Premier League Betting: Fitness freak Pulis has Stoke on the right track

This time last year Tony Pulis was preparing to run the London Marathon. After a morning taking training he'd put on his running shoes and did eight or ten miles in to prepare for the big event. He'd made a promise to the club's charity and wasn't going to let them down. Well Stoke's boss has come up with a much better way to be a marathon man this year - he's getting his players to cover 26.2 miles every couple of games!

Pulis has owned up to his obsession with running distances today as he nudges them closer to a second season of Premier League survival. They have 29 points on the board, are sat comfortably in 11th place, and Betfair's punters make them a healthy [27.0] to go down.

That's partly because, according to their manager, they are fitter than ever. Like many clubs they use ProZone to analyse the distances and speeds the players cover during a game, and the figures are a big improvement on last year.

"It's a shock coming into the Premier League because you don't realise how physically fit teams are," he says. "You expect them to be good players, but physically they are very, very good specimens. We needed to work at that and our stats far exceed last season."

Now it's a myth that teams promoted to the Premier League automatically go straight back down. In fact it's happened only once when Crystal Palace, Barnsley and Bolton all came up and went back again in 1997-8. But what isn't in doubt is that "second season syndrome" really exists. Teams who stay up find their next year much harder as the novelty value wears off, big clubs pinch their best players, and other sides work out what they do.

In fact in the history of the Premier League there have only been two clubs, Bolton and Leicester, who have stayed up and then bettered their tally of points the next year. Pulis has set that as his target, and at the moment with 15 games those improved fitness levels give them every chance of achieving it - making them a good opportunity to buy on the Premiership points market which currently sets them at matching the 45 they got in 2008-9.

More immediately they present an opportunity tonight at the JD Stadium where laying Wigan at [2.3] looks a certain way to make some profit. Roberto Martinez is in the middle of his own first season in the top flight and is finding out the same shocks about the quality of opposition and fitness levels. True they got a creditable drew at Sunderland at the weekend but that was only their third point in nine games, and meanwhile Stoke are on a six match unbeaten run since Pulis dumped James Beattie from his team at the start of the year.

Five things you might not know about ProZone

1. The company started developing their software after setting up offices in Leeds in 1998 using techniques based on military missile tracking technology

2. The system, which needed nine cameras to cover every inch of the field, was first installed for a match at Derby in 1999

3. Steve McClaren, later to become England manager, had been involved in the development at Derby and helped make Manchester United the club's second customers

4. The full package costs more than £200,000 a season, but lower league clubs can now get a reduced set of statistics using only one high powered digital camera

5.Tottenham in 2006 used the Prozone stats when they tried to prove food poisoning meant the defeat at West Ham which cost them a Champions League place should be replayed because their players were able to cover only a fraction of their normal distances