Hughes agony as gamble fails
THE PROBLEMS are mounting fast for Mark Hughes – and it is clear that Stoke’s fans have had enough.
Hughes’s team-selection gamble against Chelsea on Saturday was made with the intention of securing a muchneeded win against a Newcastle side who are their relegation rivals.
As far as the Stoke manager was concerned, the 5-0 drubbing at Stamford Bridge would have been worth it as long as they responded with a win. On every level, the plan failed. Stoke came up well short against Rafa Benitez’s side and, on this evidence, are in grave danger of sliding into the Championship.
The home fans responded with banners and chants calling for their manager to go.
“We have to take this on the chin,” said Hughes, after a defeat that left his team two points above the relegation zone, having played more games than everyone else below them. “I didn’t feel we deserved to lose but that’s the way it’s panning out at the moment. We’re not getting the breaks.”
Hughes has tried to put a brave face on things but the statistics do not look good. Stoke have the worst defensive record of any team in Europe’s top five leagues. They have the worst away record in the Premier League. They have won just nine of their past 39 Premier League matches, a run stretching back to last January.
They have a crucial period coming up, with matches against four more teams in the bottom half of the table – Huddersfield, Watford, Bournemouth and Brighton – before mid-February.
For long spells of yesterday’s game, Hughes’s side were second best. They were short of invention, although Charlie Adam almost scored with a first-half free-kick – bending the ball over the top of the wall to force Karl Darlow into a two-handed save – before his ambitious shot from the halfway line was carried over the bar by fierce winds.
But it looked as if all the flak that surrounded Hughes’s team selection at Stamford Bridge had demoralised his players. Joe Allen, Xherdan Shaqiri, Maxim ChoupoMoting and Peter Crouch did not look refreshed, they looked apprehensive. So did their team-mates.
Perhaps the most agonising thing for Hughes was that his team lost the game because they failed to reorganise quickly enough in defence after he made an attacking substitution with 19 minutes left. Hughes took off his leftback Erik Pieters and sent on striker Saido Berahino – without a Premier League goal in 674 days – with the hope of unlocking Newcastle.
As part of the change, Geoff Cameron was supposed to move from midfield to centre-back as Kevin Wimmer shifted over to left-back to fill the gap left by Pieters. But they were still getting into position as Jacob Murphy ran unchallenged down the Newcastle right and slotted across goal for the unmarked Ayoze Perez to tap in.
Stoke applied a flurry of pressure late on and might have earned a point had Darlow not made two superb saves to deny Mame Diouf in the closing stages.
The 3,000 travelling Newcastle fans were ecstatic at the result and taunted Hughes with chants of “You’re getting sacked in the morning”.
Those supporters have suffered their own agonies, as Benitez has been starved of funds to improve the team and a planned buyout of the club by Amanda Staveley has stalled. Benitez, though, insists the team spirit on the pitch is strong enough to secure survival.
He said: “All the players are working and they don’t give up. That’s the spirit you expect from a team trying to stay in the Premier League.”