PREMIER LEAGUE:Supporters will soon tire of the joyless brand of football favoured by Stoke City's manager, writes Andrew Fifield

THERE is a curious morality tale currently being played out among the deadbeats and drop-outs at the foot of the Premier League.

In the white, shimmering corner stand Middlesbrough and West Bromwich Albion, both playing the sort of sparkly football that, presumably, pixies and fairies would practise were they not engaged in complex image rights negotiations with Disney Corps.

And lurking in the gloomy, cobwebbed corner, we have Stoke City and Blackburn Rovers, the brutal, muscle-bound bogeymen that terrify the inner child in all of us, all long diagonal balls to James Beattie and defenders with shins like railway sleepers and tattoos on the inside of their eyelids.

The twist – and we live in an age where every fairytale has to have a twist of some sort – comes from seeing the forces of darkness perhaps enjoying the happy ending of survival in the top flight.

Albion and Boro, despite the latter’s win over Hull on Saturday, are currently locked in a very pretty tailspin towards the Championship – the sort undertaken by a dying dragonfly, perhaps – while the hulking behemoths of Tony Pulis and Sam Allardyce are crashing, banging and walloping their way to mid-table security.

Allardyce, of course, is the long-standing bete-noir of Premier League purists and, in Pulis, he seems to have attracted his very own one-man tribute band, right down to the defiantly regionalised accent which, by itself, appears to cock a snook at the metropolitan football establishment.

Yet while Big Sam is more a Falstaffian figure of fun – an odd blend of nasty cynicism and rosy-cheeked bonhomie – there is something more sinister about Pulis which only becomes clear when, like me, you devote several hours of your life to watching him deliver the same three-minute interview on Sky Sports News’s endless loop of inanity.

On the fourth or fifth reprise, it became obvious; with his cold, dead eyes and James Gandolfini-style spam, Pulis has metamorphosed into a kind of lower league Tony Soprano, albeit one whose preferred method of whacking someone would be to pop a baseball cap in their ass.

He already comes across on camera as the kind of man struggling desperately to contain his murderous impulses; see for yourself the next time Sky’s hardy west midlands reporter ventures to Stoke’s training ground, which is always framed by suitably leaden skies and scudding rain.

First, Pulis will respond to the interviewer by name – less as a gesture of cosy familiarity and more in a I-know-where-you-and-your-children-live sort of way.

Then, once the question has been asked, Pulis’s grey-steel gaze swivels to focus on some neglected corner of his complex, as if seeking out a suitable burial plot. The whole exchange just drips with cold, calculated menace: Sky should release a box set of the best of them in time for Christmas.

All this, of course, is grist to Stoke’s satanic mill.

Pulis long ago grew convinced – not unreasonably – that the rest of the top flight community would like nothing better than to see his plucky Potters shooed back to the crevasse they crawled out from. So, rather than softening his attitude, every barbed comment or waspish aside has merely sharpened Stoke’s serrated edge.

There is nothing unusual in that, of course. Bigger and bolder clubs than Stoke think nothing of adopting their own siege mentality in pursuit of success and a bit of bloody-mindedness never did Don Revie, Alex Ferguson or Jose Mourinho any harm.

But, while that celebrated trio can shove medals in the faces of their detractors by way of vindication, Pulis will merely be able to point to Premier League survival: admirable in its own way, but unlikely to inspire much in the way of lingering affection from either the neutrals or, more importantly, his own followers.

Stoke may boast an unusually large Neanderthal contingent – even if their largest group of troublemakers, the self-styled ‘Naughty Forty’, appear to have been named after a grab-a-granny night at one of the city’s seediest nightspots.

But this is also the club of Stanley Matthews’ twinkling toes and Alan Hudson’s x-ray vision, where the great Tony Waddington produced a side that buckled more swashes than any of their top flight peers in the late 1960s.

Stoke’s followers, so starved of success in recent years, will take Pulis’s joyless brand of pugilism for now – provided, of course, that they go on to secure their top flight status as a result of their combined endeavours.

But there will come a point – maybe as early next season – when the prospect of being sucked into a black hole of entertainment every other Saturday will begin to lose its appeal.

Then, the time will come for Pulis to cast off his dusky demeanour, embrace the game’s sunnier side and allow the light to spill back into the Britannia stadium.