The Week in Leicester: Musa, Mike, and minutes under the belt
No new male signings and just one low-wattage outgoing, but it’s an action packed week nonetheless.
James Knight reviews seven days that saw a wild Ahmed Musa resurface, Mike Stowell beg for a job, and Leicester get started early on the losing front.
The good
You would be forgiven for thinking that the entire Seagrave complex fell into a deep coma after signing Conor Coady a couple of weeks ago. Project Rebuild, which briefly sparked into life with a sudden avalanche of links to ex-Manchester City players, appears to have brought in the HS2 contractors to get the job done.
However, Jon Rudkin’s creaky old fax machine did manage one bit of business this week: George Hirst, famous for the way he was signed via OH Leuven and then coming on as an impact sub against Tottenham and Manchester United with the Champions League on the line, is finally gone. Those two games, zero goals, and about seventeen loan spells later, he has departed for Ipswich Town, so set your watches for Boxing Day bantz.
Organising one transfer is enough to have the Leicester recruitment department running at capacity, so that’s it on the signings front.
Fortunately, the women use a different phone line, so they have been much more active. The big banner signing is Janina Leitzig, who was on loan last season and quite literally saved the season, on a permanent deal from Bayern Munich. She’s been followed by Lena Petermann from Montpellier to add - badly needed - reinforcement up front, and Janice Cayman, a 34-year old Belgian international who was described as ‘Cambiasso-esque’ on Twitter, so nothing can possibly go wrong there.
The Women’s World Cup starts next week and there are a couple of Leicester players Down Under for the tournament. One of them, CJ Bott, could be involved in the opening game on Thursday and celebrated by scoring the first goal in New Zealand’s warm-up win over Vietnam. Wales won’t be there, but Hannah Cain, Josie Green, and last year’s loanee Carrie Jones all played in a respectable 2-0 loss to the United States. The Welsh held them for 75 minutes before, in painfully American fashion, Dennis Rodman’s daughter came off the bench to score a late brace.
The bad
Leicester’s pre-season campaign in front of fans gets underway this Saturday at Northampton. The first friendly, however, has already happened. Peterborough United came to Seagrave, raved about the facilities, and handed us our first L of the new season.
Enzo Maresca used a different XI in each half, Harvey Barnes found an excuse not to play, and Leicester conceded inside five minutes. Some of the analysis from the journalists who went down to watch is enough to set off our PTSD - “For all City’s possession, there were very few chances”, Peterborough scored their opener “with Ricardo out of position and Vestergaard failing to intercept”.
We’re back, baby!
On the Women’s side, Ashleigh Plumptre has abruptly departed at the end of her contract. She’s another at the World Cup, and has either got a bigger club lined up already, or is planning to get one after the tournament. That’s going to be a big gap to fill in defence next season, and a is bigger loss of a beloved player, who came through the academy, than this rather pitiful goodbye statement from the club would suggest.
The daft
In the year of our Lord, 2023, Ahmed Musa’s Leicester City career is still making waves. The man who brought us the Greatest Friendly Goal In History and, um, Kicking It Out Of Play A Lot, has now managed to leave us nearly half a million quid out of pocket.
He disappeared off to Al-Nassr in the Saudi Pro League before it was cool, and they apparently decided not to pay for him. Nowadays, Al-Nassr are no longer Al-Nassr, they have become Cristiano Ronaldo’s Al-Nassr, and they’ve been whacked with a registration ban as a result of this shenanigans. Which makes the national news, because that’s the world we live in now.
On the subject of the Saudis, big Mick Stowell, fresh from being sacked two days before pre-season, has immediately popped back up in the news. He gave an interview with the Wolves Heroes blog in which he delivered a thinly veiled come and get me plea to MBS.
“I have always worked in England but wouldn’t mind going abroad for a couple of years if the chance came up in somewhere like America or Saudi Arabia.”
Have a bit of self-respect, Mike. At least play hard to get.
The club, meanwhile, has hammered home the air of extreme competence at the top by cancelling a friendly with the Thai national team that they never even announced was happening in the first place.
Hot goss
Harvey Barnes has been on the brink of a move to Newcastle for at least a week. The current word on the street is for £30-£35 million. We jumped the gun, and gave our final official verdict on Barnes’ Leicester career already.
Leicester are being heavily linked with Brondby’s Mads Hermansen, who ticks every box for a Leicester goalkeeper: he’s Danish, and he was previously linked to Burnley. Before they signed the last guy we were linked with, James Trafford. Maybe the ex-Etihad bros share a Wyscout login.
Stephy Mavididi is the only winger Leicester have been linked to for about a month, which is both slightly promising and somewhat alarming.
Eagle-eared sleuths have deduced that Jonny Evans’ epic ghosting is because he’s about to sign for Everton.
Thing we learned
Callum Doyle looks set to be the next name in. What originally started out as a permanent deal from Manchester City looks to have become a season-long loan with no option to buy.
Doyle’s imminent signing, along with Coady’s arrival, could mean a back three at times next season. It might also mean Wout Faes is not long for this world and Maresca is stocking up on centre backs that he actually wants.
Enzo’s trust in younger players may be a lot more real than Brendan Rodgers’ ever was. Doyle is just 19, while the Peterborough friendly was notable for the fact that Wanya Marcal-Madivadua, 20, started for the ‘first’ team. Tawanda Maswanhise, also 20, and Kasey McAteer, 21, both played the second half.
Anything else?
Over the weekend, Willy Caballero ghosted in as the new Assistant Manager. The club, for all its faults, is at least backing Maresca to the hilt: there’s barely a staff member left who was here before he arrived.
If this all goes belly up, there’s a very real prospect we might get Rudders adding the caretaker manager gig to his portfolio.
One last thing
In those long, lonely nights spent reliving the pain of last season, have you ever wondered why it all happened? How did it all come to this? Why, for instance, did Jamie Vardy hand penalty-taking duties to James Maddison against Everton, when he could have simply scored and kept us up?
Was it just that Vardy’s penalty taking is shaky? Was there an elaborate penalty competition at Seagrave that Maddison won? Was Dean Smith just a maniac?
Wrong, wrong, and wrong again.