SOMETIMES, you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. Or as Tony Pulis put it, as he reflected on the end of his time at Stoke City, “Maybe you get used to getting served steak and chips every night”.

Pulis heads back to Stoke’s home ground this evening, rebranded as the Bet365 Stadium, and his return will inevitably evoke memories of his ten-year spell in charge of the Potters. He will be afforded a warm reception, but it will almost certainly not be as raucous as it should be given the extent of his achievements as Stoke boss.

Having briefly managed the club under the chaotic regime of Icelandic businessman Gunnar Gislason, Pulis was persuaded to return by the club’s current chairman, Peter Coates, in 2006. In the next ten years, he won promotion to the Premier League and established Stoke as a seasoned top-flight force.

There was an appearance in the FA Cup final and a Europa League campaign that saw Stoke successfully negotiate the group stages before losing in a two-legged tie with Valencia. There were a string of top-half finishes, but by the time he left in 2013, after guiding the Potters to safety in 13th position, there was also a sense that things had become stale.

Fans were questioning his style and striving for a return to Europe. Five years on, and those same fans find themselves following a club occupying a mid-table position in the Championship.

“What happens is complacency,” said the Middlesbrough manager. “You get used to playing in the Premier League, you get used to playing against the big sides, you get used to getting served steak and chips every night. And it becomes a bit bland and not as tasty as it was when you are only getting it once a week.

“That’s what happens, we are all human beings, we are all the same. Trying to maintain that togetherness and mentality where you need to be on it week in, week out, over a long period of time, can be difficult.”

Mark Hughes followed Pulis into the Stoke hotseat, and over the course of a couple of seasons, the current Southampton boss dismantled most of the foundations his fellow Welshman had put in place.

Pulis’ squad was overhauled, and instead of recruiting the type of player that had served his predecessor so well, Hughes attempted to move in a different direction. Stoke’s transfer record was broken to sign first Xherdan Shaqiri and then Giannelli Imbula, but results nosedived and Hughes was replaced by Paul Lambert. He was unable to prevent the club’s ten-year stay in the Premier League coming to an end, which is leads us to the position Stoke find themselves in today.

“The disappointment is that you spent so much time there and put so many building blocks in place,” said Pulis.

“If you look, the squad I put together was a real solid squad of players, a good group of players and that really was dismantled over a period of time.

“The characters that you need to build and maintain football clubs sadly left and weren’t replaced. From an outsider, that is most probably one of the reasons that they’ve struggled. Huthy (Robert Huth) had left, Glenn Whelan had left, Jon Walters – really, really top characters. They weren’t just good players. They were top, top quality characters – and you need that.”

Nevertheless, as he reflects on his time in the Potteries, Pulis takes considerable pride in his achievements. He turned a club with no recent history of success into an outsider feared by the Premier League’s big boys, and established some lifelong friendships along the way.

“It was great times,” he said. “The big thing at Stoke was taking them into the Premier League. That was the catalyst for everything else that happened. It took us a year to sort everything out and then the second year, we got a team together which we felt would score goals.

“We knew we would be strong enough defensively but we would score goals, and that’s what got us over the line. And then we decided that if we were going to stay in, we would most probably have the smallest budget in the Premier League so we would have to do it a bit different to other teams. That’s what we did.

“We did it different to other teams. We grew a mentality which remained there until I left.

“That stadium was rocking and rolling every week. There was no complacency, everybody understood where we were and what we were about. And my God, did we enjoy it. The supporters enjoyed it, I enjoyed it, the players certainly enjoyed it and we had some great times.”

The challenge now is to repeat those times with Middlesbrough.

“If you said to me, ‘You can move around and do this, that and the other, or you can stay at one football club and really put something together’, I’d much prefer to build something that lasts,” he said.

“But that is determined by results, and it’s determined by having a really good chairman. I think I’ve got a really chairman here – I just need the results now.”