By his own admission, the last day of last season was the lowest point in Tony Pulis’s 600-game managerial career. Mamady Sidibe’s late equaliser secured a point for Stoke City at Loftus Road, but a victory for Southampton on the Solent tossed Pulis’s raggle-taggle smorgasbord of cast-offs, loanees and kids out of the playoffs at the very death.

With summer came the exodus. Before the August transfer window slammed shut, key players Darel Russell, Danny Higginbotham and Carl Hoefkens had fled for pastures wealthier, leaving Stoke to commence the season as 25-1 Championship outsiders, longer odds than Southampton (9-1), Leicester City (14-1) and Sheffield Wednesday (22-1).

Undaunted, Pulis set about bettering himself and his charges. He signed Richard Cresswell, but, as is his trademark, he played the loan market with the sharp-eyed dexterity of a Las Vegas card shark, borrowing 13 players over the course of the season.

“There’s a loophole in the system that can be exploited and we’ve exploited it,” admits the Welshman, who learned the managerial art at Bournemouth as Harry Redknapp’s coach. “The biggest thing I got from Harry was to know your product. The product of this industry is players and Harry knows about players. He said it doesn’t matter how hard you work, good players make the right decisions when the heat is on.”

This season’s Championship concludes today and Southampton, Leicester or Wednesday would almost certainly be relegated. If Stoke take a point from Leicester, they are automatically promoted to the top flight for the first time since 1985, around the same time Pulis dispensed with the services of his babysitter, a young Bristol Rovers professional by the name of Ian Holloway. “I had to get rid of him,” Pulis chuckles. “When we came home, the kids were always wide awake and laughing. He’d been telling them jokes and stories . . . ”

In this tale of two contrasting cities, Holloway takes Leicester to the Britannia stadium knowing their status as one of just nine teams to have plied their entire trade in English football’s top two tiers is in mortal danger.

Yet not everybody has enjoyed a vintage season with overachieving Stoke. Club captain Dominic Matteo may appear today for the first time since November, despite a left-foot stress fracture incurred last spring.

“I played with injections until the pain and the post-match swelling became too much,” he grimaces. “I was frightened my career was over, especially when they took two bones out of my foot. Recovery was slow, I wasn’t allowed to put any weight on it or swim for weeks. It’s fine now, but I’ve never had an injury like that.”

Moreover, in a career hitherto spent at the highest level, Matteo has never previously enjoyed a promotion scrap. “When I was out, I saw all the home matches and most of the away ones,” he explains. “We seem to be able to grind out results when you least expect it: anybody watching when we were 2-0 down at home to Scunthorpe would have thought we couldn’t win it, but we did. There’s great spirit here and a real feeling in the dressing room that we can achieve something.”

And yet, there is a problem; an aesthetic problem. If West Brom are heralded as exponents of the beautiful game, Stoke, once the domain of Stanley Matthews and Tony Waddington’s free-flowing Seventies mavericks, are regarded as a striped version of Crazy Gang-era Wimbledon, rulers of a barren land where the long ball is king, wars are invariably of attrition and wins are ugly. The criticism has been long, loud and not without justification. Nobody likes them, but they don’t care.

“We’ve not had the credit we deserve,” insists Matteo. “We play good football, and we have good footballers, but if you’ve got Rory Delap, someone who makes a throw-in as good as a corner every time we get in the opposing half, would you not use him? If you can get an early ball to Sidibe who’s 6ft 4in and wins all the flick-ons, would you not do that too, especially if you knew Ricardo Fuller was going to get on to those flicks and do his business?”

The proof, as they say, is in the table. Matteo is not done yet. “I don’t understand why we should stop doing what we do. We get goals from all areas: our centre-halves Ryan Shawcross and Leon Cort have 15 league goals between them and the midfield chips in too. If something’s not broke, you don’t go around fixing it.”

“Our season has not been about proving anybody wrong,” adds Pulis. “It’s about doing your job properly. We deserve more credit, but the most important thing is that the players look themselves in the eye and know they’ve been successful.”

And so to the match of the Championship’s final day and Pulis’s reunions with his former babysitter, who “lives on his nerves, if truth be told”, and with Leicester owner Milan Mandaric who, amid considerable acrimony, sacked him at Portsmouth in 2000, but is now, notes Pulis, “a smashing fella, a football nut”. The Serb is in the US today and Stoke’s pressure, Pulis insists, is relative.

“I remember facing Reading in 2003 during my first spell here. We had to win to stay in this league: that was real pressure. This is good pressure. We know Leicester will be a tough game. What’s important is that our attitude is the same as at every home game: to go out there and try to win, not to sit back and hope things go for you. We’ve got to be on the front foot.”

What then? Will Stoke be the next Derby County or the spawn of Redknapp’s Portsmouth, conceived in Bournemouth? “Well, we might have to get the ball down a bit more,” concedes Matteo. “And though we’re among the fittest in this league, we’ll have to be even fitter up there, but the important thing is not to be scared. And believe me, nobody at Stoke City is scared of the Premier League.”

Last day of the Championship – and plenty to play for

GOING UP West Bromwich are up already, barring a bizarre combination of results today. They will be joined in the Premier League by Stoke City if they get at least a point or if Hull City fail to win.

IN THE PLAYOFFS If Stoke slip up, they are guaranteed a playoff place, as are Hull and Bristol City. A win for Crystal Palace and Watford will confirm their playoff places. Wolves, Sheffield United and Ipswich need to win and hope Watford and Palace lose.

GOING DOWN Scunthorpe and Colchester are relegated, with Southampton, Leicester City and Sheffield Wednesday the most likely to join them. Coventry and Blackpool are also not out of danger.

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