It’s a phrase that’s now engrained in English football folklore. Part praise, part distain, it’s perhaps the biggest gift the city of Stoke has given English culture in recent years.
Initially coined in 2010 to suggest that the likes of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo couldn’t hack it at the then notoriously difficult Britannia Stadium, the term has lived on ever since amongst fans of all teams.
"Can they do it on a wet, Wednesday night in Stoke?"
But what does Tony Pulis, who was Stoke City manager at the time it was coined, think? Is he offended by such a bank-handed compliment?
“I don’t give a damn!” he told UCFB with a big smile on his face. “We were what we were, as I’ve said before.”
Speaking exclusively to UCFB as part of the LMA Insight Series, the former Potters boss described the necessity of his teams’ performances in their formative Premier League years.
He said: “We got promoted from the Championship [in 2008] and I don’t think we were even in the betting for promotion. We had the twelfth or thirteenth highest wage bill, so we came from nowhere to get promoted.”
Describing the initial journey to the Premier League, Pulis added: “We had to think out of the box, we had to be clever, we had to be astute with what we did and careful with what we did to make sure that we maintained Premier League football. What we did at Stoke - we built a brand new training facility, then we got category A for academy football, went to a cup final, went to the latter stages in Europe, signed some wonderful players – big name players as well.”
Pulis’ stay in the Stoke dugout lasted seven years, and when he left the club in 2013 he had established them as a Premier League outfit. But as Pulis told UCFB, the early days of being a top flight club weren’t easy.
The Welshman said: “What we had to do was get through those first two years by hook or by crook, I made my mind up that we would do it whichever way we could with the resources that we had. This perception of us being this big, ugly, direct horrible side that’s just got one thing – a long throw – really put a lot of people off coming to Stoke and our home form in the first couple of years kept us in the Premier League.”
