[boundngag]

The current plight of Stoke City shows that, imho, if Arsenal under Wenger played like Arsenal under George Graham (without the success), he may well have been sacked by now. When initially promoted, the Britannia Stadium was like a fortress, it was an intimidating place for other teams to visit and the amount of points they gained at home guaranteed them Premier League survival.

This season, their fans haven't seemed to get behind them so much as they were expecting Tony Pulis to at least attempt to start playing a more attractive brand of football. This didn't happen, the fans became disillusioned with the team, the Britannia Stadium stopped being such an intimidating place for rival teams to play and their form plummeted. They have the worst form in the league this calendar year and with Sunderland, Aston Villa, Wigan, QPR and potentially Reading all improving, are in real danger of going down. Realistically, the survival points target could reach the 40 points area and Stoke would be unlikely to reach that on current form.