There will be those who saw Stoke’s rampant win over Manchester City on Saturday as vindication and validation for the great renovation project under way at the Britannia – the project that brought itself to the nation’s attention with the arrival of the rosy-cheeked La Masia graduate Bojan Krkic in the summer of 2014 and peaked with the signature of Xherdan Shaqiri a year later.
There will also be those who point out that one swallow does not a summer make. That, actually, in spite of all the talk of crowd-pleasing makeovers that prefaced this season, the football produced by Mark Hughes’s men so far has, on the whole, been rather dull. Not ineffective, of course, but certainly not the most exciting.
Indeed, before Saturday, Stoke had registered the fewest goals in the division. Their standout performers had not been the legion of silk-booted virtuosos up front but a miserly back four and octopus-like goalkeeper. Four of their five wins had come with scorelines of 1-0.
One interpretation is that the makeover simply had yet to take effect. Before Saturday their much-heralded quadrant of attackers – Marko Arnautovic, Ibrahim Afellay, Bojan and Shaqiri – had yet to start a game together, let alone foster any sort of understanding, and the latter two had been hampered by niggling injuries. Perhaps Stoke’s early-season pragmatism was merely proof of a solid platform awaiting the arrival of a cavalry to add penetration and panache.
It is no exaggeration to say that Stoke’s performance against Manchester City was one of the most exciting and flair-laden of any side this season – and almost certainly the most impressive the club has produced since rejoining the top flight seven and a half years ago.
Any suspicions that it was a one-off can be allayed by the pedigree of the players leading the charge. That front four are alumni of genuine European heavyweights, are defined by fast-paced trickery – “devilment in the opposition box”, as Hughes so splendidly put it after Saturday’s win – and will continue to play that way.
For Stoke to produce their finest display in recent memory against the title favourites, however off-colour City might have been, adds weight to the theory that their much-awaited makeover is well and truly under way.
In truth, it has been quietly under way for a while. Whereas Stoke had the lowest possession of any side in the Premier League in all but one of Tony Pulis’s five campaigns (they ranked only fourth-lowest in the other), Hughes has steadily increased that ranking to 11th and 10th in his first two seasons in charge. Nor has he brought about possession for its own sake: last season Stoke registered the league’s sixth-most goals from open play, with 37. That’s some advance on Pulis’s final year, when the equivalent figure was 14, again the division’s lowest.
None of which is to disparage Pulis’s achievements, or even to say that his teams did not frequently provide splendid spectacle. The thunderous aggression of Stoke’s first couple of seasons in the top flight was not only new and unique but exciting, too – typified, of course, by Rory Delap’s riveting javelin act – and his FA Cup runners-up of 2011 earned their medals through no small amount of rousing wing-play.
However, in two and a bit years at the helm, Hughes has utterly changed the emphasis of the side, adding high-end technique to the existing tenacity and ushering the lumbering brawn of Robert Huth and Andy Wilkinson, two Pulis stalwarts, firmly towards the exit door. In their place he has recruited the ball-playing defenders Marc Muniesa and Erik Pieters, who ensure the shifts from defence to attack involve a tad more sophistication.
It is dangerous to read too much into one result but, look closely, and it is difficult to deny that all the ingredients are there for Stoke to not only establish themselves as one of the league’s higher-ranking middleweights but to do it in a way that would have been deemed preposterous only a few short years ago: by winning over the aesthetes.
Certainly, much will depend on fitness but if Stoke can continue to field the scuttling elusiveness of Afellay and Bojan alongside the flip-flapping flair of Shaqiri then the side will rarely suffer a shortage of chances. Any of those three gathering the ball behind enemy lines is a surefire means of panicking defenders and enthralling spectators. All three are masters of the deftly weighted pass – an art that will bear more fruit as each gains a greater appreciation of the others’ runs.
Coming in from the left, Arnautovic adds an air of maverick insolence – always fun for the neutrals, if not always for Stoke fans – and on his day provides the perfect blend of incision and nonchalance that has made him a cult favourite around the Potteries. Stoke City: England’s great entertainers? It is certainly much too early for any definitive judgment, let alone one of that sort of hyperbole, but the prospect does not seem as hootingly ludicrous as it once would have.
There is an added layer of poignancy to Stoke’s renovation in a season in which the prevailing debate continues to surround the tedium being served up by the country’s self-styled swashbucklers. The plodding football played by Louis van Gaal’s Manchester United this term has exasperated Old Trafford by trampling on the club’s perceived traditions. Funny, then, that the process may be about to take effect in the exact reverse 40-odd miles down the M6, with the league’s most proudly brutalist side reinventing themselves as its go-to buccaneers. Stoke have some way to go yet but, as Van Gaal has proved, a new identity can be forged rather quicker than you might think.
