Tony Pulis column: ‘I had to put everyone on edge’ – How can managers influence the game?

After a full week of working on each player – and going deep into each individual’s understanding of their role on the team and how it will impact everything if they don’t execute it – I will then begin to identify ways in which we can hurt the opposition.

Obviously free kicks are now synonymous with how teams do it successfully, but that was the case before me and it’s the same now that I’ve retired.

In addition to attacking set pieces, defending them was another thing we would work on. Whether it was attacking or defending, everyone knew what personal challenge they faced.

On Saturdays, I would attend a home match at around 11am, and in my early years I would also train myself before matches.

At this point, with only a few hours left until kick-off, I was doing everything again and waiting for the players to start arriving. Once they’re all settled, I’ll have a quick chat – nothing too exciting! -And then leave the dressing room.

As soon as the opposition team sheet arrived, about 75 minutes before kick-off, I would check our markers against their players – this was important because I was always marking!

I would take this board into the locker room, then go out again until they came back from warming up. Everything that was said from then until the players left for the start of the match was full of confidence, with no negatives at all.

The actual team talk itself and the last things you said to the players can be completely different depending on the occasion. And I wasn’t always the one who gave it either.

Back at Stoke, I asked Ricardo Fuller to speak before the FA Cup semi-final against Bolton at Wembley in 2011.

Rick was a great character and also a player of exceptional ability. Unfortunately, he was injured and pulled out of the match but gave a once-in-a-lifetime speech to the team quoting Nelson Mandela.

We won the game 5-0, and I’m sure to this day Rick believes his speech led the players to that famous result. The players will all tell you that it definitely kept them going.

It shows you that the path to success in football management is not set in stone. You need tremendous flexibility, yes, but you also need more human strings to tie your bow.

In my early years at Stoke, we were always the underdogs and the atmosphere was off the charts, no matter which team we played.

As time went on and we became established, the teams coming to Stoke became more willing to experiment, and our fans became less reliant on our underdog status, and rightly so.

To compensate for this, I began using more psychological methods to create an atmosphere in the locker room that would help motivate the players.

This could mean mentioning recent comments or coverage that were negative towards us, or even bringing up things I remembered from our early days at the club – anything that was critical of us in any way, which I knew would generate a positive response from the players.

This method has helped us tremendously in playing matches that we expected to win.