This Saturday afternoon brings us a real ‘six-pointer’ in south Yorkshire with second from bottom club, Barnsley, taking on bottom side Stoke City, with a precious three points up for grabs for both teams in this early relegation battle at the base of the Championship.
Barnsley’s return to the second tier following last season’s promotion from League One was a triumphant one as The Tykes registered a surprise 1-0 home win against Fulham, but that’s where Barnsley’s success has ended so far this term.
The hosts have subsequently slumped to an alarming 14-match sequence without a win in the Championship, which includes 6 draws and 8 defeats, and has already resulted in a managerial casualty as former coach, Daniel Stendel, was shown the door after Barnsley’s poor start to the season.
Barnsley are joint second in terms of number of draws so far in this season’s Championship with no fewer than 6 stalemates to their name from their 15 matches played so far in the second tier.
4 of these 6 draws have been registered on home turf at Oakwell and they’ll be up against last season’s ‘draw specialists’ in Stoke City this Saturday.
Onto Stoke City, and they too dispensed with the services of former manager, Nathan Jones, after he failed in his bid to lift The Potters out of the bottom three in the Championship, and indeed managed to record just 6 wins out of his total of 38 matches in charge of Stoke.
The Stoke board had been extremely patient with the former Luton Town boss but back-to-back defeats to Sheffield Wednesday and Millwall were the straws that broke the proverbial came’s back and Jones was shown the door.
Former player, Rory Delap, has taken over the reigns on a temporary basis but he oversaw Stoke’s recent 2-0 defeat at home to promotion contenders, West Brom, so this trip to Barnsley on Saturday means that Stoke are looking to avoid a fourth league defeat on the trot.
A brief revival saw Stoke register back-to-back wins against Swansea City and Fulham before Jones’s sacking, but the visitors have since return to type and away from home, have lost 5 of their 7 matches to date on their travels.
This fixture is therefore between two very out of form teams and a dour stalemate could be on the cards as a result as neither team will want to lose this one.