Esteban Cambiasso having a big impact on Leicester players, says Kevin Phillips
New players bedding in during international break
Thursday 11 September 2014 17:48, UK
It may have been international week but there’s been plenty of excitement down at the Leicester City training ground.
Esteban Cambiasso signed for us just before Deadline Day and it’s fair to say the players were all looking forward to playing alongside him for the first time! After all, it’s not often you get to train with a Champions League, La Liga and (five-time) Serie A winner.
In fact, there were a couple of lads who were injured who would never normally come out and watch training who, on his first day, managed to pull a few bikes out to the side of the training pitch to watch him train!
It seems like he’s already having a huge influence on the players and he’s certainly brought his calibre and experience to the training pitch.
His arrival has given everyone a huge lift and hopefully as time goes on he’ll be a big asset for us.
It seems like he’s already having a huge influence on the players and he’s certainly brought his calibre and experience to the training pitch and the reserve game he played this week. You can see by the way he gets around the pitch that he reads the game so well.
The break in the fixtures has also given our other new signings a chance to get to know their team-mates, as well as work on our style of play and understand the commitment and work rate we expect from Leicester players.
Our squad is looking very healthy now. It’s much bigger than it was at the start of pre-season and we’ve got competition for every place, which is exactly what the manager, Nigel Pearson wants.
When clubs buy players who are going to try and take your place, that’s healthy competition and I know that when I was a player I always responded when a new striker came in; it made me not want to lose my place and I worked even harder to keep hold of a starting spot. Hopefully our players will respond in the same way.
Recharge
We’ve also used the period to give some players a rest, too. We’ve equipped ourselves well in our first three games of the season and it’s important to use these times to recharge the batteries and get away from football, even though it is early in the campaign.
Refreshed, we can now look forward to the next four games before the October international break, starting with an away trip to Stoke this weekend.
We haven’t set any targets for the players, in terms of the number of points we want to pick up over the next spell, but that was always something I’d do as a player – and I’m sure some of our players will have individual targets they want to achieve in those games.
As a staff, we’ve just told the players we want to focus on each game individually and pick up as many points as we can from every game.
That won’t be easy at Stoke - everyone knows the Britannia is always a tough place to go because the supporters are great and they make it a daunting place to visit. Stoke are also coming off the back of beating Man City so their confidence is going to be very high.
However, we’ve got a gameplan and if we stick to it we’ll give them a run for their money.
Having watched us against Arsenal, I’m sure Stoke will know they’ll have to be on top of their game to get something out of it.
