Stoke have ´turned their season around´ – Hughes

Mark Hughes claimed Stoke City have “turned their season around” after a 1-1 draw with West Ham at London Stadium extended their Premier League unbeaten run to six games.

The Potters fell behind to Glenn Whelan’s second-half own goal, before Bojan Krcic took advantage of an Adrian blunder to rescue a point. 

The point lifts Stoke to 11th in the Premier League table, further away from the relegation zone where they spent time earlier in the season with no wins from their opening seven league games. 

Hughes said that was a false position and that his side are back playing attractive football.

“We came here with a little bit of confidence, in good nick, looking to ideally get a fourth win on the trot. We werent quite able to do that but we’ve kept our run going,” the Welshman told Sky Sports.

“That’s six games unbeaten in the Premier League which is something. It is difficult to get runs going. We’ve clearly turned our season around.

“A lot was made of our opening three or four games where we had a really poor performance against Palace and were well beaten and maybe a half against Tottenham where we weren’t as good as we can be.

“Apart from that we were always in the other games so we knew we weren’t far away from getting back to the level we know we’re capable of and the last few weeks have proved that.”

Hughes said Stoke deserved at least a point from the game after falling behind and praised the contribution of goalscoring substitute Bojan, who has lost his place in the Stoke starting line-up to Joe Allen since his arrival from Liverpool. 

“We felt hard done by clearly, because at that point we’d never been any under pressure and we were always trying to take the game to West Ham,” added Hughes.

“We had to go for it then, Peter Crouch came on to good effect and Bojan equalised with a fantastic finish.”