The Week in Leicester: Wonderkids, the winning feeling, and Wilf’s big move
Where once there was a listless, lifeless, losing football club, there is now a victory juggernaut, dropping dubs far and wide. This week we find wins every way we turn, Manchester City disgrace themselves, and we’re inundated with blasts from the past.
The good
It’s a pleasure to bring you loads of good news these days - and that’s on top of the Enzo revolution.
LCFC Women followed up the signing of a brilliant German goalkeeper with what looks like a coup to sign a highly-rated Dutch keeper. Lize Kop won the Eredivisie with Ajax last season and has been capped 7 times by the Netherlands.
On the surface, it appears a bit of a Ramsdale/Raya move to try to keep Janina Leitzig on her toes - not that it seems necessary based on last season’s exploits. Perhaps the long-term view is that a full season in the WSL will have the giants of European football clamouring for Leitzig’s signature and after 12 months of cup action, Kop will step into her… erm… gloves.
The Under 21 men’s side kicked off their campaign with a 2-1 win over Derby County. The goals came from highly-rated strike duo Amani Richards and Zach Booth. It seems Enzoball is spreading throughout the club with youth coach Ben Petty implementing his learning already.
Meanwhile, the Under 18s won 2-1 at Norwich at the weekend - last season we became accustomed to the Following section of our FotMob apps laying out in gory detail the defeats for every one of our men’s, women’s and youth sides. Perhaps this year will be a different story.
Perhaps most excitingly of all, we’ve signed a “Punjabi wonderkid”. To some of you that might just be the latest Aston Villa reject to be drafted into our Under 21 side, but Arjan Raikhy has been given the big build-up by Sky Sports, and who are we to argue? We certainly haven’t seen any of his 12 (count ‘em) appearances on loan at Stockport and Grimsby.
Oh, and Cesare Casadei finally joined as well.
DB
The bad
Regular readers of The Week in Leicester may recall our lament a few weeks ago about the Super League Six trying to ruin the sport for everyone by hoovering up young talent before we’ve even had a chance to enjoy it. That was in response to the news that 16 year old academy sensation Trey Nyoni had joined Liverpool.
Regular readers of The Week in Leicester who are also fans of historical materialism may be familiar with the maxim that history always repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce.
Those hardy souls will be delighted to find that within two weeks football has already outdone itself. This time, Manchester City have reached their grubby paws in where they don’t belong, plucked a hotshot from the Leicester academy, and left £1.2 million in dirty oil money in his place. The man, well, boy, to depart is French midfielder, Tyrese Noubissie.
JK
The daft
Football clubs offer a link to the past, and a shared history is part of what unites us all as fans. Last season, Leicester took this to rather extreme levels by seeming to discount the present entirely in favour of posting articles about random events from the 19th century as our Premier League status teetered on the brink. In the words of our man David Bevan at the time, we were “a rapidly declining club which was busy posting pictures of some bloke with a massive long beard from the 1880s.”
Over the summer, this content largely disappeared from club channels, in favour of waves of propaganda about Gerry Taggart teaching Thai children how to play out from the back.
This week, however, we bring good tidings. Fittingly, in keeping with the futuristic tactics on display on the pitch, we’ve gone from a rapidly declining club busy posting pictures from the 1880s to a surging giant busy posting pictures from the 1960s!
Over the last seven days we’ve been treated to tales of Jimmy Hill’s pioneering spell with Coventry City, somewhat curiously posted a week after we’d played Coventry rather than before, a fake news pennant, and the crooked mainstream media falsely reporting the death of Tony Carroll.
If this has taught us anything it’s the fact that it’s all a bit easier to swallow when you aren’t losing every week. And that Tony Carroll hadn’t been on a ship.
JK
Hot goss
Moving swiftly on from daft online content, can we interest you in Wilfred Ndidi to Bayern Munich?
How about Timothy Castagne to Leicester City?
At least that would solve the issue of finding clubs both silly and rich enough to browse our Do Not Want pile. One other such source of buyers who aren’t bound by a modicum of common sense is Turkey, so it tracks that both Fenerbahce and Galatasaray could be in for Boubakary Soumare.
We’re never sure if Monaco have loads of money or no money, but apparently they’ve gathered together enough pennies to bid for Patson Daka.
Hopefully one or two of those moves go through, as Enzo Maresca revealed on Friday that we’re back operating the ‘one in, one out’ policy like a cheap student nightclub. If we finally manage to shift some deadwood, then Yunus Akgun or Andi Zeqiri could fill the giant yawning chasm in wide areas. While the answer to this week’s Manchester City + Burnley + linked to Leicester = ? transfer teaser is Taylor Harwood-Bellis.
JK
Thing we learned
We should probably acknowledge that although earlier this summer we seemed like the basket case of the relegated sides - crippling wage bill, wantaway stars, managerial flux - things have changed over the last month.
Meanwhile, at Leeds… It seems like gross mismanagement has taken place at Elland Road in recent times. They’ve still got a fair bit of quality in their ranks but Daniel Farke is already sounding unhappy and we are the only relegated side with a 100% record. Which is worth shouting about for as long as it remains the case.
DB
Anything else?
If you’re a casual football fan in Nigeria, you must think Wilfred Ndidi is very important to Leicester City. Very, very important. Very, very, very important.
And if you are, hopefully it’s easier to watch our games from there than it is in Bolivia. There can’t be many more dedicated Leicester fans than Joaquin Alvarez, who has had to resort to following our academy games through sketchy Derby County streams because the club makes it as hard as possible to watch us play.
The Get Leicester Live in La Paz movement starts here.
JK
One last thing
If you’ve been living under a rock, England women are in the World Cup Final this Sunday. The game kicks off at 11am. In perhaps related news, the Lionesses’ trip to the King Power is now sold out.