Stoke City stayed up on the final day of the 2024/25 season. This season sees them going through the motions in April, nothing to play for. This campaign, Stoke have been in the top two for 43 days, the third-most of any club. A promising start, hampered by injuries to key players, but ultimately capital ‘P’ Progress has been the story the club is telling. “We’re on the right track, just a shame about the devastating loss of Divin Mubama, who you definitely all really liked”.

I’m sure Sisyphus felt he was making progress too. It’s true that injuries – particularly to Johansson and Tchamadeu – have been costly (especially given the Simkin ‘experiment’) and it’s also true that Stoke aren’t in a relegation mix with Oxford and a generationally awful Leicester City. But I’ve worn out my gratitude that things could be worse and I’m tired of ascribing any value to mediocrity.

We are, once again, a poorly run club, with poor tactics, poor players and the ‘progress’ we see in terms of the league table has been the slipstream of a fortunate couple of months at the beginning of the season.

Jon Walters is a charlatan who has no business overseeing a Championship football club. Mark Robins has a squad of players he clearly can’t stand and is seemingly punishing them for being horrible to look at by playing the ugliest, dourest tactics he can. The kind of tactics that will heroically pick up just enough points to be able to push the ‘progress’ narrative. Thank you 25/26 Sheffield Wednesday for being in this division, by the way. Our best performer this season in terms of goals and assists cuts an increasingly frustrated figure from right-back. The midfield offers next to no creativity, no matter what combination of panicky plodders play there.

Defensively, it’s been good. Thanks largely to Phillips, a defender embodying Michael Caine in A Muppet’s Christmas Carol, playing his role with poise and class while muppets fart about around him. Up front, no striker will ever be good again at Stoke City. The bet365 stadium is where strikers go to die – as if haunted by the ghost of Maggie Thatcher.

But none of this is the fault of the players, they’ve been poorly used by Robins, acquired by Walters – who’s been given his glorified milk monitor status by Jon Coates – the overseer of coming up to ten years of appalling mediocrity. The buck will stop with him.

Maybe yet another summer rebuild will help, maybe Walters will do some good recruitment. Maybe, but if these are the foundations we’re building on, collapse is inevitable.