The Week in Leicester: Late wins and lucky winners
This week we saw the start of the Enzo revolution, the latest round of the Seagrave injury lottery and our old friend Colin wading into the PSG of the Championship debate.
The good
No team has ever won all 46 games in a Championship season. Do you know who still can?
We’ll give you a clue, they’ve got Coventry’s number and their name’s Leicester City.
Football’s back with a bang. A late show at home to some people’s favourite losing play-off finalists was followed by a trip to Burton Albion in the cup, where the Brewers were left reeling by an avalanche of passing that guided them straight out of the tournament.
It may have been weak opposition, but that’s the first time Leicester have won back-to-back games for six months. Not since the heady and, with hindsight, quite confusing days of scoring four against Tottenham and Aston Villa in successive weeks have we seen anything like this.
It wasn’t just the wins but the manner of them that made this week so enjoyable. Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall’s bullet was the first time Leicester have scored a late winner in more than a year. While the trip to Burton saw a back-heeled goal in the first five minutes and Wilfred Ndidi cooly dispatching a finish into the top corner before half-time.
Strap in, it’s going to be quite a ride.
That ride looks likely to include Cesare Casadei, who is set to join on loan from Chelsea - within minutes of this article being published, if recent history is anything to go by. Casadei is one of the most exciting young talents to grace the King Power in a long time, and an example of the pulling power of the manager in attracting that type of player. The pieces are falling into place.
The bad
SEAGRAVE STRIKES AGAIN
Key City player wins injury lottery
A young Danish immigrant was the lucky holder of the mysterious injury ticket on Filbert Way this week, mere days after he arrived in this country.
Mads Hermansen had just wandered onto the turf at Leicester City’s industry-leading, £100m training ground at Seagrave when he felt a sudden agonising pain in his quadricep.
Hermansen, 23, was quickly mobbed by his team mates and sent for a precautionary scan, which is expected to rule him out for 3-4 months.
Excitement for next week’s draw is already building, with sources close to the team reporting that Harry Winks is so confident of his number coming up that he’s already booked a six week trip to Dubai for September.
The daft
Enzo Maresca’s press conference ahead of the Coventry game included his refusal to announce a captain. Sceptics among us suspect that it might have been related to the fact his intended captain, Conor Coady, is missing, parts unknown, and he didn’t want to name a captain who’s immediately out for months.
Nevertheless, Maresca’s official argument is that ‘we have four or five players who can be leaders’. Au contraire, Enzo, we were here last year.
Saturday’s opposition manager, meanwhile, has been up to his usual villainy. Neil Warnock’s pre-match press conference included all sorts of antics designed to create a siege mentality for his players. “Leicester are odds on favourites to go back up”, “they’ve got two XIs that could get promotion”, “everyone expects us to get beat”. All delivered with a sinister chuckle.
We know what you’re up to, Colin.
Hot goss
Dewsbury-Hall’s opening day double has put him on the radar of fake transfer news outlets everywhere. Even before the Coventry game he was being linked to Liverpool, by the time Tuesday rolled around it was Chelsea.
Another name found himself linked with two top four contenders this week, unfortunately for Harry Souttar they were Scottish ones. In a transfer tale as old as time, one journalist put ‘Brendan Rodgers’ + ‘signed Souttar in January’ together and came up with Celtic, another galaxy brain realised that his brother plays at Ibrox and inevitably picked Rangers.
The third member of the January triumvirate, Victor Kristiansen, has been connected with Lazio despite vowing to stay. While Everton have completed their own hat-trick of links to Leicester strikers by adding Patson Daka to the list.
Daka’s replacement as a forward inexplicably left out in favour of Jamie Vardy could be Benfica’s Tiago Gouveia, who looks fun…
The Leicester loan machine has also set its sights on Galatasaray’s Yunus Akgun (with Wout Faes potentially heading in the other direction) and we might now be battling Tom Brady for Jes Rak-Sakyi.
Thing we learned
If the team selection against Coventry was a warning shot to a whole bunch of fringe players in the Leicester squad, the Burton team sheet was a comprehensive bonfire of their hopes of making it back into the reckoning.
With no place for Souttar, Bouba Soumare, Luke Thomas, or Danny Ward, their time at the King Power is certainly up. Daniel Iversen, Timothy Castagne, and Daka were left simmering on the bench and are surely on the way out as well.
Anything else?
The King Power is going to host the Lionesses’ Nations League tie with Belgium in October. A Belgian side that could be featuring new signing Janice Cayman are going to visit Leicester while the suits at King Power have managed to wrangle playing the return game at OH Leuven’s Den Dreef stadium as well.
One last thing
LCFC Women defender Sophie Howard recently launched a new podcast, The Bold Tackle, and the second episode looks at the team’s great escape.
(Ed: Talking of podcasts, Wanya Marcal-Madivadua wasn’t the only one making a debut this week.)