Stoke City's 'main objective' clear as striker completes move

Lewis Baker doesn't beat around the bush when he talks about his and Stoke City's ambitions.

The 27-year-old is enjoying his first pre-season at the club, having joined from Chelsea in January and already signed a new extended contract.

"It's good to have come in and found a home but it's not a 'comfort' thing," he said. "I want to progress from that and achieve big things.

"The main objective is promotion and there's no sugar coating it. That's what we want to aspire to and that's the level we can get to.

"Every day, I think if you have an expectation then the standards have to meet that expectation as well. Every day you need to be driving it from the morning to when you finish to get the best out of ourselves and the best out of each other."

The midfielder also talks about reuniting with his old Chelsea youth teammate at Stoke this summer and his appreciation of Joe Allen in an interesting interview. You can read it in full here.

Big Harry Souttar has taken the chance to spend some time in the gym while he recovers from his knee injury. So he'll be Bigger Harry Souttar when he comes back.

"I've tried to," he said. "I wouldn't say I was skinny but being taller it's probably harder to put on muscle. I'm not quite Peter Crouch but not Aden Flint, I'm probably somewhere in the middle. I've spent a lot of time in the gym working on different things and pretty much straight away when I had the op, the muscle in my leg disappeared so it was focusing on getting that muscle into my leg before I could even do balance work because my right was so weak compared to my left one.

"Then you can't forget about the left one, because you've not done anything on that for the same amount of time. It's just balancing off everything and