Baggies look to continue solid start at Stoke

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·22 August 2024

Baggies look to continue solid start at Stoke

Stoke City v West Bromwich Albion; bet365 Stadium, Saturday 24th August 2024, 3pm

Carlos Corberán’s team make their second shortest trip of the season to the Potteries on Saturday looking to continue their positive start to the campaign. An opening day victory at QPR and a draw with Leeds United at the Hawthorns has left Albion in fifth place in the nascent league table, a position they became very familiar with last season. The team will be backed by a third successive sold-out away following with more than 3,000 making the trip to north Staffordshire.

Steven Schumacher is entering what he hopes will be his first full season at the bet365 Stadium having taken over just before Christmas last year. He is City’s fifth permanent manager since they were relegated from the Premier League, along with Albion, in 2018, and the club hasn’t finished higher than 14th in the Championship in that period. Gary Rowett, Nathan Jones and Michael O’Neill had all been sacked before Alex Neil became the latest to be shown the door with the Potters languishing in 20th place in early December. Schumacher guided them to a 17th place finish last season, safe but still the club’s worst finishing position for more than 20 years.

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Five new permanent signings and two on loan, including Lewis Koumas, the son of former Baggies favourite Jason, have come through the door so far this summer. Sam Gallagher from Blackburn Rovers and Ben Gibson from Norwich City are probably the names that will be familiar to most but they have also signed Swedish international goalkeeper Viktor Johansson and French left back, Eric Bocat, who both started their two opening league games. A host of players have left the club but Tyrese Campbell, son of the late Kevin Campbell, was perhaps the only one who was in demand at Championship level and he joined Sheffield United on a free transfer.

Stoke started the season with an encouraging 1-0 victory over Coventry City before the inconsistency that has plagued them for several years saw them comprehensively beaten 3-0 by Watford last weekend. Like Albion, the Potters will be hoping to add a few more to the squad before the end of next week, but they will need to improve if they are to look like challenging for a top six spot.

With no further new faces confirmed at the time of writing, I’m expecting another unchanged line-up for Albion at the bet365, but I hope to see them set up as they were at Loftus Road rather than the more conservative approach that Corberán adopted against Leeds at the Hawthorns. It was certainly a back three in the first half with Fellows playing in an unfamiliar left wing back role although it was a bit more fluid after the break. Nonetheless, I felt that Fellows’ effectiveness as an attacking force was much reduced and, with John Swift wide rather than centrally in support of Maja, the hat trick hero of the previous weekend was left very isolated.

I can understand that Corberán felt that Leeds, one of the favourites for promotion, needed some sort of special treatment even with their current early season troubles, but hopefully he will see Stoke as an opposition that are much more beatable.

Last season’s league game at City was certainly one that got away with the Baggies 2-0 up before the hour mark only to allow the hosts back into the game. One boost for Baggies fans is that André Vigidal, who scored in that game as well as in the League Cup game earlier in the season, is likely to miss this match through injury.

After travelling to west London with moderate hopes a fortnight ago, I suspect that the 3,000 Baggies fans who make the trip to the Potteries will do so with increased expectations of a positive result. Hopefully, Corberán’s team can deliver!

History

We are not yet back to the 25-year period when Albion could barely scrape a point against the Potters, but the Baggies have only won two of their last eight meetings, both of which came in the 2022/23 season. Both league games in the last campaign finished all square but Stoke knocked Albion out of the League Cup in the first round. Prior to the Baggies’ 2-0 home win in November 2022, the Potters had won three successive meetings.

Sixty-one players have played for both clubs since the the two clubs met in their first Football League match at the Victoria Ground in 1888. Of the current squads, Josh Maja is the only one to have played for both clubs with the Baggies’ number nine having been on loan in the Potteries for the second half of the 2021/22 season scoring twice in seventeen appearances. Erik Pieters, who left the Hawthorns in the summer, spent six seasons at the bet365 Stadium and played more than 200 games for City.

Other current professionals who have played for both clubs include Dwight Gayle, Saido Berahino, Romaine Sawyers, James McClean and James Chester, while Albion’s best 21st century goalkeeper, Ben Foster, started his professional career with Stoke but never made a senior appearance for them.

Foster is just one of a host of goalkeepers linked to both clubs – Paul Barron, Russell Hoult, Boaz Myhill, Barry Siddall, Andy Lonnergan, Kevin Pressman, Paul Reece, Marlon Fulop and Gavin Ward all signed for Albion and Stoke at some point but, like Foster, some didn’t appear for both clubs.

Other “notable” names to have turned out in both sets of stripes include Darren Fletcher, Peter Odemwingie, Garth Crooks, Lárus Sigurðsson, Graham Potter and Derek Statham. Former Arsenal captain, Brian Talbot, moved from Stoke to the Hawthorns in January 1988 and was player-manager when the Baggies beat City 6-0 later that year in what proved to Albion’s last league win over the Potters for 15 years.

Finally, the last surviving ’66 World Cup winner, Geoff Hurst, also moved from Stoke to Albion towards the end of his career, making the switch in August 1975.