Sinking Stoke
Striker once rated the equal of Harry Kane is a symbol of club’s wider slump as he faces an Under-23s match while first team fight for their Premier League lives
It will be three years ago come June that an injured Saido Berahino withdrew from the England Under-21s’ European Championship squad on the eve of the first game against Portugal, replaced in the team by a 22-year-old Jesse Lingard, who had yet to make an impression at Manchester United.
When England went out of the competition three games later, a crestfallen Gareth Southgate looked back on the withdrawal of Berahino, and a concussion sustained by defender John Stones, as the turning point for his team.
Harry Kane might have been the biggest name in that Under-21s squad with a senior cap and a senior goal already, but Berahino, the younger of the two strikers by just seven days, had earned his call-up to a senior England squad four months earlier than Kane.
Three years on and it feels unkind to compare their careers now: at his height Berahino came very close to being Kane’s team-mate at Spurs in the summer of 2016, although that is one deal Daniel Levy will be delighted he never closed. Berahino’s decline, through a failed drugs test and the subsequent collapse of his form at Stoke City has been one of the English game’s saddest stories, right up to the point where Paul Lambert has had to exclude him from the first-team squad for turning up late.
Berahino has famously not scored a senior goal for more than two years, going back to Feb 27, 2016, and encompassing 44 appearances for West Bromwich Albion and then Stoke. The most awkward part of it at Stoke’s Clayton Wood training ground was not only his failure to notch a single goal on match day but that he had hardly ever scored in training, either. If ever there was a symbol of the wider decline at Stoke, facing a game tomorrow against West Ham that they dare not lose, then it is Berahino, all at sea and turning up late for Under-23s training yet still with four years left on a £75,000-a-week contract. Tomorrow Stoke will be fighting for their Premier League lives but as things stand, the same evening Berahino is scheduled to play for the Under-23s against Brighton.
His signing was a gamble taken by Mark Hughes that backfired spectacularly, although when it comes to Stoke’s bigger problems, it can be hard to separate those that should be laid at the door of the club’s technical director, Mark Cartwright, or their former manager.
Cartwright is a former goalkeeper with Wrexham, among others, who previously worked for the football agency Beswicks, and in signing their star client Jack Butland he has at least ensured there will be some saleable assets if the club go down. Cartwright is understood to have opposed some of Stoke’s recent signings, including the £18million Kevin Wimmer, although Stoke’s recent record demonstrates just how hard they have found it to navigate the European market, buying and loaning players who have been wholly unsuitable. Their record signing, Giannelli Imbula, is on loan at Toulouse; Marc Muniesa and Bojan Krkic are back in Spain on loan; Wimmer was placed on a special regime by manager Lambert, having been considered insufficiently fit to play. Ibrahim Afellay has been told to stay away from first-team training; Jese Rodriguez, on loan from Paris St-Germain, was on compassionate leave the last time the club checked but seems to have extended that into a late Easter holiday. Meanwhile, Erik Pieters was fined two weeks’ wages for being in a club the night before the Everton game with his reality television star wife.
One question doing the rounds is whether that old joke at the expense of English football’s more parochial souls – whether a new foreign signing can do it on the proverbial cold, wet Tuesday night in Stoke – should now be applied to Stoke themselves. Stoke look increasingly like a team unlikely to perform on a cold, wet Tuesday night in Stoke. There can be no going back to the likes of Jon Walters and Glenn Whelan, both of whom left last summer, although it is now clear that while there was a strong case for moving the individuals on, something more profound about the team has been lost.
It is too simple to listen to the be-careful-what-you-wish-for merchants who say that Stoke could only ever be the Stoke of the Tony Pulis era, but, even so, mistakes have been made.
The sale of Marko Arnautovic, who will face his old club tomorrow, was an outcome that was difficult for Stoke to avoid given the player’s determination to leave in the summer, but it hurt them badly. He was one of the few with the ability to win games against top opposition. Of Stoke’s 11 wins last season not until the final day, away to Southampton, did they beat a team who finished above them. The warning signs were there.
Not every signing has been a miss, with some promise shown by the midfielder Badou Ndiaye and full-back Moritz Bauer, but the core upon whom Lambert has tried to rely has been shrinking. There is Joe Allen, Xherdan Shaqiri, Butland, Ryan Shawcross, Glen Johnson, and Peter Crouch at 37, more often than not off the bench, the last of the cold, wet Tuesday night crew.
Lambert has tried to give Berahino some game time but he has quickly realised that for the benefit of the squad as a whole he can no longer afford to indulge poor timekeeping.
Those who know Berahino, who came from Burundi as a young asylum seeker, say his tough start in life must be taken into consideration, and while it was once thought football might provide stability, it does not look that way. Lambert did at first try to talk him up but to no avail. While he has not been Stoke’s only problem, it would seem that if they can get that signing so badly wrong it is not hard to see why they have made so many mistakes
elsewhere.
His signing was a gamble by Hughes that backfired spectacularly
It is not hard to see why they have made so many mistakes elsewhere
It was good to hear from Alessandro Del Piero this week, one of the few in Italy prepared to tell Gianluigi Buffon the hard truth that he was wrong about Michael Oliver. Buffon’s aggression on the pitch and his contempt for the English referee in his subsequent interviews is one of those things elite referees unfortunately have to put up with, but the sad corollary is the effect it has lower down the game.
I called Ryan Hampson, the 19-year-old referee from Manchester who was butted, punched and spat at before he spoke out in The Daily Telegraph, threatened a strike of grass-roots referees and formed the Ref Support group. “We will see that at a local level, it’s always the same when it happens in a massive game on television,” he said.
“Everything gets copied on a Sunday morning, from people trying to do overhead kicks like Rooney to players abusing refs”.
Hampson takes charge of Sale Moor v Northern Quarter in the Cheshire and Manchester Sunday League Cup at Hough End playing fields today, and while he thinks things have improved, like many grass-roots referees he wonders just how long he
will continue.