Brendan Rodgers
Brendan Rodgers dropped three players from his squad the last time Leicester City visited West Ham – and he would make the same ruthless decision again. The City manager left James Maddison, Ayoze Perez, and Hamza Choudhury out of the meeting at the London Stadium after they broke Covid guidelines the weekend before. City lost the game, downed 3-2 after a dismal first 50 minutes, a result that may have cost the club a place in the Champions League, as they ended up finishing one point and one place outside the top four. In the aftermath, Rodgers said it had been an “awful week” leading up to the game, describing the incident as the lowest moment of his City tenure. But as he gets set to take his team back to the Hammers on Monday night, he has said that, faced with the same dilemma, he would repeat his judgement.
Brendan Rodgers said: “100 per cent. We have a standard of performance on and off the pitch which I demand, and part of that is you have to sacrifice and commit. Obviously at that time, those young guys, they fell short of that. I didn’t fall out with them but it was not the application and it was not the professionalism we wanted at that time. They suffered because they were taken out of the team and out of the squad. It helped us. Maybe not on that day, because we were missing some very good players, but it certainly helped us for our future. Those guys were accepted back into the group again and have done really well since coming back. If you are going to succeed and you want to be a top club, you have to have discipline. Discipline is absolutely critical. That’s something, with experience, you can deal with differently and better. You have to make your mark. Fingers crossed I never have to [make the decision again]. If the situation arises we’ll deal with it how we feel is best. It’s for the greater good of not just the team, but the club.”
While City missed out on the top four, losing their grip on a Champions League place in the run-in, they did win the FA Cup, and Rodgers is convinced the club, and the players involved, are in a better place because of the incident.
Brendan Rodgers said: “It’s education, it’s all experience. These are young guys, hugely talented young players, who will make mistakes. That’s what life is about. We wouldn’t have wanted it to happen at that time, but then how you deal with it allows you to move on, and I’m pretty sure they’ve learned their lesson from that. There’s certainly no doubt it galvanised us and brought us closer together.”
