoke City to struggle greatly this year. Mark Hughes won’t be given the money he got at QPR, and he will be expected to play in a different way to Tony Pulis, otherwise what was the point of changing manager in the first place. He will be expected to gain more success with a team which statistically has been overachieving for a number of years. This is all expected of him in a year when the top 6 Premierleague teams are stronger than ever, where even one of the teams coming up from the Championship is spending millions on players (Cardiff). I think it’s a shame that Tony Pulis has left Stoke, I think Mr Reep would see it as a shame as well. I’m not sure what the “rainy night at Stoke test” will change to. Maybe that means there are no challenges left for Messi to face. Maybe he is the best player in the world.
