Passion and honesty: Why Steve Cooper puts me in mind of a former Foxes manager
Excitement for the season ahead is hard to come by with the unknowns and we’re still seven weeks out from the kick-off. If we’re looking for things to be optimistic about, Steve Cooper is putting me in mind of a beloved former manager.
Watching Austria concede almost immediately in their knockout game, and then again from another set piece, put me in mind of exactly how Leicester City cannot afford to start the 2024/25 season. With just under seven weeks until we’re back at the King Power to kickstart life in the Premier League, I’ve hit my summer sadness phase.
Even the Euros are only helping keep my mind from wandering to an extent. Expectations for the campaign ahead? Still pretty low, but that’s not a bad thing. Excitement level? Desperately seeking excitement, any excitement please. I can’t remember feeling so underwhelmed for a season in quite a long time.
We’re past the halfway phase of the summer break, it’s been 8 weeks since the Championship trophy lift but you’d be forgiven for thinking it was longer given what’s changed, and shorter given we’re no closer to understanding what points deductions may lie ahead or even when we’ll finally know and can plan for it.
Throw in the sale of our most exciting homegrown player, an actual Leicester boy who loves the club, to ensure we’re complying with the next round of PSR regulations. Plus the ongoing battles our fans groups are having with the club over matchday ticket prices and the glaring gaps in our squad depth and it’s not the most positive landscape out there.
I was trying to think back to the mood in 2014 after our last promotion but the two hardly seem comparable outside of the nailed on favourites for relegation status. We could ride the Champions wave that year and had signings like Cambiasso to drum up excitement.
In lieu of excitement, I started searching for positives and I keep circling back to June 2008, a month after relegation that season meant we found ourselves in our lowest ever league position. That month we hired Nigel Pearson and it felt like things were starting to change. We’re not quite there yet with Cooper, but the two feel more similar.
That summer had started more like last year’s, an understandable level of anger at the mismanagement of our club and a big cleanout needed in the squad. Actually, both of those things are still sort of true. We needed fresh ideas, a bit of passion and somebody unafraid of a challenge. Enter Nigel Pearson, a man whose name is enshrined in legend and a lot of notable history in the years that have followed.
When Pearson was appointed, he said:
“I am delighted I have been given this magnificent opportunity to revitalise the fortunes of this great club after what has been a difficult few years. I have an enormous amount of respect for chairman Milan Mandaric and chief executive Lee Hoos, who I worked very closely with at Southampton, and I can promise everyone connected with this club I will be giving the job my 100% commitment. I am privileged to have been given the chance to turn around the fortunes of a club with so much history and such a strong fan base and I am confident my style of management can help bring the good times back to Leicester City”
Compare that to Steve Cooper last month when he was appointed and the similarities are there:
“I am very proud to be joining a club with a rich history, and I want first of all to thank Khun Top for the opportunity to manage Leicester City. I recognise I am joining a group of people who love this Club and want the very best for it.
As staff and players, it is important we play with a style that the Leicester support recognise as the very best of their Club. The support of the fans will be fundamental and I am looking forward to meeting many of you over the summer.
This Club has a distinct identity and attracts a great deal of respect for what it has achieved. That has been done through the dedication of the owners and the hard work of the players and the people here.
I take the faith the Club have placed in me very seriously and am committed to immersing myself in what the Club and community stands for and ensuring we have success together.”
Pearson had several instant advantages that our current manager doesn’t of course. He wasn’t immediately having to overcome the red prejudice of being so strongly linked with Nottingham Forest. Most of the fanbase were allowing him to start with a completely open mind and no preconceptions, similar to Cooper in being reserved and optimistic rather than outrightly excited or disappointed.
Pearson was also joining a club who were already going to be tipped to earn promotion if not win the league, allowing us to make some shrewd signings as one of the biggest teams in League One that year. No financial punishments lingering over the club and impacting any plans.
For Cooper, walking into our current status doesn’t compare. We may have Seagrave and our recent(ish) run of success to try and lure potential players but as Crystal Palace landing Daichi Kamada shows, we’ve got some work to do to beat off other teams for signatures in 2024. But Cooper seems well respected so add that into the mix and with the type of player we will likely be targeting, this should help.
Leicester City has changed a lot since 2008 when Pearson came in and worked his magic but in many ways, the qualities we needed most from him, and always got, are exactly what we’re looking for again now from Steve Cooper.
Even the most ardent of Maresca’s fans would admit that he was always going to move on at some stage. His frustrations started early and the bond was never really there with the fans. We need a manager to help bridge the gap between fans and the club and to offer transparency and insight into plans that otherwise remain vague.
Steve Cooper has done about as much as one manager on their own pre-season and just two weeks into the job could try and get the fans onside. He’ll need to keep bearing this burden as we’ve shown time and time again that whether the going is good, or gets tough, that he’ll be the one facing off to the media and to fans. Hearing Forest fans talking about and praising Cooper does put you in mind of how we still reflect on Pearson now.
Some honesty and some passion never go amiss and we certainly need bags of both this year. Had Cooper been in charge of the fateful 2022/23 season, you can’t believe players would have been sending deluded tweets at journalists and failing to see how much actual danger we were in. A little like Pearson, you get the impression he’ll call it as it is. Something fans should appreciate.
The biggest thing Cooper won’t have that Pearson did is time. Football fans' patience has thinned in the 16 years that have followed 2008, not just at Leicester City. Pearson had the bonus of us hitting the ground running in League One and never really looking back. It helped him when we got back to the Championship. If we were hit with a ridiculous points deduction, it would give Cooper a bit of a free hit and all expectations would already be dampened.
If we start reasonably close to zero then the pressure will be on from some fans from the get go. The thought of going straight back down seems probable but does leave us in that yo-yo club territory which is its own curse. Our owners are generally pretty patient, pulling the rope as late as we could risk where Ranieri was concerned and later than we should have in the case of Rodgers. Cooper is likely to get the time he’ll want from our board, it’s more a question of whether he’ll get the financial backing he’d like.
The open letter and the first interview were both good PR pieces to try and gloss over the Forest connection and any fan disappointment around it not being Graham Potter. However you believe Cooper when you hear him talk about his excitement and motivation to be Leicester City manager. It’s what we need to hear as fans too after months of strange comments from Maresca. It was easy to sort of ignore him threatening to quit early into the season after some grumbles from fans, but you do wonder how that would have played out were we to start on minus points and potentially enter the second month of the season without a win.
It puts me in mind of our title winning season, we didn’t have the best squad but they were the most determined and powered by a manager with belief and equal motivation. Although I think we can all indefinitely shelve any dreams of going for a second title, it has to give us some chance of survival if he could keep the belief the players had from this year and channel it in a realistic way. He seems to know what challenges he’s signed himself up to and he’s no stranger to having to crack on with coaching on field despite some chaos off it.
Cooper also seems to have some tools in his arsenal that Pearson didn’t. For all the love and admiration of Pearson, he could be cautious to the point of stubbornness where substitutions and changes were concerned. He didn’t always push the use of young players too, preferring experience for the most part with our academy players having limited game time under him.
Cooper isn’t shy in either respect and this plays into both our squad restrictions and the likely budget we’ll have. Planning for the future with a manager who hopefully can stick it out a little longer.
Siege mentality is the phrase you’ll hear most often associated with Leicester City as soon as the point deduction lands and Cooper does feel like the man who wouldn’t shy away from using that to our advantage.
Foxes fans are in desperate need of some good news stories while so much else is either up in the air or seemingly on fire. Finally confirming the signing of Abdul Fatawu would help, but seeing who Cooper is looking to bring in would give us possible ideas of the formations to expect and the types of players he wants to work with.
