We go again: Convincing myself Steve Cooper is the right man for Leicester City
My mind’s telling me no, but my fingers… my fingers are writing a thousand words about Steve Cooper being the right man for Leicester City. Perhaps I will never be cured of this desperation for Leicester to majestically overcome our own stupidity…
I love that moment when a manager departs and the list of possible replacements appears. We’ve been fortunate enough to have experienced that moment three times now in the past 15 months. It’s an exciting time. New possibilities. A fresh start.
Then comes the grind. The interminable days of the same names revolving around. In this case, there were three. And Leicester have ended up with, for most fans, the least inspiring of that trio. It’s not Potter. It’s not Corberan. It’s the guy Forest fans adored.
From the depths
The immediate reaction to Leicester City’s appointment of Steve Cooper yesterday morning reflected that sense of ending up with a manager. Not, as with the last two permanent appointments, going out and getting someone capable of deciding what the club’s much-fabled long-term vision should be and then delivering it.
And yet. Large swathes of Leicester’s support ended up despising Brendan Rodgers and Enzo Maresca. Perhaps if we just come straight out with antipathy, it’ll swing the other way for us this time?
Strap in, because if it wasn’t enough to try and convince myself that Dean Smith was a good appointment, I’m about to try and forget what I’ve been thinking for the past month and make a case for Steve Cooper.
There’s no real alternative, because I’m not going into a season booing a new manager. The club did their best to bury themselves under an avalanche of fury with the announcement of the match ticket prices, which almost made the arrival of any new manager look positive and progressive in comparison. Even so, it’s a hard sell.
In the immediate aftermath, this feels like the most unpopular appointment in my near 35 years supporting the club, rivalled only by Claude Puel and Gary Megson. Peter Taylor was a promising manager when he was brought in. Ian Holloway initially appeared a good antidote to Megson’s dourness.
Even Dean Smith, as uninspiring as it gets, was welcomed by plenty as getting back to basics with the return of Craig Shakespeare smoothing things over. Perhaps Cooper will have his own Shakespeare waiting in the wings to help calm the natives.
The red mist rolls in
Pretty soon after the impending arrival switched from Potter to Cooper quicker than you can say “I’ll wait for the Telegraph tweet”, my mind went back to a certain afternoon on the banks of the river Trent when, like many other Leicester fans, I experienced my first thought of “Rodgers Out”. It was my introduction to Steve Cooper, not having paid much attention to Forest’s rise up the Championship. February 2022. Later that month several hundred Leicester fans would have the best away day of their lives in some place called Randers. But the month started with a real low.
It’s a game I think about whenever I see King Power’s line about a long-term vision for the club because it felt like a collision between perception and reality. Leicester took to the field as FA Cup holders. We’d won the famous trophy just nine months earlier. We had the previously lauded Ndidi-Tielemans-Maddison axis in midfield. Barnes and Lookman.
The less said about the goalkeeper and back four the better, but the real disappointment was that midfield. We’d been waiting years to go back to the City Ground with players of Tielemans and Maddison’s quality and play them off the park. They waited for our bright early spell to fade and then they ran right through us and over us. Take partisanship out of it, hard as that is, and it was enviable.
Look back now at Forest’s team that day and there were no real Premier League quality stars other than Brennan Johnson. It was a Championship level side who were up for it against a much better team, which is exactly the scenario Cooper will need to replicate in a couple of months unless something magical happens in the transfer market.
A question of style
The threat of the points deduction made this appointment an outlier. The calibre of the manager we could attract never felt like it would reflect the Premier League status, the world class training ground, the infamous “vision”. Even if there are a handful of people who rate Cooper equal or even higher than Potter, there was always a sense that a man linked with Manchester United, Ajax and England would be ill-advised to take on a job that might see him playing catch-up on the rest of the league from the start.
It’s more likely we’re going to need a bit of the old siege mentality. You can understandably choose to dismiss Cooper’s open letter to Leicester fans as PR nonsense or you can, as I have, choose to cling on to a couple of sentences for comfort: “Great challenges lie ahead but I get the feeling that Leicester thrives in these moments… it is important we play with a style that the Leicester support recognise as the very best of their club”. Is it me or are those nods to the division in the stands over possession football and recognition of the need for unity? Anyone coming in from the outside would surely associate the best playing style of Leicester City more with O’Neill, Pearson and Ranieri than Rodgers or Maresca?
A little more pragmatism, a little less threat of relegation. Not because promoted sides can’t play possession football, but because our squad doesn’t suit it at the top level. It worked for (most of) last season, of course, but the gulf is enormous. We’ll need to play with more pace. I think Steve Cooper will recognise that and I think Leicester City fans will respond to it.
I’m not as convinced as others that Maresca’s Big Idea would have failed spectacularly in the Premier League. It might have been okay. It doesn’t matter now. What matters is that we find the best way for this squad to play. And, excitingly, veering away from The Idea gives us the opportunity to be bastards again. This was essentially my call from two years ago and the main reason why I think there’s still a place for Harry Souttar at Leicester City.
If you can’t beat them, take bodies. For too long we’ve been too James Maddison when we’ve always needed to be Jamie Vardy. Guess which one of those played in that FA Cup defeat and which one didn’t.
Cooper’s time at Swansea and the beginnings of his time at Forest demonstrate he’s not some kind of anti-football charlatan but there are enough signs there that he recognises the need for physicality. The first rumour after his arrival wasn’t some 5 foot 6 trequartista but a good, relatively new-fashioned set piece coach.
That got one or two more onside. And the slow, improbable ascent to greatness has begun…
