Brendan Rodgers will be choosing the “hungriest” players to lead Leicester City away from relegation with the manager to keep an even keener eye on performance in training over the next few months. As Rodgers looks to pick the right team to secure City’s survival over the next 14 matches, he is looking for his players to show hunger. They can do that through actions, not words, and their intensity and commitment in training at Seagrave will be a big factor, the manager has said.
Brendan Rodgers said: “It was a disappointing result for us at home. I trust the squad and I made changes to the team thinking we could put a team out to go and win the game and get through to a quarter-final. But we were nowhere near intense enough or synchronised enough in our pressing. I gave an honest answer, I felt they were better than us. We need a far greater intensity and ambition in the game, collectively as well as individually. We lost the game and now we have 14 games left in the league where we have to play with maximum desire and we have to pick the hungriest team to get the results. It’s very easy (to see who is hungriest). You judge players physically and what they are doing in training. I’ve sat with many players who have told me what they want to achieve and what they want to do in their careers, and how they want to progress. The easiest measure in that is to see what they do physically. If someone’s telling you they want to be a top player and they want to be the best they can, but if they’re the last one into training and the first one away, their commitment doesn’t match that, and they’re never going to get there. It’s always about what the player does physically, and that’s what I always look for.”
Danny Ward, Timothy Castagne, Harry Souttar, and Victor Kristiansen are all expected to come back into City’s rearguard, while Papy Mendy, James Maddison, and Kelechi Iheanacho may be among three changes to the midfield and attack, meaning just Wout Faes, Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, Tete, and Harvey Barnes keep their spots from the midweek defeat.
