Finnegan

It wasn't a reflection on Under I just mean that he started trying way too hard to impress

I've felt a few times in the last couple of games that he was going to be the new Cengiz. Player not getting picked gets in a vicious cycle of trying too hard to impress the manager by going it alone and falling in to the trap of doing exactly what the manager doesn't want.

Nigel Farage still being on I'm A Celebrity says a lot about the demographics of ITV reality TV watchers. Fair enough, they know their audience.

I'd easily have KDH in my top three. Hermansen, Vestergaard and Winks are absolutely critical to what we do, they're imperious at beating the block at this level and we don't really have like for like replacements for any of them that could plug the gap. Stolarczyk is willing, Hamza has done OK and Coady isn't awful with his feet but it's very obviously a significant drop in our ability to play our when they come in. Meanwhile obviously we do have slightly more options in the middle if KDH isn't there. He's not quite priceless in the same regard. But we saw against Wednesday what happens when he's out of the team. I do think he's very undervalued by our own support. Not only is he incredible on paper, statistically, just with the old eye test you can see how much more presence we have in the middle of the park when he's there. Yeah he gives it away a bit and that's definitely something he'd have to improve on promotion but he also drives most of our best work in attack. Think my top three currently would be KDH, Winks and then I'd find it hard to pick one of Ricardo, Ndidi and Hermansen who are all excellent.

I swear we get more boring draws against teams in the same league than anyone else.

They must be absolutely pig sick of the sight of us tbh

Kinell Ipswich, Leeds and Southampton all winning early.

I think this is completely wrong to be honest. And completely misunderstanding "the philosophy." The whole point of passing it around between Winks, Vestergaard and Hermansen right inside our own box is to try and draw teams out so they aren't parking the bus so that we CAN move quickly through the opposition. The idea that Maresca doesn't want us to counter attack quickly is completely false and rather silly given the entire point of our build up is to try and create chances to counter. It's not like Rodgersball where we pass the ball sideways a thousand times in front of the opposition box is it? "Completely against the philosophy" would be something like bringing on a seven foot striker and lumping it at his head from every goal kick. Please can we fvck off with this myth thag Enzoball is negative or slow or anti fun or anti excitement. Maresca wants us to score quick, efficient goals exactly like that but you can't do it when 99% of the teams in the league are terrified of us and tend to have most of their team sat in their own box refusing to move.

Stonewall pen VAR absolutely gives that

Looked better in two minutes than the entire Wednesday game.

Is it working as normal on foxes hub?

Hmm

Not surprising I guess but still gutting. Don't really flinch much at celebrity deaths but a big fan of Shane and the Pogues. Absolute mess of a life at times, miracle to an extent he got this far. No less sad though. RIP In the spirit of the Wire,

They won't sell him, they'd be nuts to and if we tried to buy him we'd be charged considerable Leicester Tax and rightfully so. He's also 28 and having a significant purple patch. His career to date has looked nothing like this. And Blackburn play a high pressing, intense 4231 where he's given a considerable amount of freedom to roam as a 10. A lot of his best attributes that JDT has gotten out of him this year would be wasted here.

I'll be honest, I was surprised he didn't come on on the hour mark yesterday given we were winning. But we were largely shit and on the back foot at that point having created very little, I'm not sure he'd have done much other than run around and press. Minutes in the legs sure but I doubt he'd have had the chance to make much impact and that's probably what swung it for Maresca who had bigger things to worry about given the general performance. Would you really have chucked a young kid on for his debut in that? I imagine the hope is we'd have been comfortable by 60 minutes and he'd have gotten a game.

Oh and as for this Vardy and Iheanacho aren't good enough shit. Sit down, shut up and get back in your boxes. They're two of the most productive goal scorers in the league, they're just having to share minutes with each other. They're both scoring 0.61 goals per 90 minutes currently. That's more than Adam Armstrong who is the league's second top scorer with 10 goals at 0.58 per game. Vards is scoring a goal every 148 minutes which is better than basically all of the league's top scorers except Szmodics. Seriously, after Szmodics there's pretty much Vardy, Broadhead and Nacho in the 0.6s. After that you're looking at the likes of Summerville, Clarke, Whittaker, Piroe et all managing 0.45 to 0.55ish goals per game. Cannon has one decent season at this level or above under his belt and he famously went about six months at Preston before he settled and made any impact. Let the lad settle, recover from his injury and trust the management to ease him in to the squad at the right time. Enzo has put massive faith in McAteer and Fatawu, he obviously isn't afraid of giving young players a chance. Cannon will get his chance, it's just not the time right now while we're struggling.

Tbh I'm getting a bit frustrated with the weird desperation for Cannon. I know it's like having a new toy and everyone's excited to see him play but eh. The over reactions to Enzo not getting him on the pitch yet are weird. Yes, Maresca has said he wants to give him minutes but he's not going to throw an inexperienced, young debutant returning from a pretty long injury on in a game where we're struggling and desperate for a goal. And that's pretty much where we've been at since Cannon has been fit. We've run in to a patch of poor form and we've not been doing well, we're obviously going to favour Vardy and Iheanacho who are known quantities. I don't have any problem with that. Maresca just seems to be waiting til we're more comfortable to give him a chance to get game time and I'm not sure in what world that's a bad idea?

Mavididi is a good example of the sort of player I think people have a habit of really under estimating the impact of because he can be frustrating to watch. His predecessor, Barnes, had the same issue. Don't think a lot of fans ever fully appreciated just how good Barnes stats were both scoring and creating. Mavididi isn't on that level but then he cost us like six million quid and signed for us in the Championship so what were people's expectations exactly? But for some context, of everyone in our squad, only KDH with 5.39 (also massively under valued on here) makes more "Shot Creating Actions" per 90 minutes than Mavididi's 4.25. That ranks KDH and Mavididi as 7th and 20th in the league respectively. For broader context, Giorgino Rutter at Leeds is having a bit of a renaissance this year and has found his level well. He's one of the main creative forces at Leeds and is regarded as one of the leagues best players. He makes 4.73 shot creating actions per 90 minutes of game time ranking him 15th. Given a fair few of the players ranking about KDH and Mavididi have only played a handful of games, we can look at the total Shot and Goal creating actions and Mavididi ranks 9th in the league for SCA with 68. Rutter is 7th with 78, KDH 4th with 89, Summerville and Clarke are 2nd and 1st with 92 and 98 respectively. As for Goal Creating Actions, KDH is actually leading the league with 13. Rutter is joint second with 12. Mavididi has 10 putting him joint 5th. For those of you who cringe and stop listening any time a stat that isn't just Goals and Assists is mentioned and are staring at the screen saying "what the fvck is a goal creating action?" we can look at pure assists. Mavididi has 4. That makes him our second highest and joint 11th in the league. KDH is 4th with 6. He has 7 Goals and Assists combined which is only one less than Joel Piroe and Nathan Broadhead who most of you would recruit in a heartbeat. Dribbling, he's third in the league progressive carries, with more than Summerville, Roberts and KDH. Passing, he's our second highest Key Passer (after, you guessed it, KDH) with 32 ranking him 12th overall. Defensively, he's 52nd in the league for challenges attempted with 29 ranking him only below Winks and Pereira in our squad. There is not a single forward at Leicester, Leeds, Ipswich or West Brom that has attempted more challenges than Stephy Mavididi, it isn't even close. In fact, there are only five forwards in the league who have attempted more (and all of them play for teams with considerably lower possession.) TLDR: Mavididi is doing fine. He gets a bit more criticism than he deserves imo because he can appear wasteful, he's tasked with committing defenders and taking them on and quite frankly he doesn't have the dribbling success that someone like Fatawu does so, yes, he gives the ball away a bit. He can be frustrating in his decision making and he obviously doesn't look like a player that would set the Prem on fire. But he was cheap, he's solid and so far he's easily our most threatening and productive player outside of KDH who is objectively too good for this level. He's ahead of Fatawu in almost every metric except succesful take ons, even when you factor for the fact he's had a lot more game time. Fatawu doesn't come close to Mavididi's chance creation even per 90. Give Stephy your love.

This isn't said anywhere near enough really. It's his first ever real, proper season in management (he didn't even last this long at Parma and really didn't have the support he does here.) We're top, we're comfortably ahead of third and we've only dropped points in four games. And to be honest I don't think he did much wrong yesterday. Casadei and Akgun I think aren't good enough to be both starting in the midfield. They had zero presence. But we weren't going to know that until we tried it, we need to rotate and they're the worst team in the league, it was the right time to do so. End of the day, tactics, formations, systems, etc all only take you so far. The players that go out there have to perform and yesterday we didn't. To man we were absolutely awful. Whatever the reason, let's just draw a line under it and get on to the next match with hopefully a better showing. Sometimes you just have off days.

This might be the single most ironic and backwards thing I have ever read on here. Fvck that, no. On the entire Internet. Like what sort of weird echo chamber are you living in for you to possibly believe that's true.

I think calling him truly elite is hyperbole and he didn't have a long enough career in the Prem to say he was definitely a great. But it's pretty obvious his injury had had a severe impact on him and he's very much not the same player and probably won't ever be.

By a considerable distance, the worst performance of the season. You can debate tactics or team selections or whatever you want to. At the end of the day, 11 players have to go out there and play and perform and they just absolutely haven't tonight. Completely lowered to the standards of the opposition.

All of this the Championship is a rough tough league shit. No. The refs are just shit. Letting someone just shoulder barge a striker in the back isn't letting stuff go because it's such a physical tough manly league. It's just getting the rules wrong.

How is that not a straight shoulder charge in the back