Stokes shooting for the top again

IT’S the second coming of Anthony Stokes.

Or perhaps the third.

Or maybe even the fourth.

Having been the bright young thing at Arsenal, a scoring sensation at Falkirk and the lad who lost his way at Sunderland, the 21-year-old Dubliner has returned to the Irish squad on the back of a season in which he rediscovered his shooting boots, grabbing 23 goals for Hibs in the SPL.

“As a team, we got into Europe and that was the main thing and I scored a few goals,” he reflected at Ireland’s base in Malahide yesterday. “But I was just happy to be playing week in, week out. Probably the best thing I could have done was getting out of Sunderland. I was going backwards there, I wasn’t playing games and my fitness was terrible. And that affects your whole lifestyle because you’re not concentrating on your football.

“You’re much more inclined to go out if you know you’re not going to be playing at the weekend, you know what I mean? I don’t care what anyone says, that’s a fact of life.

“Once you get back in the team, it’s different. I went out a lot of times this year but I went out after games where I scored two or three goals. I felt like I deserved it! But there was no point in me just taking the money at Sunderland. You need to be playing.”

Significantly, the move to Hibs also reunited him with John Hughes, the manager under whom he blossomed at Falkirk.

“He’s a man I have an awful lot of respect for,” says Stokes. “The way he goes about his business, everything is top notch. I just seem to really get on with the man. I’m very thankful to him because hopefully he’s helped me restart my career again.”

Stokes, whose lifestyle has sometimes been the subject of headlines in the past, believes he has also benefited from working with a London-based sports psychologist Dan Abrahams.

“It doesn’t change your whole lifestyle but, for me, it gets me thinking more about my football,” he explains. “He’s more like a coach than a sports psychologist. He’s not talking about going out or what I’m doing wrong – though we had our chat about that as well (laughs) – but the main thing is talking about football and trying to improve.

“It might sound ridiculous but part of it is thinking that if you’re doing something every day in training then it’s going to happen in the game. You might pick two or three sides of your game that you’re weak on and try to improve them every day in training. Like, I used never really score with headers and I scored, what, three or four this year.”

Of course, as has been remarked of Robbie Keane at Celtic, there is always the view it’s much easier to score goals in the SPL than the Premier League.

“People are going to say that but the Scottish league is genuinely tougher than you think,’’ Stokes insists. “It’s a very physical league and competitive. No one is going to deny that it’s not on a par with the Premiership but, listen, I just wanted to get back playing football. If John Hughes had been in a league in Pakistan I probably would have gone and played there.”

But does Anthony Stokes harbour ambitions to make the journey south again? “I’m enjoying my football, I’m scoring goals. I’m not thinking about getting a move or anything else. I think that sort of thing went to my head in the past. The main thing now is to have a few years where I settle down, do well and if I keep doing what I’m doing, a move will come. The most important thing is I’m playing. Because if I did go somewhere else and I wasn’t playing, I’d be back to square one.”