BREAKING NEWS: Man City are the blueprint for the Stoke City job Burger and Pearson have to do..

Stoke City legend Mike Pejic runs the rule over the squad ahead of Championship trip to Norwich

We could have written back in July that, five games in, the Championship would be extremely tight and results would be unpredictable.

We would have expected that teams who have kept their squads together should start performing better, sooner than teams who have had a mass clear out and a huge recruitment drive. But there’s no reason for panic anywhere at the moment and you have to trust or hope that however your club played the summer window, they will be at the front of the pack at the end of the marathon.

This division, as always, will be decided by consistency over the long winter months. When anyone is capable of beating anyone, it will be who has the ability, character and wherewithal to get results over the line Saturday after Tuesday after Saturday after Wednesday. Like with long distance running, however, you don’t want to leave yourself with too much to do as the race goes on. Over the next few weeks, the best functioning teams will start to emerge and we’ll have a better idea of how the table is going to shape up.

It’s not just individuals who have to perform to their best levels, it’s how they link together as partnerships and then as units. It might take a while for everything to run at its smoothest but if you got your recruitment right, you’ll be ok in the end.

At Stoke City we’ve got a much stronger squad than we had last season, we’ve got cover for pretty much every position and the options of playing different systems in the right circumstance either from game to game or within the same game. And with a much stronger squad, we’re looking for much better results. We’ve got a testing month coming up, starting this afternoon at Norwich, but it’s not a bad thing to know you’ve got to be at the top of your game.

Over the next few matches we’ll be looking more to players like Andre Vidigal and Sead Haksabanovic, who can play important roles with their individual creativity. That flair and magic in the final third can’t be underestimated, particularly at home when you might have more teams sitting back or presenting two blocks to break down.