Despite Stoke’s first-half domination, Hull could have had an early penalty when Ashley Phillips slid in and felled Matt Crooks.<\/p>\n
The Potters took advantage of that let-off and Thomas hit a right-foot curler towards the top corner, which Hull goalkeeper Ivor Pandur touched away at full stretch.<\/p>\n
But Wales international Thomas would not be denied and he gave Stoke the lead with a superb strike on 17 minutes. <\/p>\n
Ajayi headed Aaron Cresswell’s corner more up than away and Thomas watched the ball drop perfectly onto his boot, showing excellent technique to fire home the sweetest right-foot volley.<\/p>\n
Stoke might have had more and Pandur dived to his left to touch Bae Jun-Ho’s shot around the post and Robert Bozenik had a header chalked off for offside.<\/p>\n
Hull made Stoke pay for not extending their lead just three minutes into the second period after some half-time substitutions by Tigers boss Sergej Jakirovic fired up the visitors.<\/p>\n
Substitute Mohamed Belloumi looked close to being offside when he flicked on Gelhardt’s off-target shot with what appeared to be the top of his right arm and Ajayi reacted quickest to the loose ball to head in his first Hull goal.<\/p>\n
Stoke eventually started to play their way back into the game and Tigers skipper Lewie Coyle made a brilliant goal-saving challenge on Jun-Ho.<\/p>\n
Hull finished strongly and substitute John Lundstram wastefully volleyed over before the game’s decisive moment. <\/p>\n
Stoke lost possession in their own half, allowing Belloumi to drive forward and lay the ball off for Gelhardt to fire a left-footed shot past Potters goalkeeper Viktor Johansson.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Despite Stoke’s first-half domination, Hull could have had an early penalty when Ashley Phillips slid in and felled…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":166168,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-166167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166167\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/166168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}