Stoking the fire: Wise investment has Pulis and his new band of merry men on the march
In his itinerant 11-year career, Peter Crouch has played for eight different clubs and been transferred for a total of £43.5million. What is more remarkable, though, is that no club has paid more for the England international than Stoke City.
Crouch is 30 now. He remains a capable centre forward at club and international level. At £10m, though, he finds himself as the new figurehead of an upwardly mobile club who seem intent on making life uncomfortable for those above them.
This is new territory, even for him
Speaking a few days before the closure of the summer transfer window, Everton manager David Moyes sounded the alarm bell for the likes of his club and also Aston Villa and Tottenham.
‘There are those clubs beneath us spending money trying to overtake us,’ said Moyes. ‘We need to be wary of that.’
Without a doubt it was Stoke to whom Moyes was referring and, just days later, his words proved prophetic as the Staffordshire club completed £22m of August transfers
Crouch arrived on deadline day along with another forward, the mobile Cameron Jerome. He cost £4m from Birmingham City while the holding midfield player Wilson Palacios came in from Tottenham for £8m.
This is heady stuff for a club whose starting XI on the first day of their debut Premier League season in 2008-09 cost just £11.5m in total. It signals ambition, it signals progress.
As we welcome back top-flight domestic football, Stoke will find themselves under the microscope. It is what they want. They host Liverpool at the Britannia Stadium. Stoke have Crouch, Palacios and Jerome, while Kenny Dalglish’s team head down the M6 with Craig Bellamy on the team bus.
It is, in terms of intrigue at least, the game of the day.
‘They have strengthened but so have we,’ said Crouch. ‘I look around our dressing room and we have some fantastic players. This is why I came.’
Sadly for Crouch, his wife Abbey Clancy expressed her regret about his move to The Potteries. ‘I am gutted Peter has decided to leave London,’ she told a showbiz column. ‘It’s not ideal.’
Despite his wife’s whimpering, though, Crouch knows that opportunity beckons for him now.
The team whom Crouch will play for have been built steadily by Tony Pulis. Of the 11 who lost at Bolton on opening day 2008, only defender Ryan Shawcross and midfield players Rory Delap and Glenn Whelan have a realistic hope of playing against Liverpool.
Since then, Pulis has built his team cleverly and with the help of a small part of owner Peter Coates’ £750m fortune.
Players such as Bosnian goalkeeper Asmir Begovic (£3.25m), central defender Robert Huth (£5m), forward Kenwyne Jones (£8m) and winger Matthew Etherington (£2m) are the reason Stoke reached the FA Cup Final last season, are playing Europa League football this season and have a platform from which Pulis has attracted new players.
Essentially, the club have been a work in progress ever since Coates bought them back from Icelandic owners in 2006. This summer’s spending merely represents an attempt to move to the next level.
Coates, who had previously sold the club in 1997, admits that he repurchased ‘against my better judgment’
He has been compared with the late Jack Walker, whose locally-made money propelled Blackburn to the league title in 1995. Walker, of course, was not competing with cash from the Middle East, Eastern Europe and America back then but the comparisons are understandable.
Coates has made his fortune from his Bet365 company, Stoke-on-Trent’s largest single employer. An unwilling interviewee, his motives and hopes were articulated by Tony Scholes, Stoke’s chief executive.
Scholes said: ‘These latest fantastic deals are a statement of this club’s intent. We have made incredible strides over the past five years.’
How Pulis formulates his team this season will be interesting. Previously, he has relied largely upon Delap’s prodigious long throws and an efficiency from set pieces. Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger once likened their play to ‘rugby’.
Crouch’s arrival won’t discourage the sceptics from their view that Pulis knows only one way. However, Jerome is a different type of footballer. He will at least afford Stoke an alternative option.
Having started the season with draws against Chelsea and Norwich and a win at West Bromwich Albion, it is Stoke’s involvement in the Europa League that will perhaps hinder their chances in the League.
The club will enjoy trips to Kiev, Istanbul and Tel Aviv but that competition tends to sap the reserves and dealing with that will be one of Pulis’ greatest challenges.
Ten years ago, though, Stoke were playing in the third tier, their manager was called Gudjon Thordarson and they had just drawn at home to Huddersfield in front of 13,000 people.
Money - spent wisely - really does change everything.
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