In February, James Beattie became the first ever Stoke player to score more than once in a league match, as his brace helped the Potters to a 2-2 draw against Portsmouth. The striker repeated the trick today, with a happier outcome, his first two strikes of the season earning his side a hard-fought win over struggling West Ham. As against Pompey,his first goal came from the penalty spot, after former Hammers player Matthew Etherington, who received warm applause from the travelling fans in the oxymoronically named Seat Stand, was brought down, but Matthew Upson’s header levelled the scores. Beattie’s scrappy tap-in twenty minutes from time completed the scoring though, and was enough to seal Stoke’s first league win since August.

Despite pressure from some fans to make changes, Stoke manager Tony Pulis named the same starting eleven that earned a good point at Everton thirteen days ago. Thomas Sorensen, whose clean sheet against Sweden last week helped Denmark confirm their automatic qualification for next summer’s World Cup, retained his familiar place in goal, while centre backs Robert Huth, Ryan Shawcross, Abdoulaye Faye and Danny Collins made up his physical back four. Rory Delap played wide on the right, outside of Dean Whitehead and Salif Diao, who after two months on the sidelines appears to be a first choice for Pulis once again, with Etherington starting on the left wing behind last season’s regular and effective strike partnership of Ricardo Fuller and Beattie. There was again no room in the side for forward Tuncay and midfielders Liam Lawrence and Glenn Whelan, all of whom having played for their countries during last week’s international break. Indeed, there was a truly international feel to the Stoke line-up, with eleven of the squad of eighteen having gained full caps.

Trying to engineer a means of moving away from the relegation mire, Hammers boss Gianfranco Zola named a youthful side, with 21 year-old midfielder Jack Collison and twenty year-old defender James Tomkins both starting, while Mexican striker Guille Franco, reportedly a one-time target for Pulis, was named amongst the Italian’s substitutes.

Stoke began the game positively, putting West Ham’s unconfident-looking backline under early pressure with a string of set pieces, and unlocking the visitors’ defences as early as the tenth minute with a fine move. Collins slid in Fuller inside the West Ham box, and the Jamaican set Etherington free with a clever backheel. With the winger running at Robert Green’s goal from a tight angle, former Real Madrid loanee Julien Faubert made a rash tackle, clearly clipping his ex teammate and giving referee Martin Atkinson little choice but to award the spot-kick, Stoke’s first of the season. After pumping himself up with his typical routine of looking away from goal before swivelling quickly and beginning his run-up, Beattie, widely considered to be one of the Premier League’s best penalty takers did the honours, smashing the ball high past the England goalkeeping hopeful and into the roof of his net.

There are occasional times in football when a goal seems to do a team more harm than good, and this appeared to be one of them as Stoke, previously well on top, began to drop back when, against a team low on confidence like West Ham, pushing forward may well have yielded further goals. As it was, they allowed the visitors chances, first Carlton Cole and then Alessandro Diamanti, whose hair curiously resembled a carved-up divot of muddy turf, testing Sorensen.

Sensing their advantage, they pressed it, and found a way back into the game on 34 minutes, after Shawcross cheaply conceded a corner. Losing his marker Faye and capitalising on some dreadful hesitation from Sorensen, centre back Upson, another player hoping to force his way into Fabio Capello’s England plans for South Africa, met Mark Noble’s corner eight yards out and headed past the stranded Dane with ease.

With the scores level at half time, and a combined £10.5 million talent in Tuncay and top scorer Dave Kitson alone warming up on the pitch, after a largely lacklustre first half, many Stoke supporters were clamouring for an early substitution to be made. Pulis stuck with his guns though, and Tuncay, Kitson et al returned to the bench, while the West Ham players returned to the pitch still on top. Diamanti forced Sorensen into action again with a curling effort, and, after only a superb last ditch tackle from Shawcross could deny Cole a likely fifth goal of the season, and the increasing vocal travelling fans, who has seen their side win on each of their last four visits to the Potteries sensed another victory was on the cards and began to get behind their team.

With twenty minutes to play and the game and atmosphere coming to boil, a precise ball forward from Diao to Fuller sparked a dangerous Stoke attack. With Fuller running onto the ball, the home support instantly rose to their feet, having seen the pacy striker’s prowess in such situations many times before, and as he cleverly and strongly turned Upson to give himself a clear, albeit wide run at Green’s goal, a ripple of expectancy ran through the ground. With West Ham players running back to defend, and Stoke teammates pouring forward in support, Fuller opted to shoot from the edge of West Ham’s box, drawing a low save from Green. His handling will do him no favours with Capello though as, when he really ought to have held the ball he could only palm it out into the path of the on-rushing Beattie, who, sliding to get ahead of Faubert, directed it home from close range.

Then came a moment of controversy. With the expected melee of shoving in the Stoke penalty area as the players of both sides arrived to attack or defend a West Ham free-kick, Upson dropped to the ground after clashing with Huth. Through the assembled throng of bodies it was hard to clearly make out what had happened, with Atkinson clearly missing the incident. Upson, having sustained a cut just above his eye, needed several minutes of treatment, with reports suggesting that Huth caught him with a deliberate swipe to the face. If this is true, the outlook doesn’t look good for the German. With Atkinson having for once in the game taken no action, the FA are perfectly within their rights to retrospectively punish Huth, and, if found guilty of the charge of violent conduct, he will face a three match ban.

This goal from nothing seemed to spark something positive in the Stoke players, particularly Fuller, who was at the thick of the action as his side looked to add a third. Twice more getting behind the West Ham defence on the right wing, his teammates failed to meet his dangerous balls across the box, while Etherington came close to adding a goal to his earlier assist against his old club, heading narrowly wide after meeting to chipped cross of Lawrence, who had come on for Delap moments before the goal, at the back post.

Just as Stoke had started the game on top, they finished it, with the Hammers struggling to work Sorensen at all in the final minutes, failing even tot hreaten in the typically nervous five minutes of injury time allotted by Atkinson at the end of the game. Powerful tackling from the home midfield pushed West Ham back into their own half for the majority of the extra period, and, from a goal-kick resulting from such forward pressure, Atkinson blew his whistle drawing an end to a high-octane game.

The result lifts Stoke to ninth, just one place behind Liverpool, with three wins, three draws and three losses recorded in the league to date, while West Ham sit ten places below, ahead only of lowly Portsmouth, who lost to Spurs today. The win will give Pulis and his men great confidence going into next week’s tricky away fixture against the high-flying Londoners, and, on the back of a four game unbeaten run on the road, another good result looks within reach.

Stoke Side:

From The Horse’s Mouth:

Stoke manager Tony Pulis:
“I’ll have a look at the Robert Huth incident and if he’s done anything wrong then we’ll deal with it in house. It was a good performance. We knew West Ham would have a lot of the ball so we had to try and keep our shape and wait for the gaps and holes to open up. Then we looked dangerous on the counter-attack and we could have scored a couple more in the last half an hour. Beattie and Fuller were a handful up front, but it was a good performance all round and Shawcross’s block on Cole was the turning point.”

West Ham manager Gianfranco Zola:
“I have seen the incident involving Robert Huth and Matthew Upson on the video and it should have been a red card.  Probably the referee didn’t see it and that is the only justification I can give for it. It was another tough match but we did not deserve to lose. The performance was encouraging and I can only tell the players to continue as the corner is close to being turned.”

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