BURGER RELISHES NEW ERA
Midfielder insists Potters must keep focus after impressive start to Schumacher’s reign VALIANTS SIGN PREMIER LEAGUE DEFENDER: PAGE 46
STOKE City stand-in captain Wouter Burger is setting no big target other than picking up more wins – but with new belief that the squad is growing on and off the pitch.
Stoke are unbeaten in seven league games as they head back to the bet365 Stadium on Saturday to take on Tony Mowbray’s Birmingham. It has pulled the team away from the wrong end of the Championship but still with a sixpoint gap to the top half and eight points to the top six.
There are 19 matches remaining and 57 available points to make anything possible over the next four months, but Burger insisted: “I think the most important thing is that you don’t look too far ahead.
“It’s the same thing whether it’s improving as a player or improving as a team. You have to make shortterm goals and that is winning more games. If we start winning more games, we are going to climb the table.
“If I said that I want us to be in eighth position by the end of the season, that would make no sense because it’s too far in the future.
“It’s just really important that as each game comes, we make sure we are on it, we make sure we are well prepared, that we make sure that we get more wins because we think, in the end, that’s something that has been killing us a little bit.
“We have had many good games or ok games where we have lost in the last minute or given away the win. If you count all those points we would already be higher in the league table.
“So we have to make sure that, short-term, we start winning way more games than we did before, that we are focusing every day on the training ground, in meetings we have, talking with each other and I have that feeling that the group is growing on the pitch and off it.
“It’s a nice feeling to have but we have to keep the streak going and start to win more games. Last weekend when you win 1-0 and you walk off the pitch it feels so nice so I want to have that feeling a little bit more often than before.”
Burger has taken up the armband since the last game of December as Josh Laurent (ankle) and then Lynden Gooch (calf ) have been consigned to the treatment room.
The 22-year-old is enjoying life under new head coach Steven Schumacher and what is being detailed on the training pitch.
“I think the message from the moment he came in was just really clear,” he said.
“He had something on his mind, he has a way of playing and we have to do what he wants. In the end, he’s just repeating everything every week a lot and for us it’s super clear because you know what he wants. So there are things you can learn as a team if you have the right intensity of doing and the right mentality of doing it.
“From what I have seen over the last few weeks, everyone is picking it up really, really well.
“It’s just working it out but football is sometimes also hard to explain. From my perspective, there hasn’t been a really big change in my game but, for some reason, I am playing way better in the last couple of weeks than I was before. I don’t think I played bad before but everything is working better.
“That has to do with the team playing better. “If you play a normal ball to my team-mate who does something good with it, I look better. Take the assist against Birmingham. The ball is a good ball but if Vidigal doesn’t score, I have no assist.”