PULIS REVEALS THE SECRET TO SEEING OFF THE BIG BOYS
TONY Pulis has looked back on the ‘us against them’ mentality he tried to forge as Stoke City tried to find their feet in the Premier League - for the city as well as the club.
Pulis ended Stoke’s 23-year exile in the lower leagues when his side won promotion in 2008 but that was only half the battle.
It was a fierce battle for survival, particularly in the first season, and Stoke - who Pulis’s interviewer Joe Cole described as ‘like Jurassic Park’ with towering players in every position - built up a reputation as a litmus test for how much teams were prepared to fight.
That was encouraged by a pre-season conversation with Sir Alex Ferguson, who suggested that compliments for newly-promoted teams normally spelled out relegation.
Pulis said in a Footballjoe podcast: “When I took over at Stoke, when we got promoted, I rang Fergie up and rang up Steve Coppell. I spoke to Alex and he said, ‘Listen you ain’t gonna win a lot of games away from home in the Premier League but you’ve got to make the Britannia a fortress and you’ve got to do things that teams aren’t going to be comfortable with.’ One of the other great things he said as well, ‘If any of the top six sides ever give you compliments you’re not doing it in the right way.’
“Because you’ve got to get teams to despise you and despise the way you play.
“What we did, we turned it round, and made the area against the rest. We got the crowd on side. So we said, everyone is against Stoke-ontrent, it’s not just Stoke City Football Club, it’s Stoke-ontrent.
“And then all of a sudden, they’d turn up on a Saturday and the way the crowd got behind the team was just extraordinary.
“I remember games... I remember beating Man City with 10 men and James Beattie scored from a cross and people said, ‘You did brilliant, how could you do that with 10 men against Man City?’
“But I said, ‘No, it was 30,000 against 11 men.’
“Every challenge, every tackle, every pass that the team made that day was just extraordinary - and they stayed with us. And going there, we built up this reputation, we never talked about anything else apart from being big, strong, horrible to play against.
“And psychologically, I can remember talking to Patrick Vieira at a coaching course, I did a coaching session and he waited afterwards to have a chat with me. I found him to be a lovely fella.
“He said that Wenger was absolutely psychologically struck in going to the Britannia, the long throw, he always though the grass was too long, the pitch was too narrow, he moaned and groaned like a drain.
“But when we went to the Emirates, the pitch was the biggest pitch in the league, the grass was cut like a bowling green, watered before, which suited his team. Why moan about going to the Britannia when we’re doing everything that suits us?
“And he said to, ‘I can remember one game when we were playing you and he worked for the first time ever on defending long throws. And we turned up and Rory Delap was on the bench and you beat us 3-1!’
“Psychologically, Arsene found it difficult coming to the Britannia.”