With Stoke City’s stumbling start to the Championship campaign in 2018/19, clearly there’s a bigger relegation hangover surrounding the players than many originally anticipated as Gary Rowett’s own words about too many of the first team group ‘feeling sorry’ for themselves probably indicates that.
Hosting Brentford at the Bet365 Stadium it wasn’t a great performance by any stretch of the imagination but we did register our first point of the year with Benik Afobe making it two goals in two games as he found the back of the net in the first half he capitalised on a defensive error.
Whoscored’s statistical look at the game actually made him our Man of the Match with a poor rating of 7.06.
I say poor as if a player barely gets into the region of a 7 rating yet is the best performing player in a side, that probably shows how bad everyone else was. The only other player to reach even 7 was Ryan Shawcross at 7.01.
With Afobe getting one shot on target from two attempts, zero key passes and a pass accuracy rate of only 71.4% we are looking for significant improvement on both a team and individual front.
But it’s a point, he found the net again and hopefully that will bring its own bonus down the line given early expectations.
