The Week in Leicester: Stephy graph, jittery Jonny and a Nice idea
Hands up - we completely forgot to do this last Friday, which probably explained why nothing happened.
This week’s round-up includes a very important and necessary chart, the next step in the career of captain, leader, legend Jonny Evans and a possible destination for the heartbeat of Enzo Maresca’s new-look Leicester City.
The good
Hot on the heels of the announcement of the open training session on Filbert Way, the club have implemented another welcome way of engaging with the local community - drop-in sessions for supporters that might be struggling with the transition to online and mobile ticketing. This is a good idea and probably overdue by about 12 months given the issues at various games last season, most notably the Blackburn FA Cup clash which we are contractually obliged to refer to as a fiasco.
More open communication would be a huge improvement and this initiative is a step in the right direction. For now, we’ll hold fire on concerns this is the start of the plan to phase out season cards entirely in favour of mobile-only ticketing. There’s more than enough else to moan about.
Also this week, we enjoyed Owynn Palmer-Atkin's interviews with various players in Thailand, including Mads Hermansen, Ricardo Pereira and Harry Winks - three players integral to the new style of play Enzo Maresca will be implementing.
Hopefully this is again a sign that the lines of communication will be spreading a little wider and players will be made available to Radio Leicester and the written press on a more regular basis. Maybe The Fosse Way will even get the chance for a one-on-one chat with Danny Ward or Jannik Vestergaard.
We also seem to be right on the cusp of finally adding a winger to the squad with the imminent arrival of Stephy Mavididi.
Mavididi’s attacking output in Ligue 1 has been impressively consistent over the past four years - as you can see from this very basic and rather pointless graph which we in no way included purely for the pun in the article headline.
Stephy Mavididi - League goals and assists per 90
The Manchester City style Maresca will be looking to replicate is heavily dependent on wide players who can beat a man and put a ball into the box from the byline. We don't really have any of those so the pace and trickery evident in Mavididi's showreels will be priceless. Just don't let him onto any of the pitches at Seagrave, which brings us to...
The bad
That's right, we're talking about Conor Coady's mystery injury which has seen him miss the tour of Thailand altogether and will rule him out of the opening day's meeting with Coventry. It’s not like he even has form for it…
A one-off injury crisis is one thing but the longer this weird Seagrave curse goes on, the more supporters will continue to question what on earth is happening here. Perhaps we were spoiled with the 2016 title-winning team that barely picked up so much as a knock.
The tour of Thailand and Singapore never seemed like a good idea to the fans but now we also get the sense Maresca doesn't seem thrilled with how it's going.
If he really is a Guardiola/Arteta type personality and he intends to put his stamp on the club then perhaps we'll see a return to a time when everything was geared towards giving the players every possible tool to succeed rather than prioritising the wheeling of players from the 90s around Bangkok for no discernible reason.
The daft
Staggeringly, nobody picked Manchester United as the next destination for captain, leader, legend Jonny Evans. His leadership skills were fully on display as he marshalled a young Red Devils side to a 3-1 defeat against Wrexham. The Guardian labelled his display "jittery". Still, we're a centre-back down to injury already, so perhaps that contract offer is still on the table... (by the way, I had to look way back in the archives for a photo of Jonny Evans and lo and behold, he’s receiving treatment for an injury - I would say you couldn’t write it but I just have).
Dropping out of the Premier League puts us firmly in the sights of all sorts of specialist Football League blogs, podcasts and general mouthpieces. The Second Tier recently published a list of the top 24 managers in the Championship. Enzo Maresca came in firmly in mid-table, which is hard to argue with given there is absolutely no evidence to go on yet, but we'd have to take more issue with Nigel Pearson being placed 22nd - just below someone I've literally never heard of.
Hot goss
Arguably the most important player in Maresca's setup during pre-season has been Ricardo Pereira. So of course he's been linked with a return to Nice. To be honest, with Kasper already there and the prospect of some Ricky Riviera action, I'm going to link myself with a move to Nice too. See you losers later.
We've also been linked with someone called Hannibal, who has even bigger hair than Wout Faes and Hamza Choudhury combined.
Incandescent at this news, Hamza might be off to Southampton despite Maresca apparently rating him and indeed giving him the armband for the narrow victory over the mighty Port FC.
Oh, and just when you thought Rudkin and co had learned their lesson about demanding huge transfer fees for players with a year left on their contract and then seeing them disappear for nothing 12 months down the line, we allegedly want £20million for Wilfred Ndidi. Hello, is that Al-Ittihad?
Lastly, here are the leftovers from the previous week because literally nothing has happened with any of these in the past seven days while our entire club has decamped to the other side of the world: we want Cole Palmer if we can magic ourselves back into being a Premier League team before the season starts, we want Amad Diallo - especially now he's injured himself - we want Cesare Casadei and Mauricio Pochettino has been moaning about having too many players despite Chelsea already shipping half of their squad off to Saudi Arabia and we want rid of Timothy Castagne to somewhere like Juventus or Fulham. But only for the right price! We’re not giving anyone away!
Thing we learned
Not to schedule a friendly in Thailand during monsoon season. Okay, we're over that now. Last mention, promise.
One last thing
This absolutely top banter from professional wind-up merchant @craiglcfc, which will in no way come back to haunt us in a week's time.