1) When push comes to shove, it’s another valuable three points on the board. This isn’t Strictly Come Dancing - you don’t get rewarded for style or grace. Let’s be under no illusions though, for 75 minutes, Stoke were appalling and scarcely deserved their narrow victory. The first half performance was absolutely abominable and we rode our luck in giving away a needless penalty which was fortunately spurned by Kevin Prince-Boateng, who couldn’t have taken a worse spot kick if he’d been wearing his mother’s stilettos. Had that gone in, it would have been hard to see a way back, even in the 6th minute, given how we were set up. Ninth in the table or otherwise, the tactics HAVE to change. There’s a disturbing, Brian Little type vibe at the moment where we’re playing poorly and somehow getting away with it. Little’s luck ran out, and so will this Stoke team’s unless we change how we approach games. For the third consecutive home game our midfield sat unnecessarily deep and invited pressure from a lesser team. There can be no justification for handing the initiative to a team bottom of the league, especially when you’re playing at home. It took Stoke 36 minutes to register their first shot on target - James Beattie’s meek free kick which was comfortably saved.

One thing I don’t understand is our regression. At the tail end of last season, with a midfield of Etherington, Delap, Whelan and Lawrence, we were excellent at home, pressing the opposition, creating chances and looking to kill teams off. The approach paid dividends. Between January and May the Potters dropped just nine points at the Britannia Stadium with this midfield line up. This term, we’ve suddenly gone into our shell, picking three defensive midfielders and allowing visitors, even rubbish ones like Portsmouth, the freedom of the Brit to dictate the pace of games. Why are we more cautious now when we have a stronger squad than last season? It defies logic, it defies explanation, and it’s making for some uncomfortable viewing. Home games aren’t as much fun as they used to be, and it’s a problem very much of our own inexplicable making.

2) “Rubbish is perhaps too harsh a term to describe Pompey. They’re a poor team with myriad problems on and off the pitch, and will surely be in the relegation mix come May. However, they do have some tidy players, such as Kaboul at the back and the effervescent loanee O’Hara in midfield, and they were easily the better team in the first half. Paul Hart is characterised in the media as a dead man walking but he’s a wily old fox and has galvanised the South Coast club with an organised back line and a siege mentality that might serve them well. Their problem is that they don’t have anyone to score any goals. Former Stoke target Dindane flatters to deceive and seems to need about 8 chances to score one goal. Piquonne and Kanu never really got a sniff. Tommy Smith and Danny Webber are Championship players. It’s hard to see where they might find a goalscorer in January, and hard to see where they’re going to find the goals to keep them up.

3) Ultimately it was that quality in the final third that separated the teams. Ricardo Fuller, who endured a fairly unhappy time at Portsmouth five years ago, had a poor game - partly through an uncharacteristic idleness and partly through a lack of service. However, when he was finally roused into action, possibly by the roar of the crowd which heralded Tuncay’s imminent arrival, he delivered a finish of sheer class which made all the difference. It was the Jamaican’s first goal of the season but his unpredictability, skill and pace remain Stoke’s main creative threat. How Portsmouth, for whom Fuller scored just once in 31 games in an injury hit spell, could do with a player of his ability now.

4) Andy Wilkinson was tremendous and richly deserved his Man of the Match award. It was refreshing to see an out and out full back’s display in a Tony Pulis team and Wilko - a centre back by trade, has made the transition far more comfortably than the likes of Huth, Collins and Higginbotham. Wilko exploded several of the myths propagated by his critics today. He was defensively strong, making countless timely interceptions and interventions to turn defence into attack, and got forward himself often as well. The idea that Huth uses the ball better than him was also firmly put to bed as Wilkinson linked up well on several occasions with Lawrence and Fuller while Huth was reduced to hacking the ball up field to nobody in particular. The icing on the cake of Wilko’s performance was his astonishing 70 yard run, beating four men in the process before firing inches over, which would have brought the house down and wrapped up goal of the season had it gone in.

Huth, reverting to his favoured position of centre half, was solid enough but looked slow and slightly clumsy at times and did not, for me anyway, really do enough to convince that he should be Abdoulaye Faye’s replacement long-term. When considering the team to face Blackburn next week, it should be the German who steps aside to make way for our returning captain, with Wilko retaining the right back berth.

5) I accept that Danny Collins has plus points and that Matthew Etherington’s fine form (which continued today) probably has much to do with the Welshman’s presence in the side. However, I don’t accept the peddling of this notion that he’s better on the ball than Danny Higginbotham - once again Collins was guilty of giving the ball away cheaply in dangerous areas - and unlike Higgy he continues to be a defensive liability. Collins today played like someone who’d never played left back before. He frequently went walkabout, drawn like a moth into the centre whilst leaving the left flank exposed. He does have some strings to his bow, but the cons are still outweighing the pros.

6) It doesn’t take an expert to see that the introduction of Liam Lawrence on the hour changed the game. Credit to the manager for making the change which helped to win the game, but in reality it only served to highlight the pure folly of consigning him to the bench in the first place. With Lawrence on the pitch, Stoke’s attacking threat magnifies many times over. He has the trickery to pose problems for defenders, the vision to play the clever through ball, the confidence to shoot from anywhere and the quality of delivery to cause chaos with crosses and dead balls. As he has shown in the past for Stoke and as he showed in two Herculean world cup play off displays for Ireland in their ill-fated loss to Thierryball, he also mucks in defensively and covers every inch of that right hand side. What then, does Pulis think Rory Delap brings to that wing that Lawrence lacks? Once again, Rory toiled out wide to zero effect. However, he looked infinitely better, as he always does, when moved into central midfield, helping to drive the team forward in its attempts to break the Pompey resolve. The improvement with Delap in the centre and Lawrence out on the right was astronomical, so what possible reason can there be for not playing them in these positions from the start? It’s a question that few people seem to have put Tony Pulis on the spot with, but it’s the one question which needs definitively answering pretty damn soon.

7) For Salif Diao, it was a case of open, pour, be yourself once more. After a string of commanding displays in the holding role, the Diao we saw last season made an unwelcome return. Off the pace, conceding countless unnecessary free kicks, with his passing, which had much improved, back to its dismal, wasteful worst, Salif just wasn’t at the races. However, Diao isn’t entirely to blame, as he shouldn’t have been selected in the first place. When playing a rigid 4-4-1-1, at home, to the team rock bottom of the league, is there really any need to play a deep-lying, screening defensive midfielder of the Diao mould? He is at his most effective when deployed away from home against a big team - but he’s redundant in this kind of clash. Against Portsmouth, the change which ultimately reversed Stoke’s fortunes had as much to do with Diao’s removal as it did Lawrence’s arrival.

8) His detractors will point to his physics-defying howler of a miss, but Mama Sidibe made, for the most part, a positive impact during his second half cameo. Looking far fitter than he did in his last appearance against Wolves, Sidibe justified his manager’s fulsome midweek praise. He won far more in the air than the lost-looking James Beattie and showed a better touch than he gets credit for with an excellent, fluid chest control and lay off to Etherington which led to Fuller’s winner. With Sidibe, however, it’s a Catch 22 situation. As long as he is in the team, any evolution from the long ball is out of the question. A regular starting berth for Sidibe constitutes a backwards step. However, he demonstrated today that he is still relevant and has a contribution to make. As an impact sub, and maybe away from home, Mama Sidibe - a player who deserves acres of credit for his role in getting us to the promised land - can still have a say in Stoke City’s future.

9) I’ve been one of Dean Whitehead’s fiercest critics. I thought he was, again, fairly anonymous today, but he did show glimpses of what he’s capable of with a couple of meaty challenges. What was most interesting was the time he made a darting run through midfield before spraying a tidy ball out to Lawrence. It suggested that there might be some merit to the argument that our central midfielders are constrained by our system. This was the parting shot of Seyi Olofinjana, as quoted by Louise Taylor in a stimulating article in Saturday’s Observer, available here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/nov/21/stoke-city-tony-pulis-tac...

The idea has also been indirectly supported by Whitehead himself, who admitted in a recent interview with the club’s magazine that he was struggling to adapt to what was expected of him as a midfielder in Stoke’s overall shape. Assistant Manager Mark O’Connor furthered the concept in an interview in The Sentinel on Friday in which he suggested: “there may be games where we might start to release him a bit more, but not at the moment”.

I’m not sure I entirely buy into this theory - Diao, Delap, Pugh, Amdy Faye and even young Arismendi have had more of an influence to date - it begs the question of why we spent £5m on a player to play in a role to which he is unaccustomed? Could we not have signed a player to whom sitting deep protecting the back four came naturally?

10) It’s still impossible to judge how the Stoke City/Tuncay relationship is going to pan out as long as he’s reduced to the role of supporting extra. He has, by turns, looked excellent - against Spurs and Sunderland - and poor, against Chelsea and Wolves. Today, he looked lightweight and unable to grasp what the manager expected him to do in the “Fuller” role - as the audible, Hoefkens-esque haranguing Pulis was dishing out to him illustrated. Some have criticised the decision to bring Sidibe on before the Turk, but these conditions were undoubtedly better suited to a target man rather than a more nuanced smaller footballer, and so it proved. Nevertheless, it still doesn’t seem clear where Sanli is going to fit in, and Pulis still seems to have no idea either. Our system would not allow Tuncay to flourish in the hole, while the manager has no apparent intention of playing him out wide. I had thought that he might be best suited, with his pace and skill, to play as the furthermost striker, but his tendency to drop back and forage for the ball suggests that he’s struggling to adapt to this. Louise Taylor’s Observer piece implies that Sanli was signed at the behest of the Chairman, rather than the manager, and the treatment of the Turkish captain to date doesn’t exactly refute that suggestion.

At the end of the day we’re still ninth and everything remains superficially rosy in the garden. It’s a bit of a concern though, that there is a strong case to argue that our strongest XI includes not a single one of the £20m worth of reinforcements enlisted over the summer to help us “push on”.

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