Divin Mubama can be as good as he wants to be – Mark Robins

Mark Robins heaped praise on Divin Mubama after the Manchester City loanee’s hat-trick in Stoke’s 5-1 demolition of Bristol City.

The England Under-21 international had only netted twice this season before helping himself to a first senior hat-trick against the Robins.

Junior Tchamadeu and Million Manhoef also scored for the Potters, who leapfrogged their opponents into third place in the Sky Bet Championship.

“I’m not surprised,” said Robins. “When the chances come along he’s capable of taking them and he did that today.

“He’s a young player and what happens is you can lose a little bit of confidence which means you might take half a second, which means the ball doesn’t go in the net, you don’t get the shot away.

“When you become confident things become more automatic, and that’s what happened as the game went on and will happen in time.

“It’s a fantastic hat-trick. How good he can get is genuinely up to him. He’s a Manchester City player, we’ve been lucky enough to be trusted with him and his development, I think overall it’s a really good place for him to be.”

“We were really good from start to finish. I thought the intent, the intensity, the quality, the finishing, the combination play, there was everything on show and we did it at speed.

“It was really pleasing to see, I thought they were absolutely outstanding and deserved the goals, could have had some more.

“The goal we conceded was really disappointing but again, put that to one side because we’ve just got to look at the effort they put in and the relentless nature of that was really pleasing.”

Bristol City manager Gerhard Struber labelled the defeat a “hit in the face” as his Robins side lost on the road for the first time this season.

The Austrian said: “A really bad game I would say, it was a really big hit in the face today, completely different expectation about our performance but today I think we were not the team that we are normally.

“In the pressing moments we were not synchronised. It was always a little bit too late. Of course also big respect for Stoke City today, how they created problems for us with dynamic moments, but we were not really together to find control against a team on this level.

“I feel sad for the fans, we can lose games no problem but today this was too easy.

“Everything that can go wrong today I feel goes wrong, and it was not our day. We have to learn, to reflect, we have to be very honest today with us and at the same time we have to take something from this game and look forward to the next, this is very important.

“With a phase like that, you can’t win games in the Championship. We have no time to lose and I think it’s a really good chance that we bounce back on Tuesday at home (against Blackburn), so we can show the typical phase from us. Today was not good to watch.”