In 2016 Leicester City pulled off the biggest miracle in football history as they shocked the world by winning the English Premier League. Since then they've finished 12th, 9th (twice) and 5th. With their current squad Leicester are in a better position now to firmly cement themselves as a top four club. That's where we begin.
The club vision fits nicely into how I like my teams to play football, with attacking football being the primary focus. The boards expectations when it comes to competitions seem pretty achievable, my first target in this game is to get Leicester into the top four so we're aiming for bigger things than just qualifying for the Europa League this season. They've got high expectations for all three cup competitions and I'm not completely sold on whether we have the depth to compete across four fronts this season, especially as we're working with the pre-agreed transfers, so I'll have to start looking at our youth to see who can step up.
We've had a solid, if unspectacular pre-season as the team adjust to my tactics. The Sporting result really hurt as they scored twice in the last ten minutes and I felt like it was ours to win before that. Our opening fixtures in the league are going to be a big test of where we stand, kicking things off against Manchester City away and then two tough but winnable matches after that. I'd feel slightly more confident going to Manchester if Kasper Schmeichel wasn't going to miss it through injury though.
I'm certainly not going to complain about getting a draw out of Manchester City in the opening game of the season, especially when we definitely didn't deserve it on stats alone. Even though VAR awarded the penalty I still think it was a soft decision and we could could have stolen a win. With the team still adjusting to the new formation and not being used to the intensity of my tactics a draw here is more than I hoped for.
I'm not sure I've seen many games that better sum up the term "a tale of two halves", and it didn't play out in our favour. We absolutely dominated the first half and I genuinely thought we were going to walk away with this one. Then the second half came and we got completely overrun. I knew the intensity of my tactics would mean that cardio could be an issue especially in the opening games and I think that proved true. It probably didn't help that Kasper Schmeichel isn't up to full fitness just yet. Danny Ward looked lost in that second half.
We drew Millwall in the third round of the Carabao Cup which gave me an opportunity to test out the depth of the squad. Unfortunately it didn't pay off because while we completely dominated the whole match our finishing was shocking and we had to rely on a very tense penalty shootout to advance to the fourth round. In even better news for us we've got Liverpool in the fourth round so if we want to make any kind of run in this cup we're going to have to really buck up our ideas. Here's hoping that we can build some momentum against Wolves.
That’s more like it! We were by far the better team here and got the result to match. I can’t say I wasn’t a little bit nervous when we conceded given what happened in the Palace game but not only did we hold on we fired right back. It’s also good to know we don’t have to rely solely on Vardy to get goals, Barnes and Under have proven to be serious goalscoring threats.
A second Carabao Cup match, a second penalty shootout victory. Usually I wouldn’t have too much to complain about given that we matched the defending champions but Liverpool put out a much weaker side than we did and we shouldn’t have had to have gone to penalties again. A quarter-final draw against Manchester United actually pits us against the toughest team left in the competition. If we can get past them in December then I think the cup is ours to win.
Thanks to last seasons fifth placed finish we went straight into the Europa League group stages. Honestly there’s nothing I’m too worried about here, Braga could put up a fight but I’m expecting to take top spot in this group.
Five points from three games and 8th place at the end of September. Not the worst start to the season especially since we got a draw out of City. Going into October we’ve got the start of our European campaign and three Premier League fixtures that we really should be winning. I’ll be disappointed if we don’t get at least seven points out of them to hopefully put us in the top six.
Got to be honest, for the first 80 minutes of this match we weren’t up to much and barely got a shot on target aside from the offside goal. Then the last ten minutes hit, we changed up the formation a little bit and things totally kicked off as Vardy smashed in two goals to give us a very flattering scoreline.
In unfortunate news Nampalys Mendy is out for roughly six months after breaking his leg in an under-23 game.
Absolutely shocking. We were by far the better team and dominated possession but just couldn’t hold it together at the back. This is our first loss of the season and while it was always going to come at some point I certainly wasn’t expecting it at Newcastle. The loss leaves us with 8 points after 5 games and in 6th place, which isn’t a bad start but it should be better. We go into our first Europa League match needing to bounce back…
And bounce back we did. I was a bit concerned when we went a goal down but we retaliated brilliantly and dominated the rest of the game. I said Braga were going to be our toughest test in the group stages but based on this result we should get through to the knockout rounds just fine.
While it took us some time to get the breakthrough, after James Maddison put us a goal up we never looked like losing the lead. Two more goals in stoppage time, including a beautiful Johnny Evans header, cemented a comfortable win to close out our Premier League action for the month.
Absolute dominance, and another three points to put us top of the group after two games. Still four games to play but I’m feeling quietly confident so far.
We came up one point short of what I wanted from October thanks to Newcastle but I’m happy with where we’re sitting in the table at the moment as long as we can maintain it. I’m not sure exactly what’s happened to Manchester City but they’ve started horribly and are already out of the title run, probably just stunned at how good we were in the opening game of the season. We head into November with two matches against Wolfsberger AC that should cement our Europa League qualification and four very winnable Premiership matches.