Well let's face it, we weren't good enough today. Stoke actually played pretty well. The Britannia is a hard place to go. We didn't create enough but one of their goals was very lucky.
All teams have losses like today's in a season, though, even a trophy-winning season. Sometimes you just don't turn up and get plastered by an average team. Days like today are not where our season has gone wrong. The season-destroying moments have rather been:
-Playing well but letting leads slip due to poor defending (e.g. Spurs, Liverpool, Newcastle)
-Not bothering to turn up vs lower teams (points dropped needlessly vs. Brom, for example)
-To a certain extent not bringing our A game to very big matches (Nou Camp, CC final).
Those deficiencies are what have really cost us, imo. There are always games where the performance, the crowd and the luck of the draw just straight up goes against you, it's just that we have let so many days which should have been, and quite easily could have been, great days slip from our grasp.
I mean ****, if we had just taken 12 points rather than 5 from our four games against Newcastle and West Brom, the title would still be in the balance right now...