Late Late Signings Show From The Potters

We got brilliant coverage from Sky Sports News yesterday as the club maximized exposure, almost on a par with Manchester City who topped off an 'x' billion pound Abu Dhabi takeover at lunchtime by buying Brazilian striker Robinho from Real Madrid for a modest £32m or so in the evening!

A live reporter at The Britannia Stadium virtually all day (as it got later, with a happy group of Stokies gathered round him),regularly kept us abreast of events ( to quote Tony Pulis recently) " at the bottom of the Premiership food chain".

The dreamers have had us buying in all sorts of players for weeks. What we got was a pretty sensible package, three players in,bringing total spend to something in the region of £20m. Sensible too you could argue (with something like £42 m coming in) because there is the wage bill to consider and maybe additional reinforcements required in January.

Early evening saw the return of former captain Danny Higginbotham seemingly happy to be back from Sunderland. Higginbotham,29, has a three year contract,the fee is undisclosed (but likely to be close to the sum Sunderland paid us for his services twelve months ago).Happy that he was wanted at a club he knows well and still in the Premiership!

The real late show saw Crystal Palace's England U 21 midfielder Tom Soares,22, travel up to Stoke for talks and a medical, with the initial £1.5m four year deal being signed and sealed just before the midnight deadline.

Although the announcement was made near midnight I was not at all clear when the four year £2m deal for Michael Tongue was completed.On Radio Stoke this morning Tony Pulis comments would suggest that things had been developing in the background on this one. 25 years old, midfielder Tongue has his best years ahead of him. When Sheffield United were in the Prem recently he certainly showed up well in their televised matches.


All three players have Premiership experience to bring to the squad.

The one's that got away? Ledley is still at Cardiff even though Stoke upped their offer to £6m.The player was clearly keen to join us but..... watch that space in January! Striker Henri Camara from Wigan was a late prospect but agreement could not be reached