Are Stoke the team that smaller clubs with big ambitions should be aspiring to? A team that has gone up and stayed there on the foundations of hard work, good management, stability and sensible spending. Their owner is rich, but he's not one of these super-rich men that are buying other top clubs. He's a Stoke fan too, something that seems increasingly rare, i.e the club being owned by an affluent fan. Looking at the team, there are quite a few cast-offs from other clubs in there along with a few higher profile signings in there. On paper, they should be fighting the drop, but because the work so well as a team, they are comfortably in mid-table and also in an FA cup final that gets them into Europe. Apart from Pulis' controversial style of direct football, Is this the sort of model that Cortese wants to install at Southampton? When he and Markus arrived, he said that his ambition was to make Southampton self-financing in the Premier League. With the new contract given to Adkins, It would seem that Nigel is very much a part of that. With bits of various models being used to rebuild Southampton, is Cortese on a mission to define how to build a successful football club? For a guy who doesn't know much about football, he certainly makes the right noises.
Nicola knows plenty about football, he worked at Credit Suisse and was a big player in the world of Sports Banking, mainly Football. He said ages ago Markus was the owner, Cortese was the football man.
It was interesting listening to Pulis pre-match saying when they were promoted they played with a obvious raw style but now they are working on 'smoothing' the edges. He talked about moving the club forward in every way, the facilities, the style of play etc. I think the additions of Etherington and Pennant have really changed how they play and to be honest at times it's pretty good.
