TRANSFER NEWS: Stoke City targeting at least three positions in transfer market after Ipswich defeat

Alex Neil suggests a ‘settler’ defeat at Ipswich Town shows the importance of Stoke City’s remaining business in the transfer window.

Stoke have already brought in 11 new signings this summer but the manager still wants to strengthen in midfield and out wide, and a left-sided centre-back is on his shopping list too, with just under three weeks to go until deadline day on September 1.

“Obviously we played against Rotherham Kayden Jacksonand West Brom, in the cup, and they made a few changes as well, and for us maybe it’s not a bad thing to get a settler in terms of where we are,” said Neil after a 2-0 loss at Portman Road.

“I think we’ll play far better than we played today. I’m not overly worried about that. What I do think is that we’re light in certain areas. The wide areas at the moment we’re really light. There’s nothing we could have done about that because it is what it is. We’ve still got work to do to try to improve different areas of the pitch.

“I thought you could see today that not having a left-sided centre-back caused us some problems because a lot went down that side.

“There’s a lot for us to improve on. I thought in the middle as well we didn’t win enough duels, I thought their midfield overran ours.”

Neil had highlighted after the mid-week win over West Brom that his defence needed to deal better with crosses and it was the same again at Ipswich, where Luke Woolfenden scored from a Sam Morsy free-kick and Kayden Jackson tapped in a low centre from Wes Burns.

The manager added: “Cut-backs in particular. The second goal was really frustrating because we spoken and worked on exactly what was going to happen. But it’s easy to talk about, much harder to come out and do it and make it happen.

“We’re all culpable, we’re all responsible. My job is to try to make sure the next game we play better.”

It was a full house at Ipswich, who were playing their first home game in the Championship in four years, and Neil had no excuses nor complaints about the result.

He said: “I think we’ve got to give a lot of credit to Ipswich having just come up. We went one for one against West Brom during the week and in that first half West Brom looked a poor team. They couldn’t get out of their half because we pinned them in.

“Ipswich did that to us today, I thought that we struggled at times to go up the pitch because when we turned it, they were winning duels. When we put it in behind they mopped it up. They were very brave in how they played.

“We’ve done a lot of these press conferences and very few times have I come out and said we deserve to lose. I thought that was one of them.”