![]() ![]() Axel Tuanzebe hadn’t really played any games for a significant period of time. Ben Pearson virtually hadn’t played any games until he came to us. Nick Powell, Sam Clucas, the list is endless in terms of lads that haven’t been available.Įven the lads that we added in January came in having done very, very little. Ben Wilmot has obviously missed the last month – and since he came out of the team, we have not won a game. Jacob Brown was missing for large parts of the season. We’ve had Josh Tymon missing for large parts of the season. I don't think we had a good pre-season last year in terms of the fact that key signings like Josh Laurent walk in the building and break down in pre-season and you miss them for the start of the season. We want to try to create a better pathway for the academy players coming through and we want to make sure that the decisions we're making are decisions that are going to be good for the club's health longer term and make sure that we end up in a far, far better position than what we're currently in at the moment.įor that to happen we needed to ride the season out to a certain extent in terms of getting to the end of the season, fix FFP, get a semblance of a team on the pitch that we felt could compete, which I think we've done in spells, but like you say, we had a lot of injuries across the season. Whereas I think for us going forward – albeit that we're going to have to sign guys that aren't all going to be long-term strategy signings because you need to have the here and now – what we want to try to create is more assets within the team. ![]() ![]() And realistically, a lot of the signings, if you look at them, they're temporary signings, even the permanent deals, because if you look at the age profiles of them, they're not long-term strategy type planning signings. I knew that there were a lot of players here who were temporary, whether it be loans or had just joined or whatever. It naturally does because when you come down from the Premier League and your budget is up there, the longer you stay in the Championship and the more you need to acclimatise to the level you're at so that's only normal. What I did know was that I was walking into something that for the last four or five seasons wasn't in the greatest shape, I knew that there were issues in terms of FFP, I knew that we need to steady the wage bill, I knew that the budget had arguably been coming down year on year. That must have been a challenging situation to walk into?Īlex Neil: My view when I took the job was always the fact that I was hopefully going to be given the opportunity to build something here. Pete Smith: Looking back, the squad was very tight when you arrived and also had a lot of injury problems. In part one, the manager looks at everything from what he inherited and squad depth to setting about building a new spine and ‘educated gambles’ in the transfer market. It has been a campaign leading up to the significant opportunities of this summer transfer window.Īlex Neil, who replaced Michael O’Neill in August, sat down with StokeonTrentLive to reflect on the following nine months and preview how he will try to make sure there are better times ahead. ![]() It was a campaign marked by decent away form, an awful home record and a lot of changes, including in the squad and in the dug-out. Stoke City have finished their fifth season back in the Championship sitting in 16th, the fifth year in a row condemned to the bottom half. ![]()
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