Reaction from the bet365 Stadium as Stoke City run out 4-1 winners over Rotherham United
New-look Stoke City racked up their biggest opening day win in 20 years with an emphatic performance to brush aside Rotherham.
Stoke have struggled badly in home games of this nature of the last couple of seasons but, armed with eight new signings in their starting XI – and handing out three more debuts from the bench – ran out 4-1 winners at the bet365 Stadium.
Two of the new boys, including one returnee, were on the scoresheet. Ki-Jana Hoever
Jacob Brown made it four after Lee Peltier had pulled a goal back and, to round off a dream afternoon, 16-year-old midfielder Sol Sidibe was then introduced as the youngest player to make a league appearance for Stoke in 65 years.
thrashingAlex Neil said: “Obviously there’s been a lot of talk. We’ve done a lot in the window. I think that it’s easy to talk about change and resets and all that sort of stuff but ultimately the proof is in the pudding when you go on the pitch.
“So what we didn’t want to do after all that is then let ourselves down and let everybody else down. I thought it was vitally important we played well today, but we also won and we won convincingly. You’re never going to say that before the game but that’s what you’re hoping for.
“We’ve scored four goals at home, could have scored more because I thought we had a lot of chances today, to have six debutants and bring three others on, it really is remarkable for some of the lads in terms of what they’ve done.
“Some of the boys have been in less than a week and two or three of them started, playing against a team that we found really, really difficult to beat last year, and I thought we won convincingly.”
There were only two survivors from the starting line-up on the last day of last season – re-signed Ben Pearson and newly-appointed club captain Josh Laurent – as Neil gave Mark Travers, Enda Stevens, Michael Rose, Daniel Johnson, Vidigal and Ryan Mmaee their first starts.
No mean feat, then, to throw together so many new faces and to win so handsomely.
“I think it’s a compliment to the coaching staff and how they were set up,” said Neil.
“But also I think it’s a massive compliment to them about how intelligent they are as players, to be able to take that information and carry it out, come to a different country, working with a different coach, working with different players and getting that balance.
“I don’t think that can be underestimated from the players’ perspective. I thought they’ve done that brilliantly.
“Andre Vidigal had only done 30 minutes to this point today and he’s churned out a pretty much a full game – because the game lasted about 110 minutes.”
Hoever showed a knack for scoring from right-back during his time on loan from Wolves last season and this time around he latched onto an excellent cross from Josh Laurent and lashed a volley into the top of the net.
Neil said: “He’s really effective, he’s really athletic. There are still areas of his game that he can improve on but I thought it was a great start for him and there’s not many players who can take that on that volley and put it on the roof of the net. He certainly can.
“So it was an excellent start for us and that gave us a platform to go and be really sort of dominant in that first half.”
Left winger Vidigal got the next when he tapped in Ben Wilmot’s header after a Johnson free-kick then he crashed in the third after a Ryan Mmaee shot had been parried to the edge of the box.
“He was good,” said Neil. “He carries a threat. He gets in the middle of the box and he can score a goal, as he did today, I thought it was really unfortunate with his header at the end. It was a great ball in from Ki-Jana and the keeper makes a wonderful save.
“He carries a threat all the time. There’s some wide players that run up and down in straight lines and they look nice, but they never get in where it hurts and score goals.
“I think today, with Jacob on one side and him on the other, both of them have got that aspect to get in the middle of the box and I think that is vitally important for us to make sure we’ve got good numbers for our front players.
“As you can see today with Andre, he wants to get in the middle of the goal.”
Rotherham changed shape to a 4-3-3 and brought on Peltier at half-time, with Peltier scoring almost immediately from a messy corner, but their cause was not helped when Cafu collected two bookings from card-happy ref John Busby.
Brown completed the scoring with a close range finish after another Wilmot flick from a Johnson corner and Wesley, Chiquinho and Sidibe were introduced for their first appearances in the closing stages.
Exactly the start Neil had wanted but he admitted: “Yeah. Listen, it’s not all going to go that way. It’s easy for me to sit here with a big cheesy grin on my face because it went well but there are going to be difficult days that will come along. There’s going to be hard matches, there’s going to be incidents when we don’t do as well.
“But what I think we can see is how much it meant to the players. I think we can see that everybody’s pushing and trying and fighting to try to be as successful as we can be this year.
“I hope the fans can see that and I thought the fans’ backing today for the players was brilliant and that makes a big, big difference.”
