Having slipped to a frustrating defeat against Swansea City on Sunday afternoon, Bristol City and Liam Manning’s attention now turns to Wednesday night’s clash with Stoke City.
The Robins remain within touching distance of the play-off places ahead of the Potters’ visit to Ashton Gate. While their recent results have left a bit to be desired, a win would stand them in good stead heading into the weekend’s Severnside derby clash with Cardiff City.
After a tough start to the season, Stoke seem to have found their feet under the management of Mark Robins. The 55-year-old has only lost two of his opening seven games, including an FA Cup defeat to the Bluebirds on penalties, to help the Potters climb to 18th in the table and four points clear of the relegation zone.
Robins’ side come into Wednesday night’s clash unbeaten in their last two Championship matches. Since the former Coventry City boss took over the reins, Stoke have beaten Hull City and Sunderland while also picking up impressive draws against West Brom and Oxford.
When City travelled to the Bet365 Stadium earlier this season, they came away with a point as a second-half brace from Nahki Wells secured a 2-2 draw for the Reds.
Chris Hogg was in charge of the squad that day, and since then, an awful lot of football has been played. Ahead of Wednesday’s meeting, Bristol Live spoke to Pete Smith from Stoke-on-Trent Live to get the latest insight from the Bet365 Stadium.
How would you evaluate Stoke City’s season so far?
Exhausting would probably be the best word. This season was always going to be hard, picking up from a failed big reset in 2023/24 while reducing costs. The club knows it needs stability to move forward, but you can only justify stability if there are enough signs that what you’re doing is working – and consequently, they’re now on their third manager of the campaign.
They have been hard to beat at points but clearly haven’t scored enough goals and Mark Robins has to fix that despite losing top scorer Tom Cannon last month. He will have key players returning from injury hopefully sooner rather than later and there is hope that the last three months can be better than what’s gone before, as well as a bit of understandable panic in the fan base that the league table is extremely tight.
What sort of impact has Mark Robins had since taking over the Potters?
There is a massive consensus that Stoke have got the right manager in. He’s assured in what he’s doing and confident he will take the club forward in the long-term without ever getting ahead of himself or underestimating the size of the challenge in the here and now.
He’s been working on making Stoke better in possession, trying to create more chances – and then he was frustrated that while he saw some of that come to the fore in the FA Cup against Cardiff on Saturday, they were suddenly more vulnerable out of possession, which they had been doing ok. There were a lot of changes to the side for that tie, though.
What would constitute success for Stoke between now and the end of the season?
Staying up is the main thing. Pulling up safely into mid-table would be great. Scoring goals, winning games and making going to matches fun would be dynamite.
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Who are the key players Bristol City fans should be looking out for?
Ali Al-Hamadi and Nathan Lowe were both cup-tied at the weekend but will come back into the squad now. Al-Hamadi has only played once since joining on loan from Ipswich, but it’s clear to see he’s a workhorse who will hopefully have a knack of getting into dangerous positions. Lowe, who scored the winner at Ashton Gate last season, scored loads on loan at Walsall in the first half of this term and is enjoying the new test at this level.
Midfielder Wouter Burger had his best game of the season at the weekend. Hopefully, he can start to find some consistent form under Robins.
What’s your predicted line-up and how do you see the game going?
Stoke have conceded early in three of the last four matches, so they’ll have to sort that out for starters. Robins is trying to get them to play with a bit more freedom, though, so they probably won’t just sit back and try to soak things up. I thought Bristol City were superb in the reverse fixture, albeit after they had gone 2-0 down in the opening stages. It’ll be interesting to see first-hand how they’ve changed since that night. It should be pretty entertaining.
Stoke City predicted line-up: Johansson, Tchamadeu, Stevens, Phillips, Rose, Seko, Burger, Koumas, Junho, Lowe, Al-Hamadi