Tyler Martin's Rise at Stoke City: From Youth to First Team

Tyler Martin’s name was barely known around the bet365 Stadium a few months ago. Now the 18-year-old, signed from Liverpool for Stoke City’s under-21s in February and blooded with the first team through pre-season, steps into the senior picture as Milan Smit heads out on loan to Darmstadt in Germany.

It is a rapid rise, but not an accidental one. Back when Martin arrived, youth coach Sam Stockley summed him up neatly: “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." Those are the kind of attributes that tend to accelerate careers, especially when a club is reshaping its attacking options.

Stoke starting a competitive season with something other than a league match still feels odd, even if it’s not unheard of. The pattern has been broken before. In 2020, it was a League Cup tie against Blackpool that opened the curtain, played out in the eerie silence of an empty stadium. Go back further and the mood was very different: the Europa League adventure of 2011, when Hajduk Split provided home and away opposition before a Premier League opener against Chelsea brought the focus back to domestic duty.

Roll the clock all the way back to 1972 and the calendar looks stranger still. Stoke had just staggered through a 70-game marathon in the 1971/72 season, only to tack on a 71st fixture that technically still belonged to that campaign – an FA Cup tie played long after the final and just a week before the 1972/73 top-flight season kicked off.

On August 5 of that year, Stoke went to St Andrew’s to face Birmingham City in a third-place FA Cup play-off, a curio born of a five-year experiment. Tony Waddington’s side were still carrying the sting of a controversial semi-final defeat to Arsenal four months earlier. Leeds had already lifted the cup at Wembley on May 6. This was the consolation prize that nobody really wanted.

A crowd of 25,841 turned up and were treated to very little in normal time. The match finished as a drab goalless draw, the tension coming not from open play but from what followed. The game was settled by the first penalty shoot-out in English domestic football history, an awkward, pioneering moment that felt as much like a refereeing seminar as a sporting spectacle.

Waddington used the occasion to hand debuts to his summer signings Geoff Hurst and Jimmy Robertson, who under normal rules would have been cup-tied. Robertson’s presence added a twist: he had already been knocked out of that very competition in the fourth round by Birmingham while at Ipswich. Now he was back on the same stage in different colours.

The laws around penalties were strict and unforgiving. Goalkeepers were not allowed to move their feet before the kick was taken. John Farmer, Stoke’s keeper, fell foul of that interpretation. He was booked for moving his feet twice. He saved from Tommy Carroll, only for Carroll to blaze the re-taken effort over the bar. Farmer then kept out Bobby Hope, who converted his own re-take.

Waddington snapped. The Stoke manager ran onto the pitch to protest, furious at the repeated re-takes and the booking for his goalkeeper. Referee Vincent James stood firm, insisting he had given Farmer ample warning. The drama belonged less to the kicks themselves and more to the arguments swirling around them.

At the other end, Birmingham’s Paul Cooper employed a different sort of dark art. He swung his arms, leaned to one side, and unsettled takers with his movement. It was a technique he would carry into later spells with Ipswich and Leicester, helping him keep out dozens of penalties. On this day, it worked against Jimmy Greenhoff and Peter Dobing, both denied as Stoke’s hopes ebbed away from 12 yards.

Stoke’s reward for their efforts was modest: a tankard for finishing fourth. No parade, no real sense of achievement, just a piece of silverware that underlined how strange the whole concept of a third-place play-off had been. That afternoon at St Andrew’s effectively killed the idea. The FA scrapped the play-off after that five-year experiment, and the fixture disappeared into the game’s footnotes.

Stoke, though, moved on quickly. Seven days later they began the new league season at home to Crystal Palace – and this time they won.