Stoke City’s season has been very much hit and miss and a statistic which emerged this week is a sad indictment on the English game.
The Potters let a 2-0 lead slip to draw 2-2 with 10-man Leicester City last time out, a game which in many ways sums up their topsy turvy season.
Mark Hughes’ side are 11th in the Premier League table after 17 games with five wins, six draws and six defeats to their name so far.
Approaching the halfway stage of the season, though, a damning statistic about Stoke has emerged which reflects badly on the English game.
Stoke City manager Mark Hughes with Stoke City’s Xherdan Shaqiri
First founded in 1863 the Potters are officially the second oldest professional football club behind Notts County.
The Potters are also one of the founding members of the Football League and alongside West Ham are one of the few top flight clubs still owned by an Englishman.
Stoke are an English footballing institution. So it is somewhat indicative of the problems the English national side face then that following the game with Leicester the club has now gone 55 games without an English scorer.
The influx of foreign players to the English game since the advent of the Premier League back in 1992 is the source of much debate when it comes to the failings of the national team.
Marko Arnautovic
Some argue the foreign players have enhanced our game and made us better while others feel too many average overseas players are taking the place of up and coming Englishmen.
Whatever your view there is no escaping it is a worrying sign of the times that Stoke City, the club built at the heart of the country’s pottery industry over a 150 years ago, the club of Stanley Matthews has got to a stage where they can effectively go a season and a half without an English goalscorer.
Indeed Stoke only have five English players in their first team squad, two of whom are goalkeepers so Hughes’ options are limited in that respect.
Peter Coates is a proud Englishman and the statistic must grate on him.
The club have been linked with the likes of Saido Berahino in recent times so the intention is there to do something about it.
But the truth is as long as the club is scoring and doing well many fans and managers nowadays simply don’t care how many English players they have coming through in this increasingly money orientated and results driven business.
Those same supporters are often the first to bemoan the national side’s continued failure at the highest level.
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