Rather marvellously, his Chilean mum speaks with quite a thick, instantly recognisable Stoke accent. Love eet duck

I think she was about sixteen when her family moved to UK. But yes, she wants a bloody roasting for not speaking Spanish to her kids as they were growing up. I’d be pretty pissed off with her for that if I was Ben.

Wrong end of the stick mate

Christ I didn’t realise he came on for you lot yesterday. That’s pretty bloody impressive having played 90 mins in Chile at 3am Friday UK time. I’ve done that trip innumerable times and I would not be in condition to play a football match within a few hours of arriving…!

You should only need a VPN if you’re in the UK, the majority of games are available to overseas subscribers on iFollow or the club service.

Yeah my team Stoke is on there too because we have our own “service”, although in actual fact I believe it’s basically the iFollow feed contracted out through the clubs - as far as I know every Championship club offers this, particularly to overseas viewers. You’ll have to join up to the Rovers version.

Someone hook a brother up, you lot must have iFollow or something similar?

Probably be a good match in terms of football style/culture/approach as well. Mind you I can warn him he could learn to speak like a native in Castilian Spanish, he's still going to struggle when he gets to Chile 😃

I think the only thing on that list Surridge hasn't been criticised for this season is positioning. He was getting slated on our board for diving for a penno a couple of games ago 😀

S/he's being facetious, his name is Surridge without the T. Weirdly a T has appeared in my post even though I didn't put one in the original 😕 Crossing fingers for Campbell, he's been steady in the 23s so far. Will really make the difference for us if he can quickly get back to form and fitness.

Both can be true. It was a good finish but the goalie probably should have stood up better, which is what the poster you quoted was saying

If you completely ignore the last few months maybe. We have three forwards at Stoke I’d play ahead of Surridge at the moment - Brero would probably be starting for any team in the division in the form he’s in..

I’d say the vast majority of the credit has to go to Mr. BD himself

I think Tyrese Campbell is better but he’s coming back from the sort of long injury that can really fuck over a young player’s career. You’d be daft to consider swapping Ben at the moment. Jury’s still out on Surridge, he’s been ok but missed a few good chances too. Not a starter at the moment for me.

And he’s scored again Another good near-post finish for the third in a 3-0 vs Venezuela. Puts Chile back in with a fighting chance with other results going their way too.

There was an audible “our ball!!” picked up just now by the mics in Chile-Venezuela, which made me chuckle.. Chile winning 2-0 with two easy headers from set pieces, Ben not done much of note apart from get caught offside and be a bit too armsy and kneesy for the ref

We'll do you a swap with Sam Surridge

He wants to sign for his hometown club and complete two glorious homecomings in one year, of course 😉

You're half right, they're certainly not very good compared to a few years ago, but as well as the English second division player they're also still "hauling" players from all the top European leagues as well as Brazil, Mexico etc. In fact I'd guess BBD is the only non-top flight player in the squad. They're still a strong international side in the grand scheme of things.

The point was that the standard across all S. American teams is very high, which is generally true - much more so than Europe. For a start there are about 50 teams in Europe of wildly varying quality, picking one poor-ish one and saying it's the same thing makes no sense. I wouldn't call Chile a "good" side at the moment but there's no comparison with Scotland - and that's considering Scotland are relatively good at the moment. They've got nothing like the quality of Chile.

Don't know if you're serious here but that's a ridiculous comparison, there's absolutely no parallel there at all

This is an incredibly tense and testy match, been stopped several times for scuffles and Chile are down to ten.. crowd felt aggrieved that the ref failed to give several blatant fouls, massive relief when Ben scored, got mobbed by the subs coming onto the pitch from the sideline. As I type a Paraguay player just got sent off for an elbow (I think? Or a stamp maybe) on BBD

scored! Absolute cracker to break the deadlock on 69 mins. Crucial goal. They’ve now gone 2-0 up

Starts up front vs Paraguay in 30 mins

You don’t have to go back that far either, they were a fantastic team only 6/7 years ago when they won the Copa America twice and outplayed Spain in the World Cup. It’s been a steady decline since then and there really doesn’t look to be much of a new generation coming through (partly explaining the zealous pinning of hopes on BBD)..