Sooper Steve's shin

I knew exactly what this thread was from the title. I was there but have watched (and still have!) that VHS tape many times. A game and a season that sums up Leicester over the last30 years - sometimes nightmare, sometimes fairytale, never boring! We had also built a bit of a template then for giving a chance to young and ambitious managers (Little, McGhee, O’Neill) and either lower league talent (Lennon, Elliott etc) or some deemed a little past their best (Parker, Marshall, Cottee), and just making it all work. I think that held right through until 2016, but we’ve since flown a little too close to the sun. Once we recognised again the size of club we are and the blueprint that we adopted with great success for several decades, we’ll be back.

I know there is anger and I’m not an apologist for Top by any means, but in an ideal world he wouldn’t be our owner - the nature of family run businesses meant that he inherited the club (and the rest of the business empire and associated wealth) at the very young age of 33. He had to deal with the loss of his Dad and effectively take on Vichai’s mantle at the same time without any proper time or orderly handover. To add to all of that, it’s not much more than a year into his new role that the worst pandemic in history rolls in and changes the game entirely. That is a pretty rough hand for anyone to play, so I think he deserves a bit of humanity in the reactions to all this. The fact we moved on and had more success with the FA Cup should still be celebrated and maybe he could have left at that point - great idea in hindsight, but who would have wanted that in the glow of satisfaction after the Cup win? It would have been seen as bailing out. At that point, he was also just continuing a legacy that seemed to be working. Yes, we have subsequently fallen away - some decisions have not been great, but it’s been the first real tough time we’ve had to come through in his time with us and he just hasn’t had the business experience to make the right calls at the right time. But nobody can say he’s done this on purpose - there would be no financial or emotional reason for him to do that. It’s just a sad chapter that we’ll either see through with Top to better times or he’ll sell out and we have to cross our fingers that we get a person or group with the magic mix of experience, charisma and luck that brings success back to the club.

This point keeps coming up - we have paid too much to too many on contracts that are too long. But if we hadn’t stretched to those players’ demands, fans would be turning on the board/owner saying we need more backing. If we’d lost out on, say, Winks because we didn’t want to pay him enough or Skipp because we didn’t want to pay the transfer fee, then at the time it looks like we’ve lost out on a decent player who could do a job for us. There’s always an element of the unknown with transfers, but you can’t put escape clauses in or contracts become worthless to the player.

This first paragraph is pure Football Manager.

Is this a wind-up that I’m not in on? How is any Leicester (or football) fan seriously suggesting this guy is halfway decent? He is absolutely dire. I’d maybe forgive his woeful positioning and regular lapses of judgment if he tried, but his attitude and demeanor absolutely stinks too. I’ve been watching Leicester for 30+ years and I can’t think of a player I’ve wanted us to get rid of more than him (possibly Dennis Wise, although I think the stuff about him largely came out after he left).

Move from Atalanta to Leicester. Fail to make the grade in the Prem as the club are relegated. Start the Championship in the side for the first three games - one good performance, one OK, one poor. Sign for AC Milan. What is going on with football these days??

Lee Marshall. End thread.

Always good to snaffle three points, but I think it will be obvious to the manager (and, hopefully, the Board) that this doesn’t so much paper over the cracks as highlight some serious shortcomings we need to address: 1. We are getting light on first-team strength players. Yes, we needed to sell and get some wages off the books. Yes, ideally we want to get rid of some more deadwood (Faes, please). And yes, this is an opportunity to use youth players fairly heavily in a way that we haven’t done for a long time. But we are not going to be able to rely on 16/17/18 year olds extensively in the Championship. It’s a big man’s league, they will get roughed up. I love Page and Monga, they are great prospects but they looked like boys today - and they will face harder tests. Monga at least has tricks, pace and some body strength to keep going, but I thought Page got bulllied throughout. It might be nerves for his debut and I’m sure he’ll learn from it, but there’s a reason that young players learn from coming on in certain game situations rather than being immediate starters. 2. Regardless of starting XI, we are struggling with the lack of mobility in central midfield. When his head’s in the game, Soumare can drive forward with the ball. But none of him, Page or Skipp were pushing up to support either Ayew or the wingers. It made those players look worse as they were isolated and had to hold onto the ball too long. I’m sure Marti will address that - in Enzo’s season, he even got Wilfred Ndidi making those runs to support Fatawu and the strikers so it shouldn’t be beyond the ask for any of our current midfield (or, if it is, we need to fix that fast). 3. On that midfield, I’ve tried to hold off criticising Skipp but really - what does he do?? He doesn’t seem to have either quick accurate passes or searching long balls in his locker; his positioning is terrible to make tackles and he gets turned very easily; he doesn’t run through and support the attack. I struggle to see the actual point of him and anything we spent on him north of £1m would have been a travesty. That signing needs to be investigated. 4. Winks is clearly our most talented and best suited CM at this level. Why is he not starting? Is it a hangover from last year’s issues, has he already fallen out with Marti or is he off? Either get him playing or get him gone. 5. We need a striker. I think Ayew has some qualities that can help us out through the season, but not as a starting number 9. Poor Patson has obvious limitations, but I’d be giving him the run of games at the moment over Ayew as at least his pace and running will give defenders something to think about. It’s too easy for the opposition at the moment, I think opposing centre-halves are barely breaking sweat at the lack of central striker or midfield runners causing goal threats. We are only (sporadically) troubling their full-backs, and then teams just resort to doubling or trebling up on our wingers. 6. Let’s not be totally pessimistic - we kept the better goalkeeper over the summer! I liked Mads but he did concede more than the odd soft goal for us. His lack of height/reach has been shown up in West Ham’s first two games - Jakub’s making saves (like today) that I think Mads wouldn’t. Time will tell, but if he stays fit then it’s one position we have covered.

From last season’s squad, we’ve also had Vardy, Buonanotte, Ward and Iversen leave. Add the three sales and likely El Khannous, that’s eight senior players trimmed from the squad. It’s not that people are saying don’t get rid of any more (an even bigger clear out was probably needed), but at some point we’ll need to look at getting some replacements in to have an adequate sized squad. The alternative is that we rely more heavily on the younger players who are currently on the fringes - Nelson, Alves, Aluko etc - and hope for the best.

Odsonne Edouard.

If only say half of these could be considered an unqualified success. With the amount of data available in the modern game and considering the money being splashed, that’s criminal.

Until we start to move anyone, we can’t really be holding onto any of the squad if there’s genuine interest. If we shipped out Kristiansen and a couple more defenders, we could (and probably should) bat away any bids for someone like Justin. But until that point, we have to accept that we may lose a few we’d prefer to hold onto. I’m surprised that there haven’t been any obvious signs of clubs looking to pick at the bones of our squad (although maybe we just haven’t heard about it), but if I was a Bournemouth, Brentford or that ilk - maybe even top end Championship - I’d be sniffing for bargains. The likes of Fatawu, El Khannous, Hermansen on a cheap deal or even a Winks, Mavididi, Justin type for perhaps next to nothing.

Agreed. Ward has the dubious honour of playing quite a major part in TWO relegations.

I thought they played well against us when we were in the Champ and he seemed to be a manager who was destined for good things. Didn’t they also thump Leeds?

If we had put up any sort of fight, he would be our manager going into the season. It’s not relegation that’s done for him (and you have to think he must also have assumed it could have been on the cards when he started with us, so he was presumably prepared to manage us in the Championship). It was the fact he didn’t show any signs of motivating players or fans, seemed to have little to no clue on team selection, and let things slide the way that they did. In any normal circumstances, he would have been sacked long before the end of the season on that showing.

We didn’t have a clue how Enzo would do when he joined as a relative nobody with no real managerial experience to speak of. He didn’t do too badly in getting us promoted as Champions (and I’m not having that was a PL squad after the sales and departures over that summer). Objectively, you have to say it was a fairly bold decision by the Club that paid off. Quite a few were concerned about how that style of play would hold up in the PL. We can’t answer that now as Enzo left and didn’t have the chance to shape the squad and work on us more over a summer. You can’t argue that he’s made the style work at Chelsea again though. We then had a dilemma of needing to find a manager compounded by PSR worries and a points deduction threat. The Club took what they probably reasonably thought was the lesser gamble - appointing a PL coach who’d kept a team in the division rather than taking a punt on somebody unproven to keep the style going. Maybe there just wasn’t the right man available at the time and we were forced to do it, but there was some thinking behind it. Then came Cooper’s sacking - a surprise from the outside, but we were (or were about to be) released from the points deduction threat and in a better position to get back to a more sophisticated football style. Cooper wasn’t helping himself and so I think that sacking him was the right decision. Ruud’s appointment was a sign we wanted to go in a different direction, back to a young and progressive manager with good coaching credentials. Again, not necessarily the worst idea (compared to the alternatives of trying to stick in another firefighter to keep us up). His failings were partly down to the inherited squad, partly to key injuries (esp. Hermansen and Fatawu), but probably mostly down to inexperience and learning on the job in one of the strongest leagues in the world. Ultimately, he was out of his depth and for someone with a known moody character, he probably felt aggrieved and ended up making a point with team selections rather than trying to change our fortunes. So, we face a new season in the Championship with a few priorities (assuming Ruud is a dead duck, which I think we can take as read): - get a new manager in quickly to stabilise, get his message across, support recruitment and sales; - get back to the possession style (whatever we think of it, that is the direction the Board want to go and, in their favour, it was largely successful with two of the last four managers winning trophies); - get promoted (key factors are style and manager - you only have to look at the last few seasons to see that possession-based play is successful at that level (particularly for teams with a sprinkling of more technical PL level players) and Martin obviously comes into play as someone who knows how to get out of the league). Based on this, an out-of-work Russell Martin who plays close to the style the Club want, is free to start immediately, won’t require a compensation payout and has credentials of promotion looks like the most obvious of slam dunks. If we went for someone less proven (Rohl) or left field, the Board would be open to massive criticism if it went wrong and we’d be back to square one (or worse). Assuming that he does come in, the true test for both Club and manager will be whether they can break the mould and not only achieve promotion but sustain something by staying up. With the widening PL gap and the bottom half of PL clubs now benefitting from the massive advantage of sustained periods in the top league, it will be a challenge for any manager or style of play to do that.

WWWWWWWWWW

Seeing the legends and heroes of the past decade or so - Morgan, Shinji, Drinkwater, Schmeichel etc - and then the class of 2025 really puts how crap we are into perspective. Faes, Reid, Ayew, Skipp and the like are so far away in quality and mentality. I know it’s stating the obvious, but it’s still shocking.

One of the great unknowns is what Enzo would have done with us. We can moan about the Board for the last two managerial appointments since Maresca, but we should give them some credit for appointing him - by no means a nailed on success when we brought him in. Rather than “building his team around” those players you mention, he dealt the hand that was played and made a pretty good job of it. You can’t deny his system worked well for the first half or two-thirds of the season before our wobble. We had a team still getting used to it and players still adapting all through last season really, but they all enjoyed it. With a full pre-season and a few signings aligned to his vision, I don’t seriously think we’d have gone into this season with Ndidi as a PL central midfielder in the same role we were forced to play him. We certainly wouldn’t have been forking out for Ayew or Decordova-Reid. I imagine he’d have made much better use of his contacts to get good youngsters and loans than Ruud (who made a big thing of that). And we were miles better at playing our system than Southampton.

It all falls apart as soon as the Board follows point 1 and refuses to pay a star player over the cap. Fans would go mad. Same for most of the points, really - good in theory but not rooted in the reality of a competitive business.

We are clearly loathe to sack him because we’ve obviously written ourselves into a corner in the contract. You’d think having just got rid of Cooper after 15 games or whatever that we might have tried to cover ourselves. I guess he’s holding out to get paid, but Ruud is not doing himself any favours in terms of his personal reputation by holding on. Have some dignity and walk - in reality, he should take some/a lot of blame for our situation but at this point we don’t care. Blame the board, the players or whatever but just go. Otherwise he’s just going to be losing more games until the end of the season and making his record even more abysmal.

Should be club captain next season with Vardy gone.

I don’t agree with this. It’s the same thinking that says Ranieri just copied what Pearson did. Completely wrong. When we went down two years ago, we lost Maddison, Barnes, Tielemans, Castagne, Perez and a host of others. We brought in a relatively untried manager, changed the style of play and had to rebuild quite extensively - new keeper, RB in a different role, on loan LB, CB brought back in from two years of being frozen out, new CM plus Ndidi in a completely different role, new wingers both sides (and both brought in from abroad). Our only continuity was Vardy and KDH. It’s complete BS when people say we steamrollered the Championship with a Premier League team (and this season has shown that it wasn’t a PL team). What we need is exactly what Maresca gave us - someone who can come in with the courage of their convictions to bring in players to suit a system and be ruthless with those who don’t. Cooper was a dreadful decision because he didn’t have the strength of character to build his own team or identity; RVN just seems like he has not been bothered or has no clue what to do. We are not doomed to years in the wilderness or nailed on to go up, but it’s in our hands with the new managerial decision.

Ruud is so far away from being a football manager it’s untrue. Cooper was at least a poor football manager.