Stoke, 21 February, 2009

Off , then, to Stoke once more. They've changed the hacks' car park. To a more handy or less handy location for those of us who lug a too-heavy laptop across the country? Go on, take a guess.
As it is they're friendly enough - although the esteemed writer who has a mini-tantrum when the laissez faire press office try to shut shop and go home early certainly disagrees - the pies are defiantly average, but the mushy peas are almost northern.
There's plenty people I know and they're all full of gossip, none of it good and more of it fact than actual gossip. It's as if we're generals in the Shah's army wondering how the new order will treat us at the very moment the Ayatollah Khomeini is asking for a window seat at his Paris check in. Nobody knows where this is going to end.
Yet, still some of the older, jollier, more haphazard ways remain: someone from another paper calls and asks if I'm at the Emirates since he's having trouble making it on time and might I take some notes for him. I would have done, too.
Anyway, for 75 minutes, Stoke City's clash with Portsmouth is a shocker, a genuine horror show, a temple of ineptitude (see also the misspelling of my name on the web site) and I spend most of it in a zen-like trance of confusion, wondering exactly how Danny Pugh managed to stumble into the Premier League.
Four goals in 15 minutes changes everything. At 5.35 with a 6pm deadline looming, the office is on the line asking - when I say asking I mean “demanding” - for more words. I've asked that lugubrious soul Paul Hart why his team had so little ambition when they were so patently superior. He answers at length, making eye contact, but insists that's the approach to take at Stoke (no it's not, it's really not). Surely they won't give him the job, although if I owned a Premier League club, he'd run my youth set up.
And, since I'm so chipper and adrenaline-fuelled, it's also time to ask Tony Pulis whether conceding a late, late equaliser means that, for all their guts in going ahead after falling behind, his team are a little bit fragile. "I wouldn't say 'fragile'," he insists, before sort of shrugging his shoulders and noting that their late concession was just one of those things. Which, I suppose it is, although it keeps happening too often to them.
Will they survive? Perhaps, but they’ll finish below Portsmouth.