Player Focus: Has Bojan Finally Found a Home from Home at Stoke?
Barcelona, Roma, Milan, Ajax… and Stoke. There was something almost comically incongruous about Mark Hughes signing the 24-year-old in the summer, almost as though this were some kind of experiment to see if one of Barça’s tippy-tappy tiki-taka merchants actually could do it on a wet Wednesday at the Britannia. Bojan, after all, is only 1.70m tall and weighs just 65kg: what place could he have in a side that has remained synonymous, even in the second season after the departure of Tony Pulis, with robust, direct football?
Six minutes into Sunday’s game against Tottenham, what he can add became obvious. Stoke’s game plan was clear: rapid transitions after winning the ball, looking to expose the space behind the Spurs full-backs. When Steven Sidwell dispossessed Andros Townsend on halfway, it turned out there was space centrally as well. Bojan ran 30 yards without meeting a challenge and then, as Younes Kaboul finally made a move towards him, smacked a low shot past Hugo Lloris. As Mark Hughes commented afterwards, Bojan is adept at getting shots off early.
“Bojan was doing what he did in pre-season. At the start of the season it was a bit of a shock to him in the Premier League," Hughes went on, acknowledging that the scepticism as to whether Barcelona’s slight technicians could handle the rough and tumble of the Premier League has some basis in fact. “We just had to bide our time a bit but he is ready now and the quality of his goal shows the technical ability he has."
This was just Bojan’s fourth start in the league for Stoke and, while he will come up against defences that give him a much tougher time than Tottenham’s, the signs were good. “You sense he is fully integrated into the Premier League and we are really pleased for him because he's a great kid with fantastic technical ability,” said Hughes. “He's going to affect games in that manner from now until the end of the season, I'm sure of that. I thought tactically him and Mame Diouf played a big part because they had jobs to do off the ball and thankfully they did it to perfection, along with many others. We got people back into shape quickly and looked to counter-attack, and they couldn't deal with it.”
It was a similar story when Spurs lost to Liverpool, a front pair splitting to attack the flanks, creating space for runners from midfield to pair in the centre. It’s that sort of work that Bojan can’t have been used to at the Camp Nou, but the directness of his running suggests he ought to be good at it. Already at Stoke – from an admittedly small sample size – he has begun to show his relish for ball-winning, something that wasn’t necessarily in evidence elsewhere.
So far this season, Bojan has averaged 1.7 tackles and 0.7 interceptions per game. Although at Ajax he was up at 0.6 interceptions per game in the league and at Roma at 0.5, he has never come close to matching that number of tackles, his previous best being the 0.5 per game he managed at Roma and Ajax. At Barcelona, he was on 0.2 in his first season and 0.3 in his second.
He’s also dribbling more per game, passing more per game and shooting more per game than ever before. That role as the second striker seems to suit him: he can be more expressive, more individualistic than at Barcelona. The philosophy there, under Pep Guardiola at least, was about abnegation, players submitting to the system (unless they were Lionel Messi). That can produce extraordinary results, of course but it may be that in a different sort of team, Bojan can take more responsibility and flourish. At 24, he’s getting to an age when he really needs to start delivering on his potential. Stoke may seem an unlikely venue, but it looks like it's working so far.
What did you make of Bojan's performance at White Hart Lane on Sunday? Let us know in the comments below
