Stoke City’s Unique Season Opener with Tyler Martin

Stoke City will open up this season with a different kind of talking point – a fresh face on the bench and a reminder that the club’s history with unconventional curtain raisers runs deep.

Tyler Martin, just 18, steps into the senior matchday squad after joining Stoke’s under-21s from Liverpool in February. He has spent the summer grafting with the first team in pre-season, and with Milan Smit heading out on loan to Darmstadt in Germany, the teenager now gets his first real taste of the senior stage.

Back when Martin arrived, youth coach Sam Stockley summed up why Stoke moved for him. “He is dynamic and quick, has an eye for goal and is versatile in terms of his ability to play through the middle and in wide areas," he said. Those are the traits that have pushed him from academy hopeful to first-team option before his 19th birthday.

Unusual openings are nothing new at Stoke. The club is used to starting its competitive calendar with a league fixture, but every so often the script changes.

In 2020, a League Cup tie against Blackpool came first, played in the eerie silence of an empty stadium at the height of behind-closed-doors football. Go back further and the memories are a lot more vivid: the Europa League adventure of 2011, when Stoke launched their season with home and away clashes against Hajduk Split before turning to a Premier League opener against Chelsea.

Wind the clock right back and it gets even stranger.

In 1972, Stoke were still catching their breath from a gruelling 70-game 1971/72 campaign when they were thrown into an FA Cup tie that technically belonged to the season just gone. The club didn’t so much start a new season as bolt on a 71st match to the old one – an FA Cup third-place play-off, staged a week before the 1972/73 First Division kicked off.

On August 5 that year, Stoke faced Birmingham at St Andrew’s, still smarting from a controversial semi-final defeat to Arsenal four months earlier. Leeds had already lifted the trophy at Wembley on May 6. This was the consolation prize, and even that came with a twist.

A crowd of 25,841 watched a drab, goalless 90 minutes that only came to life when history beckoned. The game went to penalties – the first shoot-out in English domestic football.

Tony Waddington used the occasion to blood his new signings. Geoff Hurst and Jimmy Robertson both made their debuts, an oddity in itself given they would usually have been cup-tied. Robertson’s involvement carried its own irony: he had already been knocked out of that season’s competition in the fourth round by Birmingham while at Ipswich.

The shoot-out belonged to the goalkeepers and the rulebook.

At the time, keepers were not allowed to move their feet before the ball was struck. John Farmer tested that boundary, and the referee, Vincent James, booked him twice for stepping early. Farmer still managed to make his mark. He saved from Tommy Carroll, who then blazed his retaken effort over the bar, and he kept out Bobby Hope, only to see Hope score from his own re-take.

Waddington, incensed, sprinted onto the pitch to protest, but James stood firm, insisting he had warned the keeper enough times.

At the other end, Birmingham’s Paul Cooper turned gamesmanship into an art form. He swung his arms, leaned to one side and unsettled takers with a routine that would serve him well as his career moved on to Ipswich and Leicester. Against Stoke, it worked. He denied Jimmy Greenhoff and Peter Dobing, and with that, Stoke were left to settle for fourth place and a tankard as their reward.

That chaotic, slightly surreal afternoon marked the end of a five-year experiment with FA Cup third-place play-offs. The idea was shelved, the tankard tucked away, and Stoke moved on.

Seven days later they kicked off their league campaign and beat Crystal Palace at home.

Now, as another season edges into view with a teenage midfielder stepping up and a loan move opening the door, the club once again finds itself starting in a way that doesn’t quite fit the standard template. The question is whether this year’s twist leads to another bright beginning.