Steven
Active Member
An article from the Norfox site. 
Source
Source
The Cunning Fox said:It's time for analysis
It's almost a year since the club appointed Craig Levein as manager for Leicester City, and the club was 12th in the Championship table.
Micky Adams hadn't managed to get his ideas around to a group of players he thought was good enough to hopefully win promotion.
City were favourites to go straight back up and Adams was disapointed and finally throw in his towel after the League Cup game against Preston.
Dave Bassett and Howard Wilkinson came in as caretaker manager and coach and the board hadn't a clue about who they wanted to appoint.
Bassett was a consultant at the same time as he was the caretaker manager and if the board had asked him if he wanted the job he would have grabbed it with both hands.
TCF is glad that the board looked elsewere and never appointed Bassett permantly. A lot of names were thrown in the hat but no one really came out clear, before the name Craig Levein appeared.
Levein was according to Tim Davis (City's chief executive) a clone of Arsene Wenger and Alex Ferguson, and he had done fantastic things at Hearts.
His ideas was brought forward and Levein talked about a totally different approach to the previous management, trying to get the avarage age down and start building for the future.
But the question almost a year on is, have Craig Levein gone in the same trap as Peter Taylor did when he came to City. PT made 17 changes to the squad in less than a year and he was heavilly punished.
The situation at the club wasn't as dramatic as Craig Levein described it, and the players he released after the season was released mostly because he wanted a change. Not because of money.
If you sum two and two together and can a bit of mathematics you will also find out that the teams that signed Scowcroft, Makin, Walker, Gillespie, Nalis, Heath and Stewart doesn't have all the money in the world either.
If you ignore continuity you can soon fall into traps that can set clubs back a long way and you can damage the infrastructure that is build up.
Newcastle United has fallen into the same trap and Greame Souness has signed a messiah to change everything. Souness has a problem in his back four, not up front.
He let players such as O'Brien and Hughes leave and hasn't really replaced them. Now he's trying to save his job by signing a forward.
Everyone knows that if you don't have a floor to stay on, you cannot do much hanging in the roof with both hands.
You need to build your team from the back with a strong defence everything else can be build on that. Levein hasn't managed to settle his back four, and today against Cardiff it was a new formation again.
Levein is still experimenting with players that are all uncertain of what their position are at the club. Dublin is suddenly on the bench, then he is captain, then he is up front and next game he is in the back.
He is unsettled and doesn't really fill any purpose either than being a guy filling up the holes that Levein cannot find other players to fit into.
He is talking about building a future, but futures are strange things. They tend to be pushed in front of you all the time. It's soon six years since MON left us, and the future is still a very frustrating picture for City.
The way CL has tried to recruite his team is with players that at this moment lack the quality to fight for a place in the play-off's. It's also been difficult for Levein to pick his best team and some of his selections surprises a lot.
I'm not Jesus, but I have a full FA coach licence in Norway and have played some football in my life. I feel I'm capable of seeing what's a good performance and what's not.
Mo Sylla was a key player for City against Sheff W, he did well. Then when the team is picked for the Cardiff game he's dropped for the first time this season. Why ?
Alan Sheehan made his home debut against Sheff W, the defence kept a clean sheet and he had an ok game. He wasn't the best left back in the world, but he did ok. He is replaced with Peter Gilbert which has been out for a long while, why ?
The signing of Iain Hume is another big riddle. Elvis Hammond was picked in favour of Hume against Sheff W. He regains his place in the team against Cardiff and Hume is left on the bench for the 2nd time since his arrival. Why do you sign a very expencive player and put him on the bench ?
There is no sence in this and you can of course have a philosophical view and have a lot of ideas about what to do, But football is a very simple game.
You don't buy players for millions of pounds and not play them, then it's better to use money on other players and put them in instead. You don't buy players for the future when you don't have enough quality in the team to win football games today.
Alan Maybury was a class act when he arrived last season, now he's lost his place in the national team and he looks uncertain at times.
Richard Stearman played three great games for City before the break, he might be injured, since he has been left out completely. But there is not a single note anywere about his injuries.
It's a tricky division, the Championship. You need a bit of routine but at the same time you need a hard battling group of players. You will never win a point without fighitng 100% for it.
TCF felt that Levein's ideas looked healthy and that he made sence, but his team selection routine riddles me.
He start talking about old players not able to play all games and young players not experienced enough to play in certain games. Then he is stuck with 4 or 5 players that he can use all the time, this doesn't make sence and will give him a great headache picking his best team.
My mind cannot figure out this, why do you then sell David Connolly at the perfect age and buy a player which is 21, without looking at him as an instant replacement.
I'm happy for de Vries, and the fact that he scored two goals against Sheff W, but he isn't there to crack down Cardiff when we need his goals badly.
I watched Hume for 15 minutes and could see that this young bloke had more quality than Hammond and de Vries, why do you think Brian Little wanted £ 750 000 for his young talent.
I was a bit optimistic when I arrived home after the Sheff W. game and my idea after that game was very simple.
Make place for Iain Hume, replacing Elvis Hammond up front, then I would have kept the rest of the team as it was. I got very angry when I didn't saw Iain's name in the line up against Sheff W, and I wanted him instead of de Vries.
But de Vries silenced my lips with two great goals. and I was of course happy with that. But I'm no believer in the "tower" and "mouse" combination up front which looks as a certainty under Levein.
I would say that City's two best strikers today are Elvis Hammond and Iain Hume. They are both signed to score goals and Elvis isn't a small lad and has great pace and working abillity.
de Vries should be rewarded for his two goals and get a new game, but I wouldn't have played him against Sheff W, and used Iain Hume instead. It's ok to have three guys competing for the two positions up front, and keep all of them on their toes.
Levein hasn't settled combinations, he throws players in and out and I'm riddled and sad. This is going nowhere at the moment.
So will Levein be turning this trend and start delivering what we would like. I would say no. Levein is always happy with the performance and say that he hoped they would get anything out of it, and he is in a defending position. He's losing points in every game and still happy with performances, why ?
Other reports tells you that City haven't been up to it. Why not stick your finger in the ground and admit that it wasn't good enough. Excuses isn't worth much, points are.
You can of course ignore fans and try to get them to believe that seeing Leicester City in the bottom of the Championship is what we should expect.
But Mr. Levein you soon have to eat your own words. You are quoted saying that City have a budget among the top 5-6 clubs, you should then be among the 5-6 best clubs, shouldn't you.
You don't have one single excuse. Your team isn't performing as well as we would like, you are changing your base from day to day and you cannot find the way forward. This is going nowhere.
You doesn't have enough quality and your horses doesn't run fast enough to be a force in this division. Your ideas of team picking is of course ok, if you have players drilled to go in and out of your first team.
But I cannot believe that throwing 18 year old players in and out of a team believed to be a play-off contender is the way forward. You either give them a run or you just settle with what you got.
The fact that you have decided to make Danny Tiatto the captain isn't a good pick. The player miss most games either by injury or yellow cards. A captain should be a player, first of all settled in a positon, the next a player that play most of your games during a season, and the third is that he is one not getting carried away picking up all the cards in the referee's pocket.
Tiatto is and will always be nothing else than a left back. I watched Tiatto in the FA Cup quarter final against Blackburn and he was working hard, but when you try to work hard digging a whole in the wrong garden, it's not worth much is it.
Again what I would like is to eat these words and hope that the wind will change, but the game against Cardiff today, with Levein again talking about getting something from the game, tells me that it will be problematic to find a way out of the problems when the manager don't see it himself.
It's hard to be a City supporter and it's probably not good to start a row against the manager, but this is just an opinion and I'm entitled to one, you might have another idea.
Exactly!
looks arent everything you know :icon_lol:
