Thump down to earth leaves Stoke City with transfer questions to answer in rush to deadline day
Stoke City were well beaten at Watford as two quickfire goals at the start of the second half taking the game away from their control. Here are the talking points from Vicarage Road.
had even been really getting carried away, Stoke had just had a decent opening day win against a good side on the back of a strong finish to last season. They even had an encouraging first half against Watford.
But the start of the second-half was a wallop. If Stoke are not at the top of their game, if they’re not organised and disciplined, then they can get eaten up, spat out and wiped on the shoe of a Championship side in goal-hungry mood.
The first was a poor one to concede and there was no urgent call to arms after that to make sure the game didn’t slip away. Instead for a few minutes they looked punch drunk. It was three and could have been a lot more. Watford had 17 shots after the break and they were good chances too, not pot shots from distance.
There will be an inquest into what went wrong and Stoke cannot afford many afternoons – or even 20-minute spells – like this over the course of a season.
It had been a long time since Stoke had let any opponent have that many chances in one half. Steven Schumacher wasn’t taking it lightly but he also refused to panic, at least not too much.
He said: “That’s what we spoke about. We just felt that when they had their spell we didn’t manage to do what they did last week and roll it out and get ourselves behind the ball. The game became a bit stretched for a spell in the second half when they got all their opportunities. We had to change it and adjust and try to stem the tide.
“I thought we did ok towards the back end of the game. We got into a couple of good areas, had a one v one when we should have scored. I think that’s kind of what our performance deserved, at least a goal, because it wasn’t all bad. We had 15 or 20 minutes when it got away from us.
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