Shrewsbury Town 1 Leicester City 2: A steal at twice the price
Steve Cooper’s Leicester City kicked off their pre-season campaign in Shropshire on Tuesday night. The Fosse Way coughed up the price of admission so you don’t have to.
Pre-season friendlies can be dangerous things. They can be like the devil on your shoulder, convincing you that up is down, left is right, and Boubakary Soumare could do a job in central midfield.
We’ve also seen, though, that Leicester’s summer efforts can be the canary in the coal mine that tell us what’s going to happen when the shooting starts. The first game The Fosse Way ever covered saw us concede two laughable set piece goals to Notts County before embarking on one of the most embarrassing campaigns in living memory.
Likewise, last summer, Enzo Maresca’s Idea was on full display from the off. Players inverting all over the place, Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall scoring a header after arriving late into the box, Harry Souttar fired into the sun.
As for this friendly, it lives in the netherworld between good and bad, pending further enquiries. On the football side, it was nothing but positivity. There was intent, directness, and less endlessly passing around the centre backs and goalkeeper.
Surrounding the game, though, there was some classic Leicester City circa 2024 material. Charging £10 for the privilege of listening to Matt Elliott on Foxes Hub almost certainly meant that there were more people at the game than watching online. The Leicester City App, pride and joy of Filbert Way, was on an absolutely mad one. The title of the YouTube highlights managed to get the result wrong.
The air of rank incompetence off the field remains. On the pitch, at least, there were much better signs of things to come. Except for the bit where Danny Ward’s first touch of the season was to boot the ball direct to an opposing forward.
It’s been obvious for a while now that Steve Cooper is likely to line Leicester up with three at the back. While this is indeed how his team set up with the ball on Tuesday, one of the most surprising things straight out of the gate was how similar the formation was to what Maresca did last season.
On paper, the team looked like a back four but in reality, Luke Thomas - temporarily back from the dead - tucked inside to become the left sided centre back and Ricardo Pereira pushed up to play as virtually a winger on the right-hand side. Kasey McAteer, nominally the right winger, played more like one of the number 8s in Maresca’s system.
The biggest knock-on result of all this was that Abdul Fatawu switched sides to provide width on the left. Playing on that side obviously negates some of his shooting threat, but it stretched the pitch to an extent we rarely saw last season with the wingers on both sides coming into the middle.
Lining Fatawu and Stephy Mavididi up on the same side of the pitch also gave Leicester a lot of direct running. The good folks of Shrewsbury couldn’t really cope with this double threat in the first half. Mavididi found himself in space in between the lines over and over again, without making it count, and Fatawu forced the rarest of all events, a first half yellow card in a pre-season friendly.
Mavididi hit the resulting free kick into the wall, which contrived to deflect it past the ‘keeper for the opening goal. More impressive was the regularity with which Leicester turned Shrewsbury around. Rather than the sideways passing we’ve become used to, there was far more intent to get the ball forward. With Harry Winks, Wilfred Ndidi, Mavididi, McAteer, and Patson Daka dropping into central areas, there were a lot of outlets for a forward pass.
We’ll see if this pattern continues against better opponents, but in a game where you would have expected a lot of passive possession, Leicester created plenty of transitions and got attacking players into space. There was a lot of fluidity and movement, particularly from McAteer and Mavididi, who had the freedom to come short and receive the ball or make runs in behind Daka.
One such classic move saw the entire Shrewsbury team shift left to counter the overload on that side, only for Ricardo to surge forward on the right. The Portuguese put in Daka behind, whose shot was well-saved by our old friend, ‘Trialist A’. If the miss itself wasn’t particularly surprising, Elliott confidently dispatching finishing advice on commentary, “personally, I’d have smashed it across the keeper”, was at least an enjoyable moment.
Oopskoli
The second half opened with a flurry of substitutions, followed by a flurry of goals. The introduction of new man Caleb Okoli prompted some chaos in the back line, as he misplaced a few passes and then bundled a Shrewsbury cross into his own net in slightly calamitous fashion.
Almost instantly, Leicester responded, in another example of the sort of directness we may occasionally get to see this season. James Justin hit a ball over the top and Kasey McAteer ran through to dink it over another old friend, substitute ‘Trialist B’, in goal for the Shrews.
After that the game petered out as you might expect. The substitutions saw a raft of youngsters introduced: Michael Golding, who might be described as an ‘intense’ footballer, and Will Alves, probably the greatest prospect of all time, showed flashes of skill as things drifted to a conclusion.
One Alves run and Golding dummy allowed Justin to fluff his lines with the goal at his mercy, later Alves picked up the ball in space and drove at the defence before firing wide. It will be interesting to see these guys alongside the senior team, Alves in particular looks legit, and much stronger than he did pre-ACL tear.
Coop a hoop
When he got the job, a lot of the chat about Cooper was that he was a pragmatist, more of a realist than Maresca was. In football, this is often code for a manager who plays dismal stuff, like an ‘80s dinosaur transported into the modern day.
It is pretty apparent even from this one game that Cooper isn’t that. He’s a genuine pragmatist, more likely to adjust to the players he has and to tweak what came before him rather than instigate a tactical revolution. The team looked like one where the manager had watched every game from last season and immediately identified that we did, in fact, need to gerrit forward at times.
There was also a lot of tactical fluidity. In possession, it was pretty clearly a back three, but out of possession it was more like two banks of four. In the second half, after Brandon Cover came on for Luke Thomas, the back three flipped so that the left back - Justin - was the one getting forward to join attacks and the right centre back - Cover - stayed home.
We are obviously going to see some more signings come in, and there are still the internationals to return. McAteer’s spot seems an obvious place for an upgrade, midfield still looks seriously light if we assume that Soumare is not a real solution, and a striker is surely set to come in. Jakub Stolarcyzk’s injury and six month absence means that we may yet again be stuck with Ward and Daniel Iversen.
But these were promising signs, signs that there might still be a real team in this parish. That after a weird summer, we might have someone in charge who knows what he’s doing.
