Every Sunday morning is one for the paper talks and gossip columns to go red, and as usual Leicester City grabs the headlines. This Sunday The Sun tells a story about unrest among the owners at the club and the atmosphere at the training ground.
As we here at Tcf have stated so many times, the logistic is out of control and too many players don’t really know what to expect and to see the unrest described is not very surprising.
You need to balance it all up and keep players in the frame of their own expectations and goals, if not they will be seeing other options and in a way disturb the balance. To have a competitive group is always good, but when you lose battle after battle and you see your self just flushing down the pecking order, you will start thinking about your life.
Players such as Adrien Silva, Andy King, Vicente Iborra, Danny Ward, Shinji Okazaki, Kelechi Iheanacho and Danny Simpson together with those going in and out of the team will always be unsettled as long as you are not satisfied with the idea of the manager.
The key to a balanced squad is to decide first and for all who are your best eleven, have three or four real challengers. The rest being players coming to a certain age and happy just to train and be there when needed, and filling up with youngsters who are fresh, talented and eager to push for a place in a patient way, keeping a happy face for a longer period of time. This is often the most difficult part of being a manager, and as Puel have learned, inheriting those problems from previous managers. You then have to get players out, before you get new faces in, and that could be disturbing when building a team.
You can say this and that and hope that players will stay professional, but without first team practice in games, you lose your place in the national team, mostly forgotten and overlooked and you will not be seen as much as you would like, as those international coaches are eager to have players in form and not bench warmers. The total picture is complex, players are concerned about their gametime and you will always have that as a problem, but with so many uncertainties and so many players to choose from it makes everything unpredictable, at the moment only four or five players are settled in their positions in Leicester City’s first team and it looks difficult for Puel to make his decisions.
For all other Paper Talk and Transfer Gossip, You will always find a new and fresh Sunday update at Soccervoice Blog & Football Portal.
