One start, two finishes: Tom Cannon brings the excitement for Leicester City
Leicester City began 2024 with a comprehensive victory thanks largely to two goals from an exciting new striker. Let’s revel in the prospect of what’s to come.
As a football fan, you're always so desperate for your team to score that your senses are on alert every time it might happen. Whether that's from the terraces, watching on television, hearing a change in the volume or pitch of Owynn Palmer-Atkin's voice or even a presenter saying something's happened at the King Power, Jeff.
On the first day of 2024, two of the four goals Leicester scored against Huddersfield were remarkable for the way the prospect of a goal accelerated in milliseconds.
They were both scored by Tom Cannon.
Out of nowhere
Many people have said Cannon's second was the more impressive goal, showing strength to hold off the defender and calmness to slot the ball under the goalkeeper.
But more than 24 hours on, I'm still retaining a bit of disbelief about his first. The ball broke to him on the edge of the area and a shot didn't necessarily look on. Cannon employed the cliched minimal backlift to arrow an effort into the corner at the near post. It travelled so quickly that it took me by surprise. The best kind of goal celebration.
The fact it was Cannon who scored made it even better. Because for all Leicester's dominance of the Championship this season, we have had something of a striker problem.
Jamie Vardy turns 37 this month and has certainly shown more than a few signs of approaching the end of his incredible career at a high level. Kelechi Iheanacho has been, frankly, disappointing and, whether or not it was due to the injury that has kept him out since, his Boxing Day cameo at Portman Road was horrible to watch. Patson Daka has been the best of the bunch since Vardy and Iheanacho's injuries and has supplied some neat finishes, but his first touch can still - as it did numerous times in Cardiff - look the opposition's most creative threat.
If Cannon twice made something from nothing much on New Year's Day, then his performance as a whole showed why he has quickly risen from a seemingly unnecessary signing, who few Leicester fans had heard of, to the most likely heir to the role dominated for nearly a decade by the greatest Leicester City player of this century.
No pressure.
There’s the movement
At the risk of accidentally stumbling across a tenuous Cannon pun, he looked rusty in his first few appearances. Coming into the first-team picture at the same time as a goalscoring Daka was tough, but then Iheanacho's bewildering lack of effort against Ipswich provided a sharp contrast. Cannon's neat turn on the touchline three days later cemented many fans' desire to see him start.
The folly in judging a player too quickly is becoming a theme of the season. Whether that's based on previous seasons for the club, like Jannik Vestergaard, or previous seasons for a different club, like Harry Winks, or early-season form, like Stephy Mavididi - various players have hit their stride under Enzo Maresca and Cannon showed signs of doing it as soon as he was given the shirt from the first whistle.
Almost as enticing as those two clinical finishes was Cannon's movement off the ball. He won't always get the ball given Maresca's system but he seemed by some distance the least stationary striker we've had so far this season. It's not a tactical approach that demands a lot of movement in possession but Cannon's constant, Nugent-esque urge to make upright, quick-stepping charges in behind or out to the channels must have been a nightmare for Huddersfield's centre-backs.
That's the other thing about the timing of Cannon's introduction to the starting lineup - it comes at a time when Leicester's form during the busy Christmas period, coupled with stumbles for Ipswich, Leeds and Southampton, is raising expectations to stratospheric levels when we’re playing teams that are setting up to keep the score down.
As fans, we're going into some games at the moment almost taking victory for granted. Which no, it doesn't sound like we should ever do. But the dominance is so total and utter against teams in the bottom half with such scarce relative resources, it's difficult not to expect a stroll. Especially when that's exactly what we've had in three of the past four outings.
One eye on the future
The difficult thing for Cannon, however, is not coming into a team this dominant and needing to help maintain standards, or replacing strikers with much bigger names and reputations. It's the fact that a lot of Leicester fans are already, understandably, looking at every individual with an eye to whether they'll be able to cut it in the Premier League next season.
That's a legitimate question for experienced players like Vestergaard and Winks who won't enjoy the same technical superiority over their opponents next season should Leicester get promoted.
It's even fair to ask the same about Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall and Stephy Mavididi, who aren’t as young as some non-Leicester fans often assume.
We need to bury that question for now when it comes to Tom Cannon. Having just turned 21, with fewer than 30 appearances at this level, he really is still starting out as a Championship player and he needs time to settle into the strengths he can offer this team for the remainder of the promotion push.
But let’s face it. This is exciting.
