Opposing View – Leicester City

After a close encounter with Chelsea where the Foxes nearly knocked the Premier League giants out of the League Cup on Wednesday, Vital Colchester United took time to get some thoughts from a Leicester fan ahead of Saturday`s game on Sky Sports.

Matt Davis, of the club`s Supporters` Trust, gave us his thoughts:

You`ve no manager, but that didn`t stop you giving it all against Chelsea in midweek. Were the boys trying to prove a point to Gary Megson as well as the fans and bookies?

Chelsea was a fantastic match and epitomised what it is like to be a Leicester fan. When they had beaten Man City by six goals, everyone was saying we’d be thrashed by a rugby score.

The truth was that we raised our game and played out of our skin and deserved at least extra time. Leicester often raise their game against stronger opposition.

I don’t think the lads were trying to prove a point to the fans as we’ve been consistently getting 21,000 for home games and have took in around 6,500 fans to Forest (twice!), Villa and Chelsea in the cup.

It was a fine opportunity for the players to be noticed and be compared with some of the ‘greats’ of the Premiership and so I personally think they’d wanted to prove they can compete at the highest level and so raised their game accordingly.

“It (the Chelsea game) was a fine opportunity for the players to be noticed and be compared with some of the ‘greats’ of the Premiership.”

Many fans didn’t like Megson from the start for one of three reasons 1) he was from F**est, 2) his performance at F**est hardly set the world on fire 3) his style is pretty boring, grinding out results (if you are lucky). In the league we picked up 7 points in 7 games with him in charge, won one, drawn four, lost two.

Everyone in the media praised him for stopping the rot but to me this did an injustice to Marton Fulop, who is a fantastic keeper and was largely responsible for it himself. As for the bookies … well you never see a poor bookmaker do you!

Paul Jewell, Iian Dowie or Chris Coleman have all been mentioned as the new manager. Who would you like to see?

I’d personally like to see Simon Gayson (with Jewell running a close second).

The names are changing by the minute as originally Dowie was hot favourite(partially because of Coventry’s current problems off field) then Souness now Joe Royle!

Whoever we get we need to see a loyal manager that will get on well with Milan and see his contract out and not quit as soon as a better offer comes in.

It`s on Sky on Saturday, so will that mean less fans coming to Essex and Layer Drome?

Sky TV coverage and the cost of watching football nowadays inevitably means that many fans don’t attend games that are shown live on TV.

This is based on the fact that if you only have a finite budget to spend on going to matches, if you don’t chose to attend live a game on Sky you can see two games for the price of one (the one you watch from your armchair & the one you physically attend).

So even if you could accommodate 6,500 of us sadly I doubt you’d see anything like that many!

Leicester fans will run in to Mark Yeates, after last seasons` loan spell at City, where he is Colchester`s top scorer. What sort of reception will he get?

For whatever reason Mark didn’t perform that well in a Leicester shirt. Was it him? Was it the system we played? Was it the Manager? I honestly can’t put my finger on it.

I remember when we first got him, my mate from Colchester was telling me how excellent he was & so I was really looking forward to watching the guy, but then he generally under-performed for us and so all in all it was a bit of a let-down.

I’m genuinely pleased for you and pleased for him that he is doing so well for you though.

On the spot – predict a score!

I have a real dilemma here. Me predicting a Leicester win is usually the kiss of death on the team, but I’d never hear the end of it if I predicted Colchester to win & hopefully we’ve ditched the draws since Megson left!!!

Sitting on the fence, I think it will be a close game with one goal in it either way – how is that for a politician’s answer!

What I will say though is that having a mate (Graham Moores) who is a Colchester season-ticket holder as well as two folk I work with here in Leicestersire who are fans (Nick Wash & Julian Potts), Colchester is the first team who I check the result of in this division (obviously I know ours already!)

For all the games bar the two against us I wish you luck and hope you win them & I also hope you enjoy more success in your new stadium than we have had since we moved to the Walkers!!!


Thanks Matt of the Leicester City FC supporters’ trust! May the best team win and good luck for the rest of the season!

To visit the Foxes’ Trust on thier homepage, click
here.