It wasn’t really the right day to bring up cricket, as rain lashed against the windows at Clayton Wood and, deep inside headquarters, Stoke City players were wrapping up for an afternoon training session ahead of their mid-week trip to Swansea. And because, it turns out, Steven Schumacher doesn’t like cricket anyway.
The point was that the Championship relegation battle is coming into something like a power play. Or the final few overs of a tight match, when the required run rate can suddenly be eaten up or become impossible. Only five points separate nine teams from 15th to 23rd, but this final three-game week of the season might prove decisive.
“I like your analogy but I hate cricket. I don’t understand it. Mad game!” said Stoke’s head coach, who has a match at second-bottom Sheffield Wednesday to follow Wednesday’s game at Swansea.
“But I know what you mean and where you’re coming from. We’ve said all along that it’s going to go to the wire. It’s not going to be straightforward. There are going to be good performances, good results, there will be times when the result goes against you despite playing well, and there will be times when we probably don’t play as well as want to and that’s probably all understandable for where we currently are in the league.
“We need to make sure we’re focused and treat every game like it’s a cup final. It is important. We know what’s at stake, we know what we need to get to give us a chance to stay in the Championship. We have to be focused on it and try to put in as good performances as we can to get the results we want.”
Stoke head into this final chapter on the back of a decent seven-game spell featuring three wins and two draws. That’s a not insignificant chunk of matches, including six against teams who are chasing or in the top six, to prove to themselves – and all us lot – they can get points at this level.
Schumacher added: “It’s 19 league games that we’ve been here and we’ve picked up 23 points. We’ve shown that against some really good teams we can perform and get results, but we’ve also shown where we have let ourselves down and been a bit sloppy at times or given ourselves too much to do.
“The last seven games have been positive. We’ve seen some good signs from the team and we need to just make sure we continue it now. There are still five games to go, we can’t let the standards drop. We have to work so hard to get more points on the board, which is so vital.”
Bitesize injury news
A blow for Stoke that Ryan Mmaee is ruled out for the rest of the season with a hamstring injury, joining Lynden Gooch and Ben Pearson in the treatment room.
Junior Tchamadeu has joined in full training this week and will now be eased back into the match day picture.
Schumacher is 112 days into this job having pretty much only previously experienced a winning team in his days as a coach and manager.
So it was interesting how he answered a question from Angela Smith about how he was coping with the pressure of this situation.
“Fine, yeah,” he said, and he did genuinely seem quite relaxed. “It’s one of those things that are part and parcel of being a manager or head coach. You need to stay calm, stay relaxed, stay focused on the job in hand. It’s not easy in a relegation battle but it’s also not easy when you’re competing to win the league. It’s pressure at that end of the table as well. You have to be consistent with your message, consistent with your behaviour and stay positive, neither get too high when you’re winning nor too low if you lose. It’s trying to stay pretty level.”.
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