THE BALL IS IN OUR COURT, IF WE CAN BEAT MILLWALL ON SATURDAY THEN WE

SATURDAY’S home game against Millwall marks the halfway point of our first season back in the Championship, so it’s an ideal time to look back at how it has gone so far and also assess what needs to be done if we want to see the Potters back in the Premier League come next May. Not only is it fair to say that things have not gone as well as we probably expected, it’s essential too. That’s because we cannot afford to dress up, nor dismiss our shortcomings during what was a pretty dismal start to life back in the Football League. We were NOT fully prepared for our new surroundings, we did not hit the ground running and it’s taken us almost half a season to get to a point where we’re still only in mid-table and starting to look like a team which could make a genuine push for the play-off places in 2019. Our manager and players did not cover themselves in glory and have still not done enough to win over a fed-up support. We were caught with our trousers down, and those three defeats in the opening six games, and especially the home defeats to Wigan and Blackburn, were like having ice cold buckets of water chucked over us. They were genuinely that shocking. Only then did we realise that any thoughts of bouncing back up in a blaze of glory were, at best, fanciful and, in truth, wholly unrealistic. We were carrying too much relegation baggage from the Premier League and there was still a negative aura surrounding the club. Furthermore, we clearly had not bought as well as we thought we had so our squad was - and most probably still is - lacking in some key areas. That said, and even though we HAVE to improve on our current 11th place, there are tangible signs of genuine improvement and reasons for optimism as we prepare to cross the halfway line of the 2018/19 season. We are now on a run of nine games unbeaten, we have lost one of our last 13 and if you take away that dreadful opening half dozen matches, then we have only two defeats to our name in the last 16 in the league. We’re drawing too many games, of course, but we’re proving to be difficult to beat, and if we can get into a habit of holding on to leads and winning matches then the only direction we’re going to be heading in is up.