‘I couldn’t be more convinced Narcis Pelach is the manager to turn Stoke City around’.
Stoke City captain Ben Gibson makes the 400th club appearance of his career today at the place where it all started and he is confident that his new boss will make everyone work exceptionally hard and bring back good times.
Stoke City Ben Gibson plays the 400th club game of his career today at the place where it all started – and on the back of a fortnight the likes of which he can barely have experienced over the last 13-and-a-half years.
Gibson started his life in senior football at Middlesbrough in April 2011 – a 2-1 Championship win over Coventry under the guidance of Tony Mowbray. He went on to make 203 appearances for the club he grew up supporting in this division and the Premier League as well as spending time out on loan at Plymouth Argyle, York and Tranmere.
There was a difficult move to Burnley when he had seemed on the cusp of an international breakthrough but he was revitalised at Norwich, where he met coach Narcis Pelach last year as they reached the play-offs, before heading to Stoke to be pretty quickly joined by Pelach as his new boss, replacing Steven Schumacher last week.
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It is clearly a change for Stoke, with different demands and expectations in terms of training and tactics and plenty of meetings. But, from the outside, the squad seems hungry and eager to learn and that’s how Gibson has seen it from inside Clayton Wood.
“I think if you ask the players, they’d tell you that they’ve loved this last week,” he said. “It’s probably been a bit of a culture shock and I know it’s easier for me because it’s more the norm that I’ve been used to but I’ve tried to reassure them that it will become the norm here too and they will get used to it. It’s just very, very different, the European way, a different week with fewer days off, more hours on the training pitch, loads of meetings – meetings on meetings, meetings about meetings, so different – but I think the lads have been really receptive.
“In the first 30 minutes against Hull last Friday we showed something. To change so drastically in two days essentially, we can take positives. There is still obviously loads to improve and there always will be but I’m really confident that we’ve got the group to do it and we just have to ride out the periods when it maybe hasn’t worked as well and maximise our chances that our new shape and structure can give us.”
