Leuven life: OH Leuven 3 Leicester City 3 (16 July 2022)
Few things make you question your life decisions more than a pre-season friendly. A pre-season friendly in which you concede after 25 seconds and that goes on for half an hour more than you expected is one of those things.
Two and a half hours is an interminable amount of time to spend watching a game of football that doesn’t matter. This, at least, was an entertaining game. Although when Leuven missed a free header from underneath the bar while 2-0 up after fifteen minutes, I was wondering if a friendly defeat had ever got a manager sacked.
The new Leicester: the same as the old Leicester
Making grand pronouncements off the back of friendlies is a dangerous game. But following on from conceding two goals from set pieces against Notts County last weekend, Leicester were undone by long balls and counter attacks here.
Leicester’s midfield, with Baba Soumare as the holding player, was virtually non-existent and the full backs, Ricardo and James Justin, were routinely caught way up field. Add to that the usual plethora of individual errors - Daniel Iversen for the second goal, Daniel Amartey for the third - and it was a recipe for disaster.
We’ve seen all this before. Going forward there was plenty of promise; James Maddison is maturing into one of Leicester’s leaders and Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall did his usual thing. Patson Daka and Jamie Vardy both popped up with a goal. Ultimately, though, you can’t be so systemically bad at defending and be successful, and we’ve seen nothing to suggest it’s about to improve so far.
Transfer business has left the chat
The real story of this game took place after the (belated) final whistle. It was Brendan Rodgers’ first real chance to talk about his hope for a squad refresh, which has become an increasingly forlorn one as the summer has rolled on.
“Of course I want to improve the squad, I want to develop the squad, I said that midway through last year, but if it’s difficult financially, I really respect the club, so I don’t go to war with them.
It’s unfortunate. We have to do some work and if we can do that, then hopefully we can affect the squad because if we are going to compete anywhere near where we have been, then we need to be able to do that. If not, then it’s a different expectation.”
He went on to say that the club needs to sell before it can buy and, interestingly, that “it’s also off the field as well. We wanted to reset some of our work off the field…”. The Mercury has the full quotes.
The second half of that statement might be referring to the fact that new Head of Recruitment, Martyn Glover, won’t be joining until after the window has closed. It could also be referring to Mark Waller, who is meant to be coming in to head the medical team but is, to my knowledge, still not confirmed. There’s a (hopeful?) chance they also wanted to add a set piece coach, as Spurs have done this summer.
All in all, it speaks to how everything feels on pause at the moment. With the new training ground, big plans for the stadium development, the lack of a big sale last summer to balance the books, and Covid, perhaps it wouldn’t be surprising if the money has dried up for now. Or maybe they just completely horlicksed the planning for this summer and this is the result.
Scintillating substitutions
Related to the transfer trouble is the sheer number of first team players at the club. Leicester made 15 subs in this game. FIFTEEN. Some clubs probably didn’t make 15 subs in the first 100 years of the Football League.
Only two of the 26 players on show - Callum Wright and Sammy Braybrooke - could be considered ‘prospects’ as opposed to genuine members of the first team squad. Add Wilfred Ndidi, Kasper Schmeichel, and Danny Ward to the list of names available in Belgium and you can see how congested it all is.
Until Leicester can shift some of these players out, it’s not feasible to add more in. Without European football there aren’t enough minutes to go around. It’s even more jarring when the areas where they seem most in need of strengthening - centre back, central midfield, even in goal - are the most crowded.
Part of the problem is the fact they’ve had to buy players to cope with an injury crisis. When there isn’t an injury crisis, you suddenly have a million players competing for a couple of spots. In Daniel Amartey, Jannik Vestergaard, Hamza Choudhury, Dennis Praet, and Nampalys Mendy, there are five players where there should be two. And that’s before adding anyone else.
Seeing double
For anyone who has been living under a rock for the past couple of years, or who isn’t deeply familiar with the financial transactions of the King Power International Group, OH Leuven are owned by the same people as Leicester.
This has led to various odd occurrences, like Nigel Pearson being hired to manage Leuven by the same people who fired him after his son was embroiled in a racist sex orgy. It also meant that there was a big celebration at the start of the game to mark King Power’s five years in charge of Leuven, and there was a vaguely incestuous element to the whole thing. Right down to the fact that the Belgians had someone who looked like Riyad Mahrez’s twin who absolutely shredded Leicester the entire time.
The stadium is like a mini-version of the King Power. The bench seats look exactly the same, the training tops that the subs and coaching staff wear are exactly the same, the sponsor is the same. The stadium even has the same name, which meant the commentator had to refer to ground in which this game was played as “The King Power at Den Dreef Stadion” every single time. The sort of thing you find entertaining when you’ve been sat there for two hours and seen 30 different substitutions.
The week ahead
Leicester have a date in Hull on Wednesday evening and then, in a piece of pure pre-season theatre, play two games on the same day next Saturday. League One’s Derby County and Preston are the lucky opponents.
When you have more games in a single day than new signings in an entire summer, there might be a bit of an issue.