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CosbehFox

The "do they mean us?" thread pt 2

By CosbehFox, in Leicester City Forum

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Oxfordfox83

Oxfordfox83

Posted
Posted
5 hours ago, ARM1968 said:

Of course. Totally agree. That isn’t the point. The point is he bailed and deep down we all know he will do it again. I doubt this is a Sir Alex story in the making. We aren’t Man Utd. 

Just as a counterexample, Pochettino did exactly the same thing to Southampton, leaving a smaller club for a job taking a reliably underperforming mid-table side into the Champions League. Now we’re clearly better than Spurs were then, but Rodgers is also better than Poch, so I think the analogy stands...

 

If he spends 3 years here and goes to Madrid (moves on as Poch should have in the summer if he’d had enough ambition), then I don’t think we’ll have too much to worry about...

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squarez

squarez

Posted
Posted
23 hours ago, urban.spaceman said:

'The Media' still can't cope with the following things:

 

1. That Leicester actual City won the Premier League.

2. That Brendan Rodgers would see LCFC as a brighter prospect than Celtic.

3. That two of their traditional Top 4 are in absolute chaos.

4. That Leicester actual City are trying to permanently join the 'elite' and are doing so without buying our way in like Chelsea, Man City and latterly Liverpool. 

 

Brendan is a highly intelligent person as well as being one of the smartest coaches in the world.

 

Yes, he wanted a top job, and is deserving of that.

 

But he's smart enough to see that Arsenal and Man Utd are at least 5 years away from restoring any sort of sanity in the upper echelons of their clubs with no clear identity each. 

 

Liverpool and Man City have two elite managers who will be staying for very a long time. 

 

Chelsea have dubious practices that often get them in trouble with the authorities - Lampard is doing well and while it's almost like they've been rewarded by having a transfer ban, they're probably just going to throw money at him next summer and see what sticks.

 

Spurs are Spurs. Levy has buggered them for a generation with stadium and the financial strife that puts on their transfer budget. They've an ageing squad now, half of whom can leave for free next summer. And they're shit. Never forget that.

 

With us he has everything he could possibly need. Best owners in football. Some of the best recruitment staff. A DOF who now takes the piss out of the biggest clubs in the world. A brand spanking new training ground coming up next summer.

 

And the most important: no/low expectations. Us fans aren't used to glory which is why 2015/16 meant so much.

 

We don't demand any silverware or European competitions. 

 

He has the freedom here to rebuild his reputation and achieve things the media don't want us to. 

 

Personally I'm happy to just enjoy the ride.

Largely agree with this post but I do want to want to correct that one small bit.

 

Liverpool are being increasingly accused of "buying the league" but their net spend is only about £80m since Klopp arrived. Yes they've spent big on a few players like Van Dijk and Alisson funded by the sale of Coutinho to Barcelona. But for the most part they've just bought very well (Salah, Mane and Firmino = £102m) and sold very well (Benteke, Sakho, Ibe, Smith and Solanke = £98).

 

Do Liverpool have money, absolutely. But have they just spent their way to the top like Chelsea and Man City? Absolutely not, just very shrewd recruitment - much like us.

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urban.spaceman

urban.spaceman

Posted
Posted

Roberto Mancini wasn’t at Leicester long, but he left an indelible mark

Nostalgia

Roberto-Mancini-Leicester-2001.jpg

Roberto Mancini only played five games in a Leicester City shirt, but the Italian certainly left his mark.

Looking at the Foxes’ signings during the 2000-01 season, there are a few names who you might not remember too fondly. Or, indeed, at all.

Junior Lewis played 25 league games for Leicester. Simon Royce made it to 19. Kevin Ellison managed just one. However, as Mancini proved, minutes on the pitch aren’t the only thing that can help you make an impact.

After playing his part in Lazio’s run to the Serie A title in 1999-2000, his third season in Rome, the Italian forward was sidelined the following year.

Indeed, as we entered 2001, he had gone more than six months without so much as stepping onto the pitch at the Stadio Olimpico, with his player-coach role under Sven-Goran Eriksson turning into a coaching job alone.

Enter Leicester, who went into the new year with three straight defeats – including a 6-1 drubbing at Arsenal – and found themselves in need of refreshment.

“Roberto knows that he is 36 and that I am looking for his football knowledge, not his legs,” admitted manager Peter Taylor in a display of honesty which we don’t often see these days.

“He also understands that his role will be to help bring on the younger players and pass on experience to the strikers.”

Those strikers, summer arrivals Ade Akinbiyi and Trevor Benjamin, took some of the blame for the lack of goals which brought about Leicester’s relegation the following season. If Mancini had stayed longer, perhaps things could have gone differently.

 

DID YOU KNOW? #BPL winning manager Roberto Mancini made 4 appearances for Leicester City in 2001 #BPLkickoff

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He may have been getting on in years, but Mancini still oozed class, something he showed during the twilight of his career at Lazio.

He was the sort of player who you just knew could score the simple goal if he wanted to, but often felt compelled to remind you he was better than you by doing something more extravagant.

And, most importantly, he was the sort of man who could pull off an oversized shirt without it making him look dishevelled.

Take this finish during his Lazio days. It didn’t need to be this difficult, but it’s all the more special for that reason. And you can even see him dancing away, as if he reworked the entire run to make the whole process smoother and ensure it left him with no hair out of place.

“I did not have a clue at that stage that he would go on to manage in Italy and win the things he has as a manager. But what I did notice was that he knew about training and he showed an interest in the way we trained at Leicester,” Taylor would later recall.

This was not a player looking for a final payday, but rather someone who knew his time in the game was finite and wanted to gain a new experience while he still could. Mancini seemed to know the limits of what he could provide in the other direction, but knew he could provide something, and as long as both sides recognised this to begin with it would be enough.

“For a time Mancini looked like a bottle of Frascati which had found itself in the company of brown ales,” The Guardian‘s David Lacey wrote of one of Mancini’s starts, in a surprise victory over Chelsea, pointing out the contrast between the Italian’s style and the less sophisticated approach taken by his team-mates against higher-ranked opponents.

The Premier League he entered was a far cry from the one in which he would later manage, but at the same time it felt different from the Serie A of his 20s.

English football was in a transition period, with relics of the pre-1992 era being pushed aside to make way for a glossier new millennium. Things were changing in Italy too, but not as drastically. There was more energy on the pitch, but the style we associated with the competition in the early days of Football Italia remained. It was a kind of beauty with acknowledged flaws, designed to incorporate history rather than moving on from it.

In making the switch to England when he did, Mancini could bring over some of that mystique without needing to stick around for the teething problems to show themselves. He could leave a bigger mark in five games, therefore, than he might have done in 50.

 

 

Mancini’s departure was so sudden that there was little time to react. He departed days before Leicester’s FA Cup meeting with Bristol City, a game in which he was expected to play, after being offered the Fiorentina manager’s job.

“I can’t praise Roberto enough for what he did while he was with us,” Taylor said, and there seemed to be some recognition that part of his impact came from the way he taught those at the club some lessons they could use to help themselves.

“I was used to watching him on Italian football on TV. To just get changed in the same dressing room as him was an unbelievable feeling and an honour,” Robbie Savage would later say. The Italian was Mr Bergstrom handing Lisa Simpson his parting note, reminding his peers that everything they learned from him was something they already had hiding within themselves.

We shouldn’t have been surprised when his return to England saw him lead Manchester City to a monumental title. He’d begun working on it more than a decade earlier.

 

 

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