O’NEILL TARGETS CITY STRIKING OPTIONS AS HE HEADS TO MARKET
MICHAEL O’neill has hinted he is on the look out for a new number nine to help give Stoke City different options in attack. Stoke head into the summer transfer window with Jacob Brown and Tyrese Campbell as the senior players on their books in the forward department, with Josh Maja returning to parent club Bordeaux and Steven Fletcher released.
Nick Powell was also used up front occasionally and 16-year-old Emre Tezgel will be among the younger players hoping to be around the squad more often next season.
It will be interesting to see if Stoke reignite interest in Maja, aged 23, who now has 12 months left on his contract and showed glimpses of his link-up play during the second half of the season.
O’neill remained confident that he could score goals too in the long run.
But the manager has also hinted that he would like ‘a bigger striker than we’ve had’ to help when Stoke need to go more direct. With Stoke mostly shopping in the free agent or loan market, Andy Carroll will be sure to generate whispers after being released by Championship rivals West Bromwich Albion. He showed he can be a handful at this level, not least against Stoke, and at 33 played more minutes in the last few months than he had since 2012/13. Towering Tom Eaves, aged 30, is leaving Hull too. On Crewe’s books as a junior, he scored regularly for Gillingham in League One before three seasons with Hull, giving defenders problems with his aerial strength in the Championship.
He scored five times in 31 appearances this season. O’neill said: “When you’re in this league it’s five or six games that are ultimately the difference between your season where we finished in 14th and finishing in the top six. We had more than five or six frustrating games. I’m sure other clubs could argue that too.
“I did feel we progressed, although at times I can understand supporters’ frustration because we were in a strong position in a lot of games and definitely didn’t take what we should have done.”
He added: “We faced a different situation because we’ve become more of a possession-based team and sides have come and frustrated us at home. I know that can be frustrating for supporters. At times we struggled to deal with that, we struggled to break teams down.
“That comes into our thinking when we look at the players we try to recruit in this window. We might have to have a bigger striker than we’ve had, for example, to be able to go a bit more direct as well.”
Stoke are expected to be busy this summer, having already released four senior players – Tom Ince, Tommy Smith, Fletcher and James Chester – and seeing six loan players return to their own clubs. O’neill is looking forward to the weeks and months ahead.
He said: “The first season I came here was purely about survival and then it was about change because the group of players we had, based on what the club invested in them, shouldn’t have found themselves in that situation.
“It’s about changing things not just with the team but the club as a whole. There have been quite a lot of changes behind the scenes in the football department, which we felt were necessary.
“I look forward to the season. We’ve got a good group of players, there’s a real good atmosphere in the building.
“They work really hard and we have to push them more and more and we want them to maximise their careers.
“We harbour ambitions to be a Premier League club again so we need players who have that level of ambition as well.
“I think we have a lot of players who have that – and they have to demonstrate that in terms of how they live their life as a player when they come into the building, how they train, how they live and the rewards are extremely high.
“We want them to go to the Premier League with us, that’s the objective, but if they go with somebody else we maximise the financial gain for the club in that situation.”
PETER SMITH