What do Leicester City need to improve after the international break?
The season gets underway in earnest on Friday night, as our brave blue boys entertain Southampton.
With five games under our belts and two weeks of reflection behind us, our writers address the biggest improvement they want to see from Leicester after the international break.
Iain Wright
Injury prevention. As regular readers will know, I've been very positive about the new signings and the make-up of the squad as a whole. Whilst it might be a bit early to be putting up bunting, I sincerely believe that we have a strong team and squad that, under this manager, should be well in contention for promotion at the end of the season.
However, as we've seen a lot in the recent past, injuries to key players (and indeed virtually all the players at some points!) have severely compromised our ambitions. Obviously, all teams get injuries but we have seemed particularly susceptible.
A lot of this has been of our own making, such as inexplicably replacing a successful medical team, having players return from injury in glacial conditions (Soyuncu vs Zorya & Evans vs Troyes last season), and grinding injury prone players into submission (such as James Justin playing more outfield minutes than anyone else before, surprise surprise, getting injured).
We've also been pretty unlucky, with Coady's injury for example seemingly coming out of the blue.
Hopefully Enzo, his coaches and the new medical team, can make better decisions and use the squad more wisely to prevent the treatment room at Seagrave filling up as we go into a lot of games throughout the winter. Do that and we should be in for a successful season.
Adam Hodges
The last game before the international break saw Leicester hit the target once from 21 attempts and this must be an area to focus on.
Tom Cannon can provide the impetuous upfront with Kelechi Iheanacho linking up the play just behind him at the expense of Kiernan Dewsbury Hall. Cesare Casadei will bring more creativity in Attacking Midfield than Wilfred Ndidi whilst Stephy Mavididi and Fatawu can cut in from the wings.
Using the ball incisively to beat the block is much needed if Maresca Ball is to progress.
James Knight
Goalscoring, without a shadow of a doubt. There are lots of reasons to be positive about our squad at this level, but I think our attacking options are a lot less impressive than they could be. There are already four teams into double figures for the season and, realistically, if we’re going to compete for the top two spots we need to be scoring a lot more than we have so far.
It’s not that surprising that we haven’t scored many goals, given that virtually no one in the squad outside of Iheanacho and Jamie Vardy have any history of regular scoring. A lot of our wide options are projects for the future with hardly any senior goals between them.
In the summer it was all fun and games that we were using Wilfred Ndidi in an attacking midfield role. Now we’re actually into the season and it feels like that’s legitimately one of the ways in which we’re hoping to score.
The big thing we need to see straight away is a sign this issue has been addressed, otherwise everyone’s going to get very frustrated very quickly. Maybe Cannon can shoot us to glory, but even if he has an incredible season we he’s going to need help from the rest of the team.
Another big question is going to be whether the formation changes a little to accomodate more than one striker. So far, we’ve only ever seen one up top and we’ve just rotated that player. With a third legitimate option, are we going to see one of them play from wide areas to add a bit of firepower?
