'We Didn't Expect This': Where Is It Going Wrong for Nathan Jones and Stoke?

 Nathan Jones’s Stoke have suffered six defeats in seven league games this season. Photograph: Dave Howarth/PA
Nathan Jones’s Stoke have suffered six defeats in seven league games this season. Photograph: Dave Howarth/PA
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'We Didn't Expect This': Where Is It Going Wrong for Nathan Jones and Stoke?

 Nathan Jones’s Stoke have suffered six defeats in seven league games this season. Photograph: Dave Howarth/PA
Nathan Jones’s Stoke have suffered six defeats in seven league games this season. Photograph: Dave Howarth/PA

Nathan Jones, a devout Christian, has several tattoos, from praying hands and the crucifixion on his left arm to Jesus Christ on his right bicep, and Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam across his back. Faith means a lot to Jones and a belief in the methods that have brought him this far is equally unwavering, despite six defeats in seven Championship matches this season. “I don’t know if I’ve trod on a black cat or something, but everything seems to be going against us,” Jones said, stumped, after losing to Bristol City last Saturday. At the final whistle, he briefly bowed his head and held his palms aloft to supporters in the Boothen End as if to say sorry, and thank you for sticking by him.

The most expensively assembled squad in the Championship – at more than £143m – sit bottom of the pile with one point. “I don’t ask for a ride in his [the owner’s] helicopter,” Jones said recently, “I ask for time.” Jones and the club’s hierarchy are confident the tide will turn but something has to change at Brentford on Saturday. Stoke, who have endured their worst start to a season for more than a century, have forgotten how winning feels; the last time they got three points was on 6 April and it is 200 days since victory before their home crowd. They have not won successive matches since October, when Gary Rowett was in charge and Dean Smith was still to replace Steve Bruce at Aston Villa.

Jones’s record of four wins from 30 matches (three from 27 in the league) is abysmal but the fact he has outlasted his predecessor Rowett, who won nine of his 29 matches (eight of 26 league games), speaks volumes for the support at boardroom level. The longstanding chairman, Peter Coates, a lifelong fan, recently told BBC Radio Stoke: “We didn’t expect to be where we are, we don’t expect to stay where we are and we’re working hard to change that. We’ve had a bad start [but] the world isn’t coming to an end.”

Last Saturday, 12 minutes in and with Stoke a goal to the good, Joe Allen picked up a red card which proved the catalyst for Bristol City’s win. It was a moment that can be added to a stack of setbacks and sores, along with the club captain Ryan Shawcross breaking a leg in pre-season. Jack Butland, left out of Gareth Southgate’s latest England squad, recently discussed a challenging period by fronting up following an error at Leeds, saying that it feels as if he is going to get “hit by lightning” every time he steps outside, but there is no scope for hard-luck stories. It has been a spectacular nosedive; in 2016 Stoke finished ninth in the Premier League for a third season in a row.

On the face of it, the Stoke squad is not short on quality. Even if Butland has been off-colour, they boast an international goalkeeper; the defender Bruno Martins Indi played in a World Cup semi-final five years ago; Allen and Sam Vokes are also Wales teammates; and Badou Ndiaye, a £14m signing who impressed last Saturday on his first appearance of the season, and Peter Etebo are key cogs for Senegal and Nigeria respectively. The starting XI last weekend cost more than £61m but that there are more than £50m-worth of players out on loan, including the club’s £18.3m record signing, Giannelli Imbula, and Kevin Wimmer, is perhaps the best indicator of where this malaise began. Then there is Benik Afobe, who, to rub salt into the wound, is enjoying a new lease of life at Bristol City. Others, such as Mame Biram Diouf, have not been allocated squad numbers.

Long before this summer Stoke, with the EFL’s profit and sustainability rules in mind, acknowledged the need to change tack having spent more than £100m on signings across the four previous transfer windows. They supported Jones, freshening things up with 10 new faces, the majority for no fee, and their biggest outlay was £4m for Tommy Smith, who captained Huddersfield to promotion in 2017. Lee Gregory, a free from Millwall, has been charged with leading the line but is yet to find the net.

Eight months ago Jones, who led Luton’s renaissance from the fourth tier to the second, was the fresh-faced coach with a burgeoning reputation, cherry-picked and determined to help the club back on the straight and narrow.

The reality is the post-relegation rebuild, and resulting cleansing process, has been a debilitating factor at Stoke for some time. That decay and rubble, Coates says, has been fully addressed but this summer was as much about trimming a bloated squad as anything, with players such as Ibrahim Afellay, Saido Berahino, Erik Pieters and Bojan Krkic moving on. “I had just left a group [at Luton] that basically would have run over their granny for a win,” said Jones, a former Brighton and Yeovil defender, last week. “When I came here [in January], that wasn’t quite the case.”

There has been no quick fix. Jones has been frank and when it was put to him that Stoke are in a worse position than when he took over with the team 14th, he replied: “If it was just results they wanted to improve, they probably could have gone for something else. The club is in a better position, the squad is in a better position, there is a better atmosphere around but, yeah, we are in a worse position in the league. Everything else, I feel we’re in a better position.”

The Guardian Sport



Swiatek Reaches her 1st Wimbledon Semifinal, Will Face Bencic Next

09 July 2025, United Kingdom, London: Polish tennis player Iga Swiatek celebrates victory over Russia's Liudmila Samsonova during their women's singles quarter-final match on day ten of the 2025 Wimbledon Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. Photo: Jordan Pettitt/PA Wire/dpa
09 July 2025, United Kingdom, London: Polish tennis player Iga Swiatek celebrates victory over Russia's Liudmila Samsonova during their women's singles quarter-final match on day ten of the 2025 Wimbledon Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. Photo: Jordan Pettitt/PA Wire/dpa
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Swiatek Reaches her 1st Wimbledon Semifinal, Will Face Bencic Next

09 July 2025, United Kingdom, London: Polish tennis player Iga Swiatek celebrates victory over Russia's Liudmila Samsonova during their women's singles quarter-final match on day ten of the 2025 Wimbledon Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. Photo: Jordan Pettitt/PA Wire/dpa
09 July 2025, United Kingdom, London: Polish tennis player Iga Swiatek celebrates victory over Russia's Liudmila Samsonova during their women's singles quarter-final match on day ten of the 2025 Wimbledon Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. Photo: Jordan Pettitt/PA Wire/dpa

Iga Swiatek reached the Wimbledon semifinals for the first time with a 6-2, 7-5 victory over 19th-seeded Liudmila Samsonova that went from a stroll to a bit of a struggle in the late stages Wednesday.

"Even though I’m in the middle of the tournament, I already got goosebumps after this win," said Swiatek, who will face unseeded Belinda Bencic on Thursday for a spot in the final. “I’m super happy and super proud of myself.”

Bencic beat No. 7 Mirra Andreeva 7-6 (3), 7-6 (2) to reach her first Grand Slam semifinal since the 2019 U.S. Open. The other semifinal is No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka against No. 13 Amanda Anisimova; they advanced with wins Tuesday.

Swiatek is a five-time major champion, with four of those titles on the red clay of the French Open, and the other on the hard courts of the US Open. She's also twice been a semifinalist at the hard-court Australian Open.

The grass courts of the All England Club always had given her the most trouble as a pro, even though she did claim a junior championship there in 2018. In her five appearances in the Wimbledon women's bracket before this year, she had made it as far as the quarterfinals just once, exiting in that round in 2023.

But the 24-year-old from Poland is enjoying a career-best run on the slick surface, thanks in part to being more comfortable with the footing required.
“I, for sure, feel like I really worked hard to progress here on this surface,” The Associated Press quoted Swiatek as saying. “So this year, I feel like I can just work with it and work with myself. I’ll just keep doing that.”

Before the start of Wimbledon, Swiatek was the runner-up in Bad Homburg, Germany, her first final at a tournament played on grass — and her first final at any event in more than a year, a drought that resulted in her falling from the No. 1 ranking and being seeded No. 8 at the All England Club.

Her rough stretch included a one-month ban last season in a doping case after an investigation determined a failed out-of-competition drug test was caused by an unintentional contamination of non-prescription medication for issues with jet lag and sleeping. On the court, a semifinal loss to Sabalenka at Roland-Garros last month ended Swiatek's 26-match French Open winning streak.

Swiatek led by a set and 3-0 in the second against Samsonova, who was appearing in her first Grand Slam quarterfinal.

Soon, though, it was 4-all, then 5-all. But Swiatek held for a 6-5 lead, then broke to end it, and a smile spread across her face.

“I’ll just recover today, try not to celebrate too much, but already focus on the next one,” Swiatek said. “Prepare in the evening, and I’ll be ready tomorrow.”

Bencic, who at 28 is a decade older than Andreeva, is competing in her second major tournament since returning to the tour after giving birth to a daughter, Bella, in April 2024.

“I’m very proud, actually. All my career, I didn’t say it a lot to myself, but after having Bella, I really say it to myself every day,” Bencic said. “We are just enjoying life on tour with Bella, traveling. It’s been beautiful to create these memories together. And obviously, to play great is so amazing, but for me, it’s a bonus. I’m generally just really happy to be able to play again.”