inckley fox

Yes, it feels like we're going out of our way to avoid the reset / rethink / restructure / rebuild, whatever you call it, that has long seemed inevitable. The same people are making the same mistakes, then doubling down on them. I've argued for ages that the best way out for us is for Top to stay but take a more hands-off approach and bring in new people to whom he can delegate powers. But if he were to bring Martin in as boss, I'd have to resign myself to the idea that he needs hounding out of the club. Little more than a year after we won the league, we were told that the club believed possession-based football to be more sustainable than the quick counter-attacking style that we'd trademarked. While I'm aware that possession-football can be perfectly successful, that it's served us well at times, and that a thousand other errors have contributed to our decline, that's not exactly worked out brilliantly, has it? And the fixation began long before that too, when Pearson was first forced out because, it was said, the prospective new owners fancied a 'progressive continental-style coach'. After Sousa and their own first true appointment, Sven, we had to go begging for Nige to come and sort it all out again. On the back of having won a promotion with Maresca, but realised that we couldn't realistically carry that style through to the PL, it seems like sheer insanity to turn to Martin. Even if we did go up - and I'm far, far from convinced that we will - we'd be screwed all over again. Talk about not learning from your mistakes. We won the league eventually as a result of our u-turn on Pearson but, given the fact that big bucks never bought our greatest successes, and much of the KP-era decision-making has bordered on the comical, the point is bound to come when people question whether KP won us the league, or we won it in spite of them. You have to hope that either Top's actions in the coming weeks avert people getting to that stage, or that a massive and unlikely stab in the dark reaps unexpected dividends. If we want to sustain success again though, it won't be down to a footballing identity which has been imposed on us by a man who knows nothing about either football or Leicester City's 'identity' (if such a thing can be ascribed), it'll be down to KP demonstrating that they can be competent. And that looks less and less likely by the day.

I think there is a negative to getting promoted if (a) we go up with a side built around too many players who can't do a job at top flight level, with scant resources to overhaul them, and playing a style which is unlikely to be sustainable at that level; and (b) the club can readjust to FLC budgets if they don't go up. It's often been said of teams in the past that 'they went up a year too early' - meaning that better foundations could have been built at a lower level and carried through to a higher level - and if that applies to us, I'd prefer to be patient and get it right. Of course, I don't want anything to happen which leaves us in financial turmoil, and I'd love us to go up at the first time of asking if we do the right things in the short-term (though past evidence suggests that this is highly unlikely). I just think that getting the right building blocks in place, in terms of personnel and financing, should be the number one priority. I see no point in a promotion with Russell Martin as boss and Faes / Justin / Coady / Kristiansen / Soumare / Mavididi / Ayew / Reid / Daka etc. as the backbone of the team. We'd just be stretching out the vicious circle.

Yep, you're right there - though it still felt far from concrete when he proceeded not to play him. And I read the comments about pushing for Edouard as being more a case of pushing for a striker, rather than him individually. I could be wrong, of course.

How was Akgun a superb signing?! He might be a good player (in Turkey) but he wasn't a good signing for us. And Cannon offered us nothing, other than our money back. Mavididi and Winks did well at FLC level, but not beyond that. In that respect, to call them great signings (and I know you haven't mentioned Winks, but others have) is rather like saying Julian Watts was a great signing, or even Mark Blake, Brian Carey, Gavin Ward - guys brought in to be the backbone of a side that went up and stayed up, but whose limit was the second tier. Not poor signings, of course, but by no means great. I don't think we know that it was Cooper who pushed for, say, Edouard either. He certainly never played him, and didn't seem too keen on Skipp either. But I agree with you that the manager has (or should have) a huge part to play in effective recruitment and that it'd be unfair to pin everything on Glover. How good was Steve Walsh when he wasn't working alongside Pearson (or vice versa, some would argue)? Then again, I'm not sure how much you can pin everything on any single person (even Rudkin!). I do suspect, however, that if the person who is ultimately responsible for everything was serving his purpose, then Rudkin and Glover might be among those you'd see moved on. And maybe that's why a lot of people want to see these things happen - because, even if we don't know who to hold accountable between the managers, the scouts, the directors, it would at least indicate that the need for serious change had been taken on board.

I doubt you'd have read about it in the papers. Until the court case was resolved, that is!

So, we're linked to a guy who's just experienced mixed fortunes after a brief spell at a top Dutch side, and another chap who has barely been in charge of a team for a full season. Why appoint either when, if you splice the credentials of one with the credentials of the other, you've to all intents and purposes got something that looks eerily similar to Ruud Van Nistelrooy? Is this another case of 'I've not yet experienced first hand how crap they can be, and they sound a bit fancy, so let's get him in?!'

I'm not arguing with you on your point about social media. And it's entirely possible that Lineker was attempting to do exactly that. Obviously I can't identify with him because I post on here on the grounds that people I know who read this forum don't know who I am. So to me it's not 'self-aggrandising' (if that's a word!) if I say something contentious. I'd be mortified if I ever slipped up and came across as prejudiced in a way that I didn't intend to be, and it's for that reason that I'll defend Lineker to a degree. I could imagine a situation in a day-to-day conversation where I'd refer to a person as a bit of a rat, and if it turned out that said person was Jewish or Japanese or whatever and had cause to perceive it as racist, I'd feel awful. Not because I think it's the sort of thing I'd personally find offensive, nor that I think it should be offensive - but purely because it wouldn't have been the intention. You may well be right, and this all might be part of Lineker's design. But it might not be. And I'm just not sure how much kudos you can get for doing something silly, and admitting it was silly.

Interesting officiating.

I must admit, I've taught the symbolism of rats, I've taught the Holocaust and Israel, but I'd never thought of the rat as a specifically antisemitic symbol. I know it's been used against the Japanese as well, and I'm sure many others, but it was a bit of an education for me, as well as Lineker, to have the antisemitic imagery explained in some detail. However, obviously we know what a rat more generally represents, so he was unwise to be re-posting something which made use of it in the way it did, regardless of what he did or didn't know about its past use. My guess is that he took it as a throwaway reference to what he perceived as Israel's grubby/disgusting policy in Gaza. I can understand why someone might make a mistake like that, but you should be a lot more careful in what you're effectively publishing online and he was right to apologise. As for whether it should end at that... I think it should, personally. If we don't want to live in a world where people don't feel they can say anything, and freedom of speech is shackled by the fear of causing offence to someone somewhere, then we have to accept that an honest apology for a genuine mistake, even when we find it abhorrent, is a lot better than doubling down on your error. There are enough people out there right now who are happy to bang the drum of antisemitism, or racism in general, and I much prefer someone saying 'sorry, I got that wrong' to insisting they got it right (and winning elections on the basis of it!). None of that is meant to question the seriousness of antisemitism, by the way. I've spent many an hour going over this with some of my more militantly left-wing friends, but I reckon that the way that they express themselves, both online and in the pub, is a world apart from what Lineker was saying.

You're denying his form dropped off in the second half of the FLC season? I thought there was something approaching a consensus on that, but maybe I'm wrong. I wouldn't argue about how instrumental he was in the first half of the campaign, not for a moment, but for a 10m signing in the second tier I think you're hoping for a bit more than that. We can't disregard all evidence from this season based on Ruud being rubbish, as much as I'd agree that he is. Can we therefore also forget the poor form of Faes, Justin, Soumare, Daka, Kristiansen, Reid, Skipp and Ayew? Were they just crap because the manager was crap? And what about the disciplinary issues with Vestergard? Do we accept that the players have not been good enough, and agree with Ruud (and what the results and performances tell us) in that their professional standards haven't been high enough either, or go with the assumption that the players aren't the problem, and have simply been hamstrung by god-awful management? Winks' poor form has been there for all to see, as has his half-heartedness on more than one occasion. I see no need for him to be protected from criticism for that. And the fall-out was widely reported from multiple sources, to the point that it wasn't merely a case of one word against another, and we could all make our own minds up about it. As poor a manager as Ruud may be, I don't see, in principle, what was so unreasonable about what he was asking of Winks. So I don't think anybody is throwing Winks under the bus purely because they take the manager's word as gospel. Taking into account his drop-off in the second half of last season, the poor form under two different managers this season, and the details, reported by multiple sources, of the nature of his problems with the club (with Cooper and with the current boss), many are coming to the conclusion that he wasn't such a cosmic signing after all. That seems like a statement of the obvious to me. In fact, I'd go a step further and say that his very apparent lack of commitment and his poor professional standards on and off the pitch are indicative of the whole team's low standards, and Ruud's greatest failure isn't in failing to make PL-standard players out of Winks or Faes or Vestergard or Soumare or whoever else, but rather his failure to deal with them more firmly, and sooner. As for 'quoting players from ten years ago' - that really is a gross simplification of what I said. I pointed out that the last sides to go up and stay up, like - even allowing for inflation - previous Leicester sides to go up and stay up, contained midfielders who were signed for less than Winks, and who did better upon promotion. That's hardly much of a stretch either, is it?

Really? I thought he was one of our less impressive performers post-New Year. Add to that how poor and at times outright unprofessional he's been this season, and I tend to take the view that if you don't want to see the back of him then why would you want to see the back of any of them? We can't simplify all that's happened to being the fault of two substandard bosses. I don't rate Ruud and I don't think Cooper was right for the job either, but their opinions have got to carry some weight - especially when criticism of Winks can be observed in acts of unprofessionalism which we've seen with our own eyes, and in plenty of journalism which seems to back it up. I might not like Ruud, but I've not seen any version of events which makes his request to Winks seem unreasonable. Ultimately, unless we try to rebuild comprehensively next year, and structure our side around personnel and a style which can realistically - to a point at least - be maintained upon promotion, then we'd be signing up for instant relegation again. When I see people saying they'd welcome Enzo back (for all of the many positive things I could say about him), or someone vaguely similar to him, and that our recruitment was great last year, it seems like some of us are basically asking for more of the same. I'd argue that if we want to build something which is made to last then there are lessons to be learned not only from what we did after promotion, but also what we did before it. If things were so rosy back then, frankly I don't understand why you'd be so angry about the board. Surely you'd be in agreement with a lot more of what they've done over these past couple of years than I would. Again, a class act for half a season in the FLC. Let's not rewrite history. And surely the main lesson from last season was that if the backbone of the team, and the established line-up, contains too many players who are going to need replacing in the EPL (e.g. Justin, Faes, Vestergard, Winks, Mavididi, as well as - arguably - Ndidi, Ricardo, Vardy and, in the event, even KDH) then you'll come straight back down. We can't build around people that we know not to be good enough at this level: Bit-part players and a bit of know-how here and there - maybe - but you need to go up with a core of players that can step up. Unlike, say, Harry Winks. And, while I'm at it, we've found a great many better midfielders than Winks for less than 15m, even allowing generously for the inflation of fees. The last side we got promoted with before 2023 contained one, arguably two of them (Drinkwater, James). The one before that (Izzet), and that the one before that (Izzet, Lennon, Taylor, Parker) both contained budget buys who did a whole lot better than Winks when we went up. And I'm fairly positive that the most recent sides to go up and stay up could say the same too.

Surely you'd go for Challinor over him! 7 promotions in 14 seasons, possibly an 8th on the way. Wellens had a few disasters before Orient, whereas for Challinor the record is as insane as anything I've ever seen - and he's still in his forties. The question is whether he could adapt to a bigger club. But I suppose that a degree of adaptation is also required for foreign managers.

Surely that goes for every other rubbish centre back in history.

I suppose we're both speculating. I find it hard to believe that those guys were signed to replace Fatawu / Mavididi, but in the event it hardly matters because, as you say, he ended up playing both of them often enough. I also agree about the overlapping full-backs. If I were to continue being incredibly generous to Cooper, as you put it(!), maybe I'd say that many of us felt Enzo underused the overlapping FBs, especially with Justin, so it wasn't a surprise to see us give it a whirl. But again, that proved to be the wrong decision, and you rightly point out that the tucked-in wingers were pretty horrible. I don't mean to come across as a Cooper apologist. While it's inevitable that people are going to question the change of manager, it seemed clearer that things were going awry, and that he'd been the wrong appointment, than the league standings indicated. I just don't feel he was a completely hopeless incompetent to the degree that Ruud seems to be, so it's a case of me trying to make sense of some of his more curious decisions. Maybe you're right and there's no sense to be made of them. But I go along with the idea that this season has largely been the story of two poor managerial appointments. I actually think we got the previous one wrong too. Not because Enzo isn't a good manager, nor that he did anything other than a good job for us. Simply because we weren't committed - understandably, I think - to seeing through his brand of football in the top flight. I think the about-turn in style had as much to do with our failure this season as the two substandard appointments, and we should have made an appointment whose ideas fitted in with what we deemed practical upon promotion.

You may well be right. Realistically, Cooper saw that we needed a replacement for KDH and another more conventional #10, and when he saw the budget decided that cheap back-up options for the wingers was the way forward. Ideally I'm sure he'd have asked for at least one new first choice winger. Both of our first choices - that we'd spent handsomely on the year before - had difficult pre-seasons and poor starts to the season, hence the bargain basement options ended up getting more game-time than we'd have liked. I don't necessarily agree with that, and I let out an almighty groan when we made those two signings, but I don't think the decision-making from the manager's point of view was anything exceptionally daft. His instruction to the recruitment team was 'I need wide players'. They responded that they needed to be cheap, so Cooper added the stipulation that they have good PL experience, and Glover and co. came up with Ayew and Reid. It turns out they weren't the best suggestions ever, and the boss should perhaps have said 'go back and try again', but that's been the nature of our recruitment under every manager, including Enzo, since the Puel-Macia years. Sadly it also applied to our replacement for KDH. I still think that by harping on about Reid and Ayew we're losing sight of the real reasons for our plight. It wasn't a couple of bargain buys who ended up getting a bit too much exposure. It was financial mayhem, pending deductions, budget restrictions, years of poor recruitment, unsuitable managerial appointments and a lack of professionalism by many of the regular playing staff. Ayew and Reid may be symptomatic of some of that, but so are many other things.

I heard various different figures for that, in the 3-6m range, but either way, I wouldn't argue with you. I understood the logic, but it certainly isn't what I would have done. I mean, just to clarify, I think they're both crap.

It is relevant though, when you're dealing with financial restrictions (free transfers vs. 20m of spending). I don't actually believe that either of them currently offer more, but I recognise that the manager was looking for cheap alternatives / back-up to two more expensive inherited wingers. They ended up playing more because Stephy had a poor season and Abdul started poorly too, one game aside, then got injured. I'm not making any outrageous claims about them being good signings or anything so don't worry, you can go ahead and read the rest of it if you have nothing to do for an hour or two!

I get that promotion is always a fine achievement and should never be taken for granted. Even so, we were expected to go up and we did, albeit with some very sketchy patches in the second half of the season when we certainly weren't miles better at playing our system than Southampton. And if we were adapting over the course of the season, you'd expect to see things getting better, not worse. Our evolution suggests that, in spite of what Enzo said publicly, we'd actually adapted very quickly (as you'd expect, given that these players were way more expensive than anything else in the FLC, and had mostly been signed for another very possession-centric boss in Rodgers) but then became too one-dimensional. The key issue, though, was whether we'd gone about promotion in a manner that allowed for success thereafter. To me it was quite obvious at the time that we hadn't. And not purely for PSR reasons. Whichever way you dress it up, the side still largely consisted of a backbone - in Faes, Justin, Mavididi, Vestergard, Winks, Ndidi - which was going to be too poor at this level, and require a level of spending that we didn't have in order to rectify. Even if we also consider the players who did well under Enzo and haven't disgraced themselves since - the injury prone Ricardo, the unproven Fatawu, the increasingly past-it Vardy, the up-and-down Hermansen, and KDH, who would have been on his way regardless - you still think 'a lot of these guys were going to need strong competition in the PL'. So Enzo would have had to play a blinder in the market. Now, you have faith that he'd have found a more Enzo-esque midfielder than Ndidi. So what about Winks - would he have been just great under Enzo? And what about KDH - would he have stayed? And surely Enzo would have had less money to play with than Cooper too, due to the compensation package, and would have had to go through the same scouts. Would he have managed to do better than Cooper in replacing KDH, AND found a replacement for Ndidi? If you look at the Enzo-Glover signings in 2023, it shouldn't fill you with confidence. Winks has been poor since January 2024. Hermansen was good in the FLC but up and down since. Coady was a dreadful waste of money. Mavididi was decent enough at a lower level, but poor beyond. The jury is out on Fatawu as a top level player, and between him and Mavididi we spent 20m (five times more than Cooper spent on the wide players that you single out for criticism). Cannon was another expensive flop. None of the three loanees were good enough. It's hardly stellar stuff, is it? Whether the players enjoyed playing for Enzo or not is of little concern to me. I know for a fact that several of O'Neill's players were terrified of him, and even disliked him. Nige made his enemies too. It isn't a popularity contest, and if they all adored being told that they could be a new Man City, and hated the reality check of being told 'Actually lads, no you can't', then that just underlines the fact that Enzo wasn't such a tremendous appointment after all. He's like the cool Year 10 teacher who everyone loves, before going to the serious, results-driven Year 11 teacher who tells them that, no, they're not all geniuses and no, we can't just watch films all year. But, like a bunch of Year 11s, I would take these players' critiques on management with lashings of salt. What I think is that Enzo leapt at an opportunity that McKenna turned down because of (a) financial constraints, and (b) being aware that he couldn't possibly fashion a competitive side at PL level, and with limited resources, that played his style of football. I also think that if he had stayed we'd have seen the same mixed bag of signings that we've seen under every manager, including Enzo, for years, and that these players (and they would have been largely the same set of players) would have been shown up every bit as much. What I actually know, on the other hand, is that we did end up changing our style dramatically, and lots of players with a massively over-inflated sense of their own worth got very upset about it, and then subsequently demonstrated a fatal lack of professionalism. None of them, including Enzo's signings, made the grade. And the side that came up with us, and continued to play in a vaguely Enzo-esque manner, were the only side that were worse than a team that some have called one of the most appalling in PL history. To me, all of that suggests that in 2023 we should have appointed a manager who would build something that didn't need overhauling the moment we went up. And if we want to end this terrible cycle we're in and establish ourselves in the PL again, then we have to learn from that mistake.

Ruud also speaks a great game. I'd be wary of people whose record puts you off, but whose personal charm won you over. Do we really need to keep going down the 'possession at all costs' route? It didn't bring us our success in the first place, and it's not even the norm any more for smaller clubs that want to compete with the big boys. I'm not sure we need a boss who pushes a one-dimensional 'idea' rather than the right thing for the right set of players. Becoming a managerial 'brand' may well make you personally more marketable, but I doubt it's always for the good of their employers. If what you build in the FLC is going to have to be dismantled upon promotion, I wouldn't bother building it in the first place. The idea of having to endure what we've just endured every other season is both awful and unnecessary, but when Maresca built his team around Faes / Vestergard / Ndidi / KDH / Vardy (i.e. what was left of the backbone to the side that had just got us relegated) it wasn't too hard to see that that was where we were headed. Surely it would make more sense to appoint someone who could fashion a style of play which might actually be of some use when we reach the next step. Otherwise, you have a situation where you either stick with the boss (like Southampton with Martin himself) and get mauled, or lose him (as we were forced to with Maresca, and Leeds may well voluntarily do with Farke) and then face the commotion of a complete rebuild of both personnel and style of play in a single close season. And we know how that worked out for us this year. I'd like to see us learn from our errors, just for once!

I think Harry Winks also has two relegations in his last two top flight seasons, courtesy of Sampdoria. Some of the characters mentioned here do seem a bit like the sorts of players who might 'attract' relegation, to say the least.

To be honest, with the Ranieri appointment I thought 'this was either a stroke of genius, or a massive stroke of luck'. After all, he'd publicly begged us to give him a chance. You knew you'd find out before long whether these were guys with great footballing nous (like Martin George in some of his appointments) or just chancers who'd do wild things which had wild outcomes. The passage of time was always going to tell us, and it did. Part of the problem with the support now is that they never saw that it was a manager and the brilliance of his backroom team who built our success, and not a bunch of Buddhist monks or free beers. It wasn't the 400K they spent on Mahrez, it was the scout who saw that he was a 60m player. If we were clear about that, it'd be easier for people to demand more of the owners. And they wouldn't go round appointing managers because they genuinely believe they have some kind of supernatural ability to sniff out the 'aura' of a great manager.

Hamilton is an odd one. Obviously not a top flight standard boss, but fans took to him, we started the season well, and in spite of a 'spend nothing / sell your best player' policy we still ended the season with the same points that had kept us up a year earlier. In fact, didn't we go down in 20th, which hadn't even been a relegation position just a few years earlier? I was only a kid so the memory is hazy. Some managers just seem to invoke the wrath of the fans, and it's not always tied in with success. Taylor wasn't booed until very late in the day. Allen, Sven, Rodgers all had large sections of the fanbase onside to the end. We didn't get on Bassett's back too much. We liked McGhee, and many donned 'Ollie' masks, but - if you go back - swathes called for Bloomfield and Milne to go, 'fans' spat at Little three months before we got promoted (the day, he later claimed, he decided he'd bail on us whenever he got the chance), sections of the support did their best to hound O'Neill out of the club, were split down the middle over Pearson, hated Puel etc. The immensely successful bosses probably prompted more unrest in the stands than the rubbish ones! Cooper, perhaps rightly, was hugely unpopular, and yet Ruud seems not to rile us so much. Is that down to the characteristics of our fans right now (apathetic, misguided about those they should thank for their success, and old, like me)? Either way, it doesn't always make much sense. Regardless of the rights and wrongs, most fans were happy to give Hamilton another go, though what happened next was a cautionary tale for those thinking of giving relegated bosses another roll of the dice. Of course, he signed Walsh and Newell, so it wasn't all bad! And, while we're at it, I was told yesterday that we've been relegated under 14 different managers, and stuck with seven of them. Only one ever brought us back up. So Hamilton, and every other relegated boss (except for Frank O'Farrell, who at least reached an FA Cup Final in the process of getting relegated) should serve as a warning when it comes to Ruud. I.e., sack him, or it'll only get worse.

So many contenders. Kapustka, Musa, Slimani, Silva, Ghezzal, Ward, Benkovic, Daka, Soumare, Vestergard, Faes, Kristiansen, Winks, Coady, Cannon, Skipp... While Hernandez, Bertrand, Ayew, Reid and several loanees were also awful, at least they didn't break the bank. For me, it's Faes. I've never disliked a Leicester player as much as him. Slimani, Ward, Daka and Soumare are all fairly close contenders, if I try to be objective, but nothing matches my disdain for the frizzy haired prat.

It's really unfair to judge a player on what we've seen of him, but what little I have seen made me wonder if he was even second tier standard. And for some reason - can't imagine what that is - that felt as if it was to be expected. The recruitment department really needs the mother of all overhauls. After we've fired the boss, naturally.

It's the first time in my whole life I've gone into a game thinking that it'd be for the best if we got obliterated (with a couple of goals for Vardy, obviously.) I've honestly never disliked a Leicester side more than this one, even way back in the Hamilton and Pleat and Levein and Holloway days (when at least we had a defence, and tried a bit) and I'm going to have to give it a miss too, perhaps permanently until I've seen the back of the likes of Faes and Soumare. I just feel that some of these characters are malignant. Their existence (as players, of course, not as people - I don't want to sound like Trump) is harmful to the club. Maybe I'm just getting old, and falling victim to the pervading bitterness of the modern world. Or maybe they're just god-awful, unprofessional, repulsive crap and I've had enough.