March 17-19th - other games

Just having a late lol at Lallana missing that sitter.

Just reflecting on the weekend games, Mark Hughes says Diego Costa was "practising dark arts". Everyone knows what Costa is like, he is a bit of d1ck and often goes way over the top and should concentrate more on the football, which he's quite good at.

However, I don't think enough scrutiny is applied to Stoke and their frequent dirty play. Under Hughes their style of football has undoubtedly improved than when under Pulis, but he has no qualms about telling his players to go out and kick the opposition all over the park. It's pretty shocking really. Even BBC match feed commented that virtually every Stoke player had "kicked" Costa, trying to provoke him into getting a second yellow. They were pretty dirty against us this season, Arnautovic getting sent off, but the one that sticks out was our 3-2 cup win against them a season or two ago - Pelle scored the winner if I recall. We were 2-0 up at HT, and clearly Hughes' instructions were to go out in the second half and kick us off the park. It nearly worked.

Just find it shocking that they deploy such blatant dirty tactics but equally that no-one ever seems to pick up on or highlight it. It's just "Stoke, playing much more attacking football than they used to".

Being physical is different to being dirty – Chelsea, Spurs, Everton, Stoke, WBA, WHU are all physical sides. They have height and strength in the side and use it effectively. We are not a physical side at all, perhaps with the exception of Romeu and sometimes you can see our players being simply overrun and over powered. Yesterday was a good example – we simply could not get the ball off Dembélé and he was allowed to carry the ball 20-25 yards forward or sideways a number of times in the 90 minutes.

We are missing an enforcer or two like Dembélé and Wanyama – if Boro go down id like us to look at getting Traoré in, that kid is Redmond with skill, speed and power (& only just 21)

Being physical is different to being dirty – Chelsea, Spurs, Everton, Stoke, WBA, WHU are all physical sides. They have height and strength in the side and use it effectively. We are not a physical side at all, perhaps with the exception of Romeu and sometimes you can see our players being simply overrun and over powered. Yesterday was a good example – we simply could not get the ball off Dembélé and he was allowed to carry the ball 20-25 yards forward or sideways a number of times in the 90 minutes.

 

We are missing an enforcer or two like Dembélé and Wanyama – if Boro go down id like us to look at getting Traoré in, that kid is Redmond with skill, speed and power (& only just 21)

Yes, you are right. Pulis and Allardyce sides are always physical, they use every trick in the book and are generally not nice teams to play against or watch. Tottenham, Chelsea and United are also example of physical sides. However, Hughes clearly gives instructions to his Stoke team to kick lumps out of opposition players to either antagonise them or make them cower. There is a difference and your response has perfectly demonstrated why I posted in the first place - people seem to give them a free pass because they are "battlers" but also because they do play decent football from time to time, when actually it's a lot more sinister than that.

I don't disagree with your take that we are not a strong enough side athletically or physically, but it wasn't really related to point I was making.