Hold the back page. Hold the front page. Leicester City may have a striker again.
In any normal week, Emil Riis’s two goals would have stolen the headlines. Leicester have been desperate for a striker for two years, never mind the four largely concerning league games that preceded Riis’s debut for the club.
But this is Leicester City, so we’ve spent just as much time getting agitated about the way Stockport roared back from 4-1 down and should have got at least a point. Or, you know, whispers about the threat of administration.
Let’s park those worries for a while, because a centre-forward rampaging betwixt and between opposition defenders while wearing the fox on his chest was a sight for sore eyes.
As Leicester’s players arrived at Seagrave for training this week, they were filmed being asked which of Riis’s goals they preferred: the clever dink over the advancing goalkeeper to put the visitors 2-1 up or the ferocious near-post finish from distance that made it 3-1 after the break.
The scores were even, but the quantity of the goals was as much of a talking point as the quality.
Only two Leicester players have scored two goals in one game since Jamie Vardy did it at Deepdale in April 2024 to help secure the Championship title.
Patson Daka also scored twice against Preston in April this year, although the social media team were less quick to ask Daka’s team-mates which of his goals they preferred. Partly because they were both practically open goals after gifts from Preston defenders and partly because three days later, Leicester were not returning to training but labouring to a damaging 1-1 draw against basement boys Sheffield Wednesday.
The only other Leicester player to have scored a brace between Vardy in 2024 and Riis last weekend was James Justin, who did it twice: memorably, against Arsenal; then, foggily, in a 6-2 win over Queen’s Park Rangers in the FA Cup.
For the past two years, Leicester have been lucky if their strikers (Daka, Jordan Ayew, maybe Bobby De Cordova-Reid) have managed to get near the goal twice in a game let alone have two shots. And to score two? Almost inconceivable.
The revelation is that Riis looks like a striker. He’s got physical presence, he may not be rapid but he’s not slow either and, as Saturday proved, he has the ability to finish.
This is another symptom of the club’s decline.
Leicester have deliberately handicapped themselves in various positions over the years, from not signing a Premier League-quality right winger under Brendan Rodgers through the neglect shown to the goalkeeper and defensive positions in the relegation season of 2022/23 to the continued reliance on Luke Thomas at left-back.
The centre-forward position last year was one of the most obvious examples of squad imbalance. A standard Championship striker would have represented a significant upgrade on Daka or Ayew, and perhaps if Riis had played for us last season neither he nor we would be playing in League One this season. Instead, Bristol City picked him up on a free and he scored a late leveller which denied us two points at Ashton Gate.
On first glance, Riis has proven himself a middling Championship striker for both Preston and Bristol City. His record in English football, much quoted by the more pessimistic Foxes fans upon his arrival, stood at 46 goals in 186 games for Preston and 12 in 49 for Bristol City before he signed for Leicester.
But Riis suffered an ACL injury in January 2023 to curtail a campaign that followed his only 20-goal season to date. Preston signed two familiar strikers on loan to compensate: Liam Delap and Tom Cannon, with the latter’s exploits leading Leicester to sign him the following August.
Riis returned to action in the final game of 2023 and while he has remained consistently available ever since – 22 games in the second half of that season and more than 100 games across the two-and-a-bit since – his goalscoring hasn’t returned to the heights of 2021/22.
Now he’s 28 but a four-year contract for a team expected to challenge for promotion from League One is a very different kettle of fish from battling in the Championship with teams that finished between 10th and 20th. And Leicester’s two-goal go-to James Justin, another player who struggled to regain his best form for several seasons after suffering cruciate ligament injury, is currently a good example of the right club and the right system providing an opportunity to prove doubters wrong.
Is Martin’s system right for Riis? Even on his less eye-catching debut in defeat to Oxford, there were signs that it could work. Those hopes were accelerated by the Stockport performance, with the two assisters – Louis Page from a central area, Will Alves from wide – demonstrating that Leicester have the players to create, even if early games haven’t been the best demonstration.
Riis’s suitability for this side depends heavily on the personnel placed around him. Martin noted his isolation on debut and two key changes helped at Edgeley Park. To give the manager credit, he did what nobody thought he would do, tweaking the system to bring back Liam Cullen in a support striker role. The other shift, John Lundstram’s introduction, freed Page and Sammy Braybrooke to press and create higher up the pitch.
If Riis gets on the scoresheet in victory on the road again at Oakwell tomorrow, it would settle supporters’ nerves about Leicester’s goalscoring ability this season ahead of the three-week break from league action.
As for which goal was better, the second was enjoyably explosive but Riis himself chose the first purely because it was his first for the club. We’ve seen so many similarly good chances go begging in recent years that even a simple run through on goal and consummate finish is satisfying for any Leicester fan to watch. If it turns out to be the first of many, it’ll mean even more.
