babyblue

They are cover players, Bertrand until Justin is back fit and Vestergaard until Evans / Fofana are back fit. The long term plan is certainly not them to be in our main starting line up.

Ha ha why not, if something works borrow it. I hear you learnt from some little club who got promoted and got to three cup finals in four years a while back. 😉

Very much down to what Danny is looking for I suppose. Looking at the accounts we pay out about £35-40m per season more in wages, so having rid the wage bill of a large number of players recently (and in the summer). There will be cash flow to provide him with a large financial offer. Then you look at game time, if he wants that then is a "traditional" champions league club going to offer him that? Despite him being a very good player, Man City, Arsenal, Chelsea, Man U, Liverpool are unlikely to want him? Spurs might, but then you have Kane who is always going to be in front of you. Everton will be they've got DCL as their main man. Here we have a striker who'll be 35 next season, so the pathway is there to being the main man. Good money, Europe (hopefully), unreal training facility, ground expansion to 42,000 on the horizon. I'm bias, but I think we're currently an attractive proposition for players. Of course then he also has the opportunity to stay at a cracking club like Southampton. Again, no disrespect meant coming on and talking about us potentially being after one of your players. I know it's always a touchy subject when coming from an opponent.

I'd imagine he'll be our number one target. We 100% need to think about life beyond Vardy and Ings would fit like a glove. You look at all the other teams and they got strikers who can play on for years, so Ings could find himself getting only a few minutes here or there for three years. Wasn't it Rodgers who signed him for Liverpool also? Looks like he's weighing up his options, so it's whether you guys want to hold onto him and perhaps lose him on a free or cash in and use the money on a replacement. Apologies if anyone takes offence, just trying to give a Leicester point of view.

He's not gone down that line just yet, perhaps because we have so many wingers in the squad. We've stayed pretty much a 4411 so far, he is definitely wanting more from the full backs you can tell that much and the wingers have been tending to drift inside. We've not been linked with any CM's, just more wingers at the moment.

A bit more information from the lad who knows his group of friends in Cov... "Apparently prior to us signing Madders, he received a call from Mark Hughes, he was saying he wanted to sign him so could he come and have a look around the training facilities and meet with him and the coaching staff.... James in good taste called Hughes pretty much straight after he put pen to paper to tell sparky that he had sighed for us, apparently Hughes just hung up on him mid sentence haha..... Hes also been told by Puel that he’s going to be the number 10 for next season, so looks like he is going to be integral to plans, and may help predict the potential formation? :

We got lucky, owners like this are few and far between.

It has been the owners long term plan since they arrived to do what they are now, winning the league has just enabled them to fast track the process a little bit more. It was never going to be a Chelsea or Man city fast track build, but always a longer term structured plan to grow the club. We've been lucky, but the luck was getting these owners as they are absolutely brilliant. You may scoff and Pearson and bargain players, but getting Pearson back was their first huge correct decision. He was fantastic for us before he left for Hull, the man knows how to run a football club properly, including the scouting side. Which meant we got players like Drinkwater, Vardy, Mahrez, Knockaert, Kante (A total cost of £8m there) and many more, and yes they were bargains, just brilliant ones. They put money in to get us up, wrote off all the debts, bought the ground back from the banks. They've not just thrown money at signings, but from day one they were putting big money into the academy, training facilities, infrastructure. That's what they are doing again now, huge new training complex and stadium expansion. They want it to be a self sustaining project.

I think Puel is absolutely trying to do the right things, wants to play young players and bring them through, wants to add a few more strings to our bow so that it's not just counter attack with 35% possession. He's identified all of our weak areas, he's brave enough to transition away from the aging title winners. There was some lovely football, but also some boring unadventurous football and he was too negative. Is that because he had players incapable of doing what he wanted, because of players learning a totally different style? Jury is still out on whether he can iron out the problems really. It's the right decision to give him the summer to make changes and see where we are come November. Our form was horrific, a bad start and he could be gone fairly quickly.

Noise around us is that the owners are going fairly big this season, they want to make more of the club and need us established top half to do so. We've got a new £80m training complex on the horizon, ground extension announced. They are serious about moving the club into the next bracket size wise. If clubs have owners willing to push the boat out and have the money to back it up, there isn't much you can do about it. It's frustrating I know, but we've probably had £150m more from prize money etc in the last two seasons. You can't compete against that, like we can't compete with those who have bigger income than us I don't mean this to come across "braggy", it could all go tits up in a second I'm well aware of that. But it was the other way around, I couldn't critisise the club as you can't control what others do.

He's not replacing Mahrez, he's a 10 not a winger. We'll be buying someone else when Mahrez is eventually shifted on. He'll be compared against Okazaki, who frankly is technically woeful and had trouble with his own shoe laces sometimes. For those questioning whether it's about moving back closer to home or not, we had someone on our forum who said this was pretty much a done deal in April this year. He knows Maddisons friends from Cov and they were all saying he wanted to come back closer to home as he's very close to his family and that he had started up a coaching school or something like that and wanted to be around more for that. From what they said it was only the injury that delayed this going through the second the market opened.

And people laughed at us wanting to spend £20m on Deeney... it's a new dawn.

Ha ha well yes I did think it's unfortunately what you've had to get used to. We're in a unique position this year having won it, Champions league football and the owners happy to hand out three 100k contracts to Vardy, Mahrez and Kante. The owners absolutely want to keep all of them and get the likes of Musa and Mendy in. They are very serious. Certainly not 100% he's going Chelsea at all, the contract is still on the table and as far as we know nobody has even placed a bid. If he does go, then it will be to the highest bidder. That may or may not be Chelsea... word on the street is we only have to accept the highest offer over £20m. If Madrid offer £30m, or PSG £40m then Chelsea have to stump up the same.

Is there any reason we can't sign a player without him being a replacement for one of our good players? The signings of Musa and Mendy are to improve the quality of the squad and not as replacements for Kante and Mahrez. He will be more of a replacement for Kramaric who has already been sold. He'll cover the wing and up front. We needed another pace merchant who can fill Vardy's shoes now and again, we can't expect him to play every game. Plus we'll lose Schlupp and Mahrez to AFCON in Jan, so we'll need him to cover the wing then.

Hi, Leicester fan in peace. Just a point on the injuries, of course luck does play a part in some way as you can't do much about impact injuries. I think most injuries are muscle based though, whether it's a hammy, a calf, thigh, groin etc. Since Pearson arrived here and setup the sports science department our injury record has been fantastic with regards not losing players to muscle problems. We do things quite differently to most with regards extra rest days (something Ranieri was baffled by and wanted to change until being convinced otherwise), the cryotherapy chamber we had installed at the training ground, along with lots of other innovations that were embraced. So whilst I agree, luck does play a part. It can't just be attributed to that, you have to give credit to the clubs setup. Yes other teams have lost more players, but I'm sorry. The likes of Man City, United, Arsenal, Chelsea and even Spurs to some extent, can replace one injured player with someone else who cost anything from £5m to £30m. Then having a few more injuries is no excuse when we're doing it with a starting 11 that cost less than one half a Raheem Sterling. Of course top clubs aren't performing as well as they might usually but often you only get one or two per season who get it right anyway. What we're on course for is more than enough to get you 2nd or 3rd most seasons. I did a count up a while back and with our current ppg ratio we'd end up on enough to win the league about 30% of the time. So whilst the lack of that one exceptional team might help us get the title, where usually we might not have. We'd still be there or there abouts, 4 losses in 41 games is no fluke. Plan B is a variation of Plan A, so you're right it's pretty close to what we did before. But more of a shift to the defensive side, people started giving us the ball and sitting back. We don't want the ball, it's not how we want to play really. So we've sat deeper, got more people back, aren't pressing as high up the pitch as much as we were. Basically forcing the other team to come onto us, even though their game plan wasn't to do that. It's of no surprise that we've scored pretty much in all our recent games when the other team has been having a "good spell". The beauty of the team is that they are capable of doing both sides of it. Opening it up and bombing forwards with pace and some skill (see the game against you earlier in the season after we went 2 behind). Whilst also being more than happy to sit back, absorb pressure and grind it out like in this game. There are 1000 little things that have got us to this point, enough to honestly write a book about. From training ground improvements, to scouting, past and present managers inputs, the owners mentality, bloody clappers!. All just culminating in what's happening. I'm sure some people will look at our style and think it's that they need to copy, but I don't think it can be. It's more than that, it's a once in a lifetime chain of events that brought us to this point. Just want to say thanks to the saints fans I met the other day as well. Really nice bunch.