Stoke City Welcomes Tyler Martin as New First-Team Option

Stoke City will have a fresh face on the bench as their new campaign begins, and it comes with a direct line back to Anfield.

Tyler Martin, an 18-year-old who arrived from Liverpool to join Stoke’s under-21s in February, has forced his way into the first-team picture after an impressive pre-season. With Milan Smit heading out on loan to Darmstadt in Germany, Martin steps up as a substitute option and a live reminder of the club’s pathway from youth to senior football.

Back when he signed, youth coach Sam Stockley didn’t hold back on his assessment. “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 in February. Those qualities have clearly translated on the training pitch over the summer, enough for the teenager to earn his shot around the senior squad as the real stuff starts.

Unusual Openers Are Nothing New

For Stoke, beginning a competitive season with something other than a league fixture still feels odd, but it’s not exactly uncharted territory.

They opened up with a League Cup tie against Blackpool in 2020, played out in the eerie silence of an empty stadium. Go back further and the memories are a lot brighter: the 2011 Europa League adventure, when ties home and away against Hajduk Split set the tone before a Premier League curtain raiser against Chelsea.

Roll the clock back again, this time to 1972, and the calendar gets even stranger.

Stoke had just staggered over the line after a gruelling 70-game slog in the 1971/72 season. Then came what was effectively game 71 – an FA Cup tie played long after that season’s final, squeezed in a week before the 1972/73 First Division kicked off.

On August 5, at St Andrew’s, they met Birmingham City in an FA Cup third-place play-off, a curious add-on to a competition they felt they should have gone closer to winning. Four months earlier, they had lost a controversial semi-final to Arsenal. Leeds had already lifted the trophy at Wembley on May 6. This was the consolation act.

History From the Spot

A crowd of 25,841 turned up. They didn’t get much in the way of entertainment over 90 minutes – a drab goalless draw – but they did witness a slice of history. The game was settled by the first penalty shoot-out in English domestic football.

Tony Waddington used the occasion to blood two big summer signings, Geoff Hurst and Jimmy Robertson, both making their Stoke debuts. Under normal rules they would have been cup-tied. Robertson, in fact, had already been knocked out of that season’s FA Cup in the fourth round by Birmingham while at Ipswich.

The laws from 12 yards were different then. Goalkeepers were not allowed to move their feet before the kick was taken. John Farmer tested that boundary, and the referee’s patience, and paid for it. He was booked for stepping off his line twice.

Farmer still had his say. He saved from Tommy Carroll, only for Carroll to blaze the re-taken penalty over the bar. He then stopped Bobby Hope, who converted his second attempt after another order to retake. Waddington stormed onto the pitch to protest, but referee Vincent James stood firm, insisting he had warned the keeper enough times.

At the other end, Birmingham’s Paul Cooper began to carve out his own reputation. He unsettled takers by swinging his arms and leaning to one side, a routine that would serve him well as his career took him to Ipswich and Leicester. It worked here too, as he denied Jimmy Greenhoff and Peter Dobing.

Stoke’s reward? Not a place in the record books alone, but a tankard for finishing fourth in the FA Cup. A strange prize at the end of a stranger experiment.

That afternoon marked the death of the third-place play-off, a five-year trial that never truly captured the imagination. For Stoke, it also drew a hard line under a marathon season. Seven days later they reset, returned to league duty and promptly won their first game of the new campaign at home to Crystal Palace.

Now, as another season edges into view and a teenager from Liverpool waits for his chance on the bench, the club once again stands at one of those curious crossroads the fixture list occasionally throws up. The stage is different, the stakes have changed, but the question lingers: who will grab their moment this time?