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The same article that says we're after Martin also says Vestergaard is "expected to be sold" so perhaps not

He does work incredibly hard at hiding behind opposition players when we're in possession to be fair. Can't be easy making sure you are literally never in a position to receive the ball from a teammate or do anything useful with it. Consistently shit on and off the pitch for years - the perfect captain for us.

The TNT pundits were a lot more impressed with that Arsenal performance than I was - typically good defensive effort but it looked to me like they got more or less what they deserved. Time wasting in the 46th minute, one shot in the entire second half. Fair enough if you want to play that way but the margins are mighty fine and there is always going to be the risk that you fall on the wrong side of them. Keown on the verge of tears talking about how it's such a shame because Gabriel's his favourite player top drawer stuff from Fletch and the gang all night as per usual

And here's the version that will end up being forwarded to Top by the comms team:

I know people will complain about literally any decision now and part of it is influenced by other, genuinely bad calls Celtic were the beneficiaries of, but I'm still surprised there are complaints about the second Celtic goal. That exact situation is something that happens fairly often and it's never called as an offside, because it isn't one.

I'd love white shorts back. Just feels right and properly Leicester to me in a way I can't really articulate. And yes, I know lots of our success has come in seasons when we had all blue home kits but so have both our relegations to League One (and consequently also our lowest ever league finish) so I reckon they probably cancel out at this point. Hummel blue and white kit sponsored by a company who actually exist/aren't a gossamer-thin front for organised crime is the dream. As we're still under the yoke of Adidas and King Power it'll more likely be some gash template that gets downgraded from bland to properly contemptible when they festoon it with gold and crypto logos.

I think if you're really not enjoying it then the likelihood is you're going to carry on really not enjoying it. You unlock new tools, move on to new maps, meet new characters and so on but the basic loop remains essentially the same throughout - doing deliveries to connect/strengthen areas, broken up by the occasional boss fight or very long cutscene.

16-year-old playing in an unprecedentedly bad team populated almost entirely by feckless bellends and devoid of leadership or standards, under the "guidance" of two historically shit managers who had next to no interest in using youth prospects. Restricted to three league starts in 2026 as we instead persisted with Mavididi, who was arguably our worst player all season and managed to beat Monga for goals + assists by just one despite a) playing almost three times as many minutes and b) not being a ****ing schoolboy. Hmm, I wonder why he struggled to stand out and looked sort of demotivated? Mystery.

Looked the right decision to me and pretty clearly as well. If it weren't for the fact that it helped Arsenal and Spurs I don't think there would be too many arguments.

All the more impressive when for half the season he was being badly and obviously misused by Amorim. His chance creation numbers compared to everyone else in the league are ridiculous

Makes for a grim spectacle but they are undeniably very good at what they do unfortunately

I can quite happily do without an apology, personally. Wouldn't mean anything, or change anything. If they are sorry for their litany of avoidable failures then they can express that by actually doing something about them. I need another insincere, likely AI-generated missive from our glorious leader and his underlings like I need a hole in the head. People are always asking for more communication which I understand but every written or verbal statement that comes out of the club and its figureheads only serves to make me less confident in them. Ideally I'd like them to all just say absolutely nothing for the foreseeable future because I don't think they have anything worth communicating to us at all.

It does feel like we might need to take a chance on someone like this because I'm not convinced we'll attract (or target) anyone genuinely impressive and going for a safe, "proven" option at this level seems like a good way of getting someone who's "proven" that they aren't actually very good. Not necessarily an endorsement of Fuchs specifically, and after hearing the way the likes of Huth and Albrighton talk about us I'd be very wary of bringing anyone from that era back at a time when we badly need to become less sentimental and more ruthless/meritocratic.

Now?

At his peak a genuinely outstanding footballer and I'd agree there was a point when he was up there with the very best in the world in his position. A sorry way for him to go and of course as the captain of this shambles he's by no means blameless but I think I'll still ultimately remember him fondly as one of my favourite players in recent years. The early days when he'd just replaced Simpson were very funny - people absolutely bewildered by the sight of a right back crossing the halfway line and running with the ball. "Definitely not a right back".

Good how Rowett said he couldn't do anything about "cultural things" like disciplining players because he's only here until the end of the season, but when it comes to giving academy prospects a chance and dropping players who've been stinking the gaff out for months (years, in some cases) he's obviously got to take next season into account, and that somehow also works against the young players rather than the experienced ones. Never really makes sense to read anything into press conference or interview stuff these days but some of the wording there is funny. Nobody has been "doing so well that they're suddenly going to come into this team" - yeah, you'd have to be doing so well to break into this team wouldn't you? It would take a veritable wonderkid to meet the incredibly high standards set by the seniors here.

It's weird because logically the one obvious consequence of your Director of Football also being heavily involved in the academy should be that it's front and centre when it comes to recruiting managers, building the squad etc., and it's just not. Ruud made a bit of an effort towards the end I think but Cooper, Cifuentes and Rowett have had basically no interest in using our prospects, and then we fill out the squad with decrepit old mercenaries, pointless benchwarmers like Aribo and youngsters from other teams to further limit the opportunities we give to our own.

Done, reckon it took me somewhere between 5-10 minutes. It's not a big ask, is it?

His parents speak it and he played in France for four years so it seems a safe assumption that he probably can speak at least some French

We'll Be Fine

I think it's two different questions really: Should we have kept Cifuentes? No. Things were pretty clearly only heading in one direction, and it was the direction anyone could have told you they would head in as soon as Fatawu and James stopped trading wondergoals every weekend. Should we have sacked Cifuentes if that meant handing the reins to someone with literally zero managerial experience for almost an entire month before appointing Gary Rowett? Probably also no.

I was only half paying attention to his interview after the game so can't remember the exact quote but he said something to the effect of it being the same story as the last few games, same patterns, same problems - no ****ing shit. He neglects to ever do anything differently and then seems confused when the outcomes don't change either. "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!" People want the players to get raked over the coals which I get but I don't think it's ever a particularly good idea for managers to do it in public, and to me the stuff he's been coming out with recently comes across less as frank honesty aimed to motivate and more as him trying to absolve himself of any responsibility. Yeah the squad probably isn't equipped for a relegation battle but that's the position we're in and unfortunately it is actually your job to come up with a way of getting us out of it.

Proper manager, great fit, he just gets it etc. His refusal to actually make any meaningful changes is pretty remarkable. I do get the thinking that when you're working short-term you maybe don't have the time to overhaul things tactically and it's more about simplifying, making little tweaks and trying to build the players up, like De Zerbi was saying recently. Problems with that: firstly, he's been here for two months, not two games or two weeks. Assuming he's here until the end of the season he'll have been in charge for almost a third of it, and he's won one game - probably worth trying something at least slightly different at some point? Secondly, his focus may well have been less on tactics and more on trying to improve confidence, morale, energy but unfortunately those things are all still through the floor as well. As usual, two things can be true at once - it's obviously not anywhere close to being all his fault but ultimately he's been appointed to keep us in the league and we're going to end the weekend at least five points from safety having won one of his 11 games in charge. The guy is ****ing crap.

That is not "fight" from Ayew and Lascelles, by the way, same with Hamza when he came off. It's petulance because they know they're embarrassing themselves at a level most of them probably feel they should be above and it does absolutely nothing to help us.