‘SHOW YOU ESERVE TO E PREMIER PLAYERS’
STOKE have tried a Scotsman, an Englishman and a Welshman. Now it’s an Irishman. A joke? Not in the Potteries it’s not. The club are on the cusp of dropping into League One four years after being the ninth best team in the Premier League.
It’s a long way to fall and Michael O’Neill is the fourth manager Stoke have hired in the last 22 months to try and find what’s causing the rot and cure it. Yesterday was O’Neill’s first game at Stoke. Friday was the first time he’d done a tour of the bet365Stadium and met the staff. For the rest of the week he’d been in Northern Ireland and Germany doing his other job as manager of the Irish national team. “That’s parked now,” says O’Neill. “I do nothing with the Northern Ireland national team now until Sunday, March 22 when we meet up for the European Championship qualifier with Bosnia on the Thursday.
Challenge
“My contract is with Stoke City and that is where my work will be. Northern Ireland will not distract me from the challenge here.” After such a hectic week, O’Neill, 50, did take a kip at his hotel on Friday before then getting together with Billy McKinlay, newly appointed as his No2, to talk through plans for yesterday’s game with Wigan. O’Neill was on a flight at five to seven on Wednesday morning from Frankfurt to Manchester after Northern Ireland’s 6-1 defeat to Germany and in the training ground at Stoke by 9.15am.
He’d been living in different hotels for 14 nights and still is while he looks for a home. “Living out of a suitcase, yes,” he said. “I will get settled down, move to somewhere in the area, but I intend to spend a lot of time at the training ground here anyway.
“I looked forward to getting to the hotel on Friday and getting my feet up for an hour before doing the preparation for the Wigan game with Billy, who is in the hotel with me.”
McKinlay has worked alongside O’Neill both at club level at Dundee United and with Northern Ireland as his assistant.
Both of them are looking at a squad of 37 players when you include those out on loan and trying to find the cause of Stoke’s demise.
Scotsman Paul Lambert (four months in the job), Englishman Gary Rowett (eight months) and Welshman Nathan Jones (nine months) couldn’t solve it, but O’Neill has clues.
O’Neill has already done better at Stoke than he did in his first managerial job, his Brechin City team losing at home to St Johnstone 2-0 in 2006 and being relegated from the Scottish First Division that April afternoon.
First game, first relegation. Some start that.
At Stoke, he kicked off with a 4-2 win at Barnsley just 24 hours after his appointment and on the back of one training session.
O’Neill has started unpicking what Jones left behind in his unsuccessful attempt to create the team and pattern of play he wanted and, for a start, O’Neill is playing winger James McClean as a winger rather than a highly suspect fullback.
It’s a beginning, ditching square-peg thinking and selecting round pegs for round holes, but can he get extract more from his players than previous bosses?
“There’s a vulnerability when you are an international manager when you have the best preparation
you can have and then suddenly players would become unavailable,” says O’Neill of his eight successful years leading Northern Ireland’s fight against the odds.
“In a club you have much more resilience in being able to deal with that. I won’t miss that vulnerability and I look forward to maximising what I can get out of this group of players at Stoke.
Resilience
“There are a lot of international players within it.” But that group is big.
Successive managers have brought in successive players, all thinking they were joining a club heading back to the Premier League ASAP and those already there thinking they were Premier League players anyway and don’t deserve
these hard times.
That is the malaise O’Neill has to sort out before it’s too late and Stoke go into total League One relegation meltdown.
Ryan Shawcross playing again for the first time since breaking his leg in pre-season is a bonus. He will take time yet to get fully fit, but when he is, Shawcross will be one of seven central defenders.
There are three goalkeepers, six senior midfield players, five strikers.
O’Neill looks at that and says Stoke have too many players - and he will look to change it in the January transfer window.
“I’ve told the players that we are top heavy,” says O’Neill.
“The thing for these players is that a lot of them signed for this club because they were in the Premier League at that moment. Others signed because they believed Stoke were going back to the Premier League.
“But their best chance of getting into the Premier League now is to play their way back and they have a responsibility to Stoke City to make sure this club gets out of the situation it’s in.
“It’s the message I’ve given to the players from day one.”
His assessments are beginning. Predecessor Jones wanted a togetherness, a combined purpose, the same as he had as a successful Luton manager and not much different at all to what O’Neill built with Northern Ireland.
But in the end it was the players who stayed, Jones who became yet another casualty.
“I haven’t had time to look at the players to say what an individual’s future is with the club and we will take each individual situation as it comes,” says O’Neill.
Future
“I’ve not been here long enough to give a definitive answer but I think, looking from the outside, that Premier League mentality is an issue. I can understand how players think like that.
“It’s the nature of the modern game. Players always want to be at the best level.
“But sometimes a player’s perception of where he is is not always the reality if the truth be told.
“We want to create an environment where the players can flourish and that their own careers can go forward.
“I don’t envisage that many clubs in the Premier League are looking to our squad to handpick players right now.
“We have Premier League players within our squad, but those players have to demonstrate why they were signed by this club when it was in the Premier League.”
The day job is going to be busy for Michael O’ Neill, never mind the upcoming Euro play-offs. As he says, his Christmas shopping for the family this year is likely to be done online.