Leicester City have done all we can ask for: sensible business that improves the team
Good window? Bad window? In truth, you can’t really judge the success of a transfer window for months after it slams shut.
All we can ask for is that our football club tries to do sensible business that improves the team.
It’s taken an awfully long time but at last, it feels like that’s what Leicester City have done over the past couple of weeks. We’ve been in desperate need of positivity. Before we play again and spoil it all, let’s enjoy the moment.
A bit of oomph
I’ve reflected a lot recently on these thoughts from the summer. To save you a click, let’s pick out this part:
As Leicester supporters eagerly awaited the massive rebuild everybody appeared to agree was required, friends who support other clubs began to ask me what sort of players Leicester needed… the only answer I was able to give was players with a bit of oomph.
Players who will be competitive from the first whistle to the last and won’t allow a repeat of last season’s humiliations. Players who will help bring back the feeling of Foxes Never Quit or Fearless.
They don’t have to be hoofers. They don’t even have to be hard as nails, as long as they don’t freak out every time we concede a corner.
Seeing as we decided to give every other team in the Premier League a six-month headstart on transfer business, that criteria for new players has, more or less, stayed on the table.
The impact of set piece coach Lars Knudsen has been noted. Nevertheless, we still look mentally and physically vulnerable - it’s taken until the most recent league game to actually recover from going behind even once, while the likes of Aleksandar Mitrovic have bullied our defenders.
Thankfully we’ve finally signed a couple of players with real stature, who should improve our back line.
Oh, and a highly-rated Brazilian winger.
To Victor, the spoils
The perfectly reliable source of factual information Wikipedia lists both Victor Kristiansen and Luke Thomas as being the same height - 5 foot 11. Anyone who was at Walsall will dispute that. Kristiansen, the younger of the pair by 18 months, looked like a man replacing a boy when he passed Thomas on the touchline.
We’ll have to be patient with him but he should bring plenty of presence to the left-back position, something we’ve arguably needed since Christian Fuchs was no longer first choice.
Finding positions to bring a bit of height to the team has become even more important since the emergence of Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall to accompany Youri Tielemans and James Maddison in midfield. None of those three will offer a huge amount in the air in either box, while Thomas and James Justin have both struggled at times to deal with crosses to the back post.
Perhaps even more importantly, there were already signs at Walsall that Kristiansen will offer a genuine overlapping threat to help out Harvey Barnes.
An initial fee of £12million rising to £17million is a lot of money for a young player unproven at the highest level but straight away, Kristiansen felt to a lot of fans like the kind of signing we used to make. More specifically, it felt like a much better fit than the other Danish defender we signed for a similar fee not too long ago.
Go on me Tetê son
Our second January arrival was the most exciting of all.
A favourite of seasoned European football watchers both inside and outside of our transfer-starved fanbase, Tetê seemed too good to be true.
Here was a left-footed Brazilian right winger with a fine goalscoring record a few weeks shy of his 23rd birthday, and we were being linked with him.
The more details we discovered about Tetê’s situation, the more complicated the deal seemed. But it happened, and we’ve laid into the club enough over the past few months that they certainly deserve credit for pulling this one off. We don’t know if he’ll be a success but, as with Kristiansen, it has the right feel.
As many others have said, Tetê doesn’t even have to be a roaring individual success. His mere presence as a potential threat on the right should free Maddison, lighten the load on Barnes and even signal a chance for Kelechi Iheanacho to claim the centre-forward role as his own.
It was no surprise that we were after Jack Harrison from Leeds in addition - we’ve needed more quality and quantity in creative areas for a long time. Tetê brings the quality and the feelgood factor around his arrival brings to mind a quote or two from Brendan Rodgers earlier in the season about the importance to fans of new signings.
At the time, we were rightly focused more on Rodgers not making terrible substitutions. But you can see what he was driving at. And now the club have plugged the most serious gaps in the side, there can be no more excuses.
You don’t need scores of Souttars
You need only one, if he’s the right one.
Now, it’s generally an excellent rule never to buy players off the back of a good tournament - and something Leicester fans might call the Kapustka Doctrine.
Yet I can’t have been the only one watching Australia’s games and wondering why this man mountain at the back was playing in the Championship for Stoke.
He looked exactly like the kind of player we needed.
Fast forward five or six weeks and he’s ours.
As with Kristiansen, it’s the kind of signing Leicester City should be making - not risking fees of £30million-plus for unproven players, but investing half that in players who could either become important for years to come or bring in increasingly essential profits.
Comparisons with Harry Maguire are understandable - the stature, the style, the fee, the position of the selling club, the… err… first name…
It may have become frustrating to have to sell an asset each season but, as a club of our size, when you start to run out of players the bigger teams might want, things begin to look dicey. This approach remains an important revenue stream and we were never going to make profits off the likes of Vestergaard, Bertrand or even Ayoze Perez.
If Souttar ends up taking the Maguire route to a bigger club for a bigger fee then it will have been a success all round.
That’s all for the future of course - in the meantime there are evidently one or two concerns over his recent injury history, especially given our own as a club.
With Jonny Evans no longer a reliable selection, Wout Faes already tailing off from his early form and Daniel Amartey feeling like a downgrade from the kind of level we’d expect from our first-choice centre-back, the chance is there for Souttar to make a name for himself at Premier League level.
