Stoke City: Three hopes, one fear

Hope #3: That Wilfried Bony can provide the scoring spark.

Hooray Wilfried Bony has left Manchester City (for the season). Now comes the hard part. After spending the past two seasons riding the bench for City, the Ivorian international is being given the chance to show that he still can live up to the hype that he built during his time with Swansea City.

Stoke might not seem like the ideal destination for Bony but there are some reasons to be hopeful. First, like Stoke, Bony plays a very physical style and has little issue getting into it with opponents. Given that he is a strong, tall attacker he was also likely benefit from crosses laid in by Shaqiri and Ryan Shawcross.

He doesn’t have the best first touch. However, he can hit shots with tremendous power and pace which are skills that Stoke forwards very rarely have.

Whether or not he can build a relationship with Mame Diouf is an entirely different matter. Diouf is much faster but he doesn’t really like to wait for a holding forward like Bony. He seems to be at his best when left to improvise and build attacking chances when assessing opponent’s weaknesses on the fly.

If Hughes can somehow find a way to blend their two different styles than Stoke may have enough attacking ammo to make a run at the top six.

Next: The big fear: That this might be the year that they are relegated