It seems certain that Leicester will have a young team this season. Academy graduates yet to start a league game for Leicester who have featured in warm-up games include Kirsten Otchere, Jayden Joseph, Tom Wilson-Brown, Lorenz Hutchinson, Jake Evans, Kevon Gray and Mirsad Ali. That list also features Will Alves and Sammy Braybrooke, even if their names have been around for a lot longer.
At the age of 21, Alves has made just 13 league starts – all on loan for either Cardiff City or Huddersfield Town. His Leicester career looked promising as early as January 2022 in an FA Cup game against Watford that now seems surreal.
Consider these facts: Leicester were the FA Cup holders. Claudio Ranieri was the opposition manager. Youri Tielemans had opened the scoring, Joao Pedro equalised and James Maddison put Leicester back in front before Harvey Barnes and Marc Albrighton made the game safe. In Tom Cleverley, Watford fielded an ex-Leicester player who will manage against them in League One this season after being dismissed as manager of… Watford.
Alves replaced future African Footballer of the Year, Europa League winner and Ballon D’Or candidate Ademola Lookman as a late substitute.
A lot can change in four years.
For Alves, everything changed in the space of 24 hours later in 2022.
He had been due to play in an FA Youth Cup game against Wolves but a frozen pitch at Aggborough meant the game was pushed back five days. So he was a little fresher for the substitute appearance he made for Brendan Rodgers’s first team in a League Cup tie at Milton Keynes.
The Youth Cup game was rescheduled for the following night and buoyed by his first-team outing, Alves terrorised Wolves all night. Frankly, he made the young Wolves players look silly. So one of them decided to take matters into their own hands and unleash a studs-first attack (for this could not legitimately be called a challenge or tackle) on Alves’s knee.
The long road back has been tough and even his loan spells, first at Cardiff and then Huddersfield, have presented challenges. Cardiff were embroiled in an ultimately unsuccessful battle against relegation and their manager was drastically changing the team from week to week as he sought solutions. At Huddersfield, Alves was underutilised for whatever reason.
Sammy Braybrooke was also named in the squad for that FA Cup game against Watford in January 2022, but he didn’t make it onto the pitch alongside Alves. Braybrooke’s fate did align with Alves a year later, when he suffered an ACL injury towards the end of an Under 21 game at Brighton. In contrast with the likes of Jeremy Monga, this young star didn’t make a single league appearance in his teenage years.
When it eventually arrived, his first loan was also tricky – a spell at Dundee that resulted in fewer minutes than he, and Leicester, would have liked. But last season he finally made the impact he’s been threatening for years, being named in the League Two Team of the Season after mightily impressive loans at Newport County and Chesterfield.
Braybrooke is now 22, which means his career trajectory is similar to another very mobile, blond-haired central midfielder who came through the ranks at Leicester. Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall had to wait for his club debut after standout loans at Blackpool and Luton. The comparison is obvious in playing style too, both midfielders seeming to glide across the pitch in possession and both excellent at stepping up to press the opposition backline. Braybrooke has to add impact in goals and assists, as Dewsbury-Hall did, but merely establishing himself as a key member of a Leicester City squad has to be the first aim.
What Alves and Braybrooke have in common, watching them this pre-season, is how comfortable they look on the ball. They have the kind of composure that Russell Martin should love. Martin has been clear that he has no problem playing youngsters if the situation is right. For Alves, the timing works in his favour too. Leicester’s wide options have thinned out considerably with Jeremy Monga and Abdul Fatawu both sold, so there are fewer bodies standing between him and a regular shirt than there were a year ago.
Where exactly he plays is still an open question. He was excellent against Northampton used as one of two 8s in central midfield. The more natural fit is probably the left wing, but for now Stephy Mavididi has that position sewn up. So Alves has been shifted to the right in pre-season, where he looks slightly less effective. His best game is cutting in and dribbling, because he doesn’t have the electric pace to go round players on the outside.
Braybrooke looks slightly more first-team ready, partly because his versatility seems more like a strength rather than a reason to push him around the team. His range of passing makes him a candidate for the holding role, which he played at Newport and Chesterfield, but that’s been divided between Oliver Skipp, Louis Page and Hamza Choudhury so far in pre-season. Conor Chaplin’s credentials, if not his pre-season performances, will surely make him nailed-on to start as one of the two 8s in central midfield, which would leave Braybrooke to compete with whoever’s left, plus Bobby De Cordova-Reid, for the other spot.
It’s a reasonable problem for Leicester to have, four or five good options for three starting slots once the season settles down, but it does mean Braybrooke’s path into the side isn’t as simple as his ability alone would suggest. Wherever he ends up, he should be one of the first names on the team sheet because of the sheer energy and dynamism he can bring to the side.
There’s always a section of the fanbase that won’t get excited about a young player until they’ve proven it over a full season, and that carries validity too. Otchere, Aluko, Joseph and the rest will have to make their own case the same way, minute by minute, before anyone commits to them either. Strolling around in Spain in pre-season is very different to being closed down by two hefty League One strikers in the corner of a tight away ground.
But on what’s been seen in four pre-season games, Braybrooke and Alves stand out from the large group of Academy kids. They both look like players whose games were essentially the finished article some time ago, and who have simply been kept off the pitch by circumstances that had nothing to do with ability.
Injuries, loan spells, a first team dressing room devoid of good leaders to help them develop: three and a half years of waiting for the right circumstances to unfold. Now their opportunity is finally here.
