Opinion as Stoke City head into the final 13 games of the season

It’s not a particularly good barometer for any club when the first bit of small talk between supporters is about how many more points are needed to stay up. But that’s where Stoke City are with 13 matches to go in a desperately frustrating season that’s already inspired genuine debate about whether it’s becoming the worst era in the club’s history.

If you want hope, the players that Steven Schumacher has used in his last two matches – one win, one defeat – have been applauded off thanks to their effort, which is a minimum requirement but a turnaround from the collapse at Blackburn Rovers which ended with a chant telling the team it wasn’t fit to wear the shirt.

“We’ve got to make sure that we’re ready to stand up for the fight and that’s what we keep asking the players to do,” said the head coach. “I know we’ve got the right characters in there to get the results we need.

It is not quite clear just what results Stoke do need. Managers normally target the 50-point barrier to ensure safety in the Championship but it feels unlikely that there won’t be three teams who fall short of that this time around. Rotherham, after last night’s defeat at Ipswich, already need 1.6 points per game to reach 40 points, for example, and title-winning form to get to 50. Sheffield Wednesday need 1.6 to worry the 50s, which is pretty much double what they’ve been getting up to now.

From this vantage, the mid-40s would give a team half a chance of survival in this surreal season when the top four are all on target to surpass 90 points. Late 40s would probably see you over the line.

Stoke have two major worries. It’s been very hard to keep clean sheets and very hard to score. What is the best solution, then, to average a point a game or more that is needed?. Schumacher has gone compact and narrow in his last two matches, making sure that Stoke remain in games. A team that has only scored more than once in a game on two out of 19 matches since the start of November is dead and buried when they let in two or three before half-time, like they did against Leicester and Blackburn. It’s completely demoralising as much as anything else.