Mark Robins makes ‘mediocrity’ point as he plays Stoke City numbers game
Mark Robins is taking encouragement from performance as well as result as Stoke City look for that rare beast of a back-to-back win
Mark Robins took heart from Stoke City’s performance as well as result in mid-week as he now tries to capture that rare beast of a back-to-back win.
Stoke were beaten at the death at Coventry last weekend after scrambling back from 2-0 down, but they responded with a hard-fought home win over Blackburn Rovers on Wednesday night courtesy of a first-half goal from Ali Al-Hamadi.
Now they are preparing for a Saturday lunchtime clash at Alex Neil’s Millwall knowing how valuable it would be to make it two wins on the spin to head into the international break. They have only won two league games in a row once this season, against Derby and Blackburn in early November.
Robins said in his pre-match press conference: “Really the manner of the performance is the thing you’re looking for because that is something you can repeat. You can see small shoots of recovery and when you get players start to come back performance levels start to go up.
“We’re not looking for mediocrity, we’re looking for elite and that takes time and an understanding of what is required for that and the work you have to do to get there and trying to get that to feel normal and be normal and have people driving that. That’s where you want to get to. It continues and just takes time.
“But because we’ve got players back that we need back – and we want everybody fit so things move quicker and there’s competition for places and people need to work really hard to get into the squad, never mind the team.
