Match Preview: Leicester City v Brighton

The first weekend of Premier League action went about as well as could be hoped for Brighton & Hove Albion. A 95th minute winner over Arsenal and no other side in the bottom six winning saw the Albion move five points clear of the relegation zone with the magical 40 mark just eight points away.

40 points probably won’t be required to survive this season either. Most pundits seem to be banding around the figure of 36, which means that Brighton need just one win and one draw from their remaining eight games to secure a fourth successive season of top flight football in 2020-21.

Not that we should expecting anything from Tuesday night’s trip to the King Power Stadium. As our match preview is about to very clearly point out, Leicester City have been flying this season, look well on course for a Champions League spot and have an excellent record against Brighton in the Premier League.

The 2-1 win over Arsenal might have raised expectations levels among Albion supporters, but the Foxes will be much tougher opponents. We’ll be watching on television in hope rather than expectation.

A brief history of Leicester City
Leicester City were your average football club for the first 122 years of their existence, a team who for a certain generation of fans were more famous for having a stadium named after a packet of crisps than anything they achieved on the pitch.

That all changed though in the 2015-16 season. Claudio Ranieri arrived at Leicester having been sacked as Greece manager after overseeing a defeat to the might of the Faroe Islands.

Nobody gave the Foxes a hope of Premier League survival, let alone anything else. What happened next is arguably the greatest story in English football as they demolished the established order, winning the title ahead of clubs funded by Russian roubles and billionaire royal families with questionable human rights records.

It was a genuine fairy tale, although it has come at a slight cost as Leicester have struggled to understand where they now fit in the football hierarchy since.

Becoming regular title challengers was beyond them, yet how could their supporters go back to mid table mediocrity following the joys of being crowned champions?

That complex question has seen Ranieri, Craig Shakespeare and Claude Puel all sacked from the Leicester hot seat in the past four years.

It now falls to Brendan Rodgers, the fourth man to lead the Foxes since their title winning season, to try and answer it in his first full season at the helm.

Leicester City this season
And what a job Rodgers is making of it so far. Leicester sit third in the table having spent most of the campaign playing entertaining, attacking football with a squad packed with exciting young talent.

They were Liverpool’s closest pursuers through much of the autumn and when they visited the Amex in November were the league’s top scorers ahead of both Jurgen Klopp’s champions elect and Manchester City.

The Foxes’ goals total was helped by a 9-0 win at Southampton in October, the biggest away victory in top flight history – yes, even before Sky Sports invented football in 1992.

There is a slither of good news for the Albion ahead of the trip to the King Power though. Leicester were slow starters to the season, winning just one of their first four games in all competitions as their forward players took time to gel.

If they need a couple of games to get up to speed again after three months off, then lockdown might have improved Brighton’s chances of picking something up from the King Power.

Brighton’s head-to-head record with Leicester City
Brighton versus Leicester is a fixture that has only been played on a regular basis since the 1980s. In 34 previous meetings, Brighton have won 13, Leicester 15 and there have been six draws.

It is a game though that tends to throw up plenty of entertainment. Since 1994, Jimmy Case has been sent off for being deaf; Leicester supporters didn’t realise they had scored a winner because the fog at Withdean was so thick; the Albion have had to borrow Leicester’s away kit because they rocked up in the East Midlands with a blue away kit; and hundreds of Brighton supporters walked out of Withdean at half time with the Foxes winning 2-0, those who left missing a miraculous comeback as Micky Adams’ side recovered to win 3-2.

Let us hope that there is another story to add to that little lot for next season’s Brighton against Leicester match preview.

Brighton’s head-to-head record with Leicester City

Last six meetings
• Brighton 0-2 Leicester City (Premier League, 23/11/19)
• Leicester City 2-1 Brighton (Premier League, 26/02/19)
• Brighton 1-1 Leicester City (Premier League, 24/11/18)
• Brighton 0-2 Leicester City (Premier League, 31/03/18)
• Leicester City 2-0 Brighton (Premier League, 19/08/17)
• Leicester City 1-4 Brighton (Championship, 08/04/14)

Leicester are one of the few teams that Brighton are yet to beat since winning promotion to the Premier League in 2017 – the others being Liverpool, Manchester City and, er, Southampton.

November’s game highlighted the gulf in class between the two sides. Had Maty Ryan not been in such inspired form, it could have been a lot worse than a 2-0 defeat for Graham Potter’s side.

Team News
It’s good news on the injury front for the second match preview running as Brighton have a clean bill of health for the trip to Leicester, bar long-term absentee Jose Izquierdo.

There has been a growing clamour in the run up to the game for Alexis Mac Allister to be handed a full debut. Mac Allister was on the pitch for approximately 30 seconds against Arsenal, in which time he managed to play a crucial role in Maupay’s winner.

Whether an away game against the third best team in the country is a good place to give the young Argentinian his first start is up for debate.

What isn’t is that Potter will need to come up with a strategy to combat the pace of Jamie Vardy. Last time the Albion went away to quality opponents with a frightening amount of speed in attack was against Manchester United, when the Brighton boss played a high line and aggressive press against Marcus Rashford and Anthony Martial. The result was a first half shambles.

Having Bernardo’s pace in the back line might prove beneficial to Brighton, although that would mean dropping Dan Burn, something which Potter has rarely done this season. Tariq Lamptey would provide an interesting alternative on the right.

Leicester City’s key players
We’ve just covered Vardy in this match preview, but Brighton will also need to stop James Maddison if they are to take anything from the trip to Leicester.

At the other end of the pitch, Caglar Soyuncu has been a revelation at centre back. Many pundits wondered how the Foxes would cope without Harry Maguire and those questions only seemed to become more pertinent when Rodgers didn’t attempt to sign a replacement, despite being constantly linked with Lewis Dunk throughout the summer.

The reason that Rodgers refused to spend big was because he had a ready made replacement in Soyuncu. Which is excellent news for the Albion as it is one less big club who will be in the market for Dunk come the end of the season.

A good WeAreBrighton.com memory of Leicester City away
Oscar Garcia took Brighton to already promoted Leicester late in the 2013-14 season. The Foxes had clearly been on the piss celebrating their newly won Premier League status (sound familiar?) as the Albion won 4-1 against the Championship’s best side.

Unlike Brighton’s Class of 2016-17, Leicester sobered up enough to ensure that they lifted the title. Brighton’s three points that night meanwhile went a long way towards securing a playoff spot as well as convincing Nigel Pearson to pay £8 million for the services of brace scorer Leonardo Ulloa that summer.

A bad WeAreBrighton.com memory of Leicester City away
Picture the scene. Brighton are awarded a free kick 30 yards from goal in a decent position. Dunk and Shane Duffy come forward having already plundered nearly 10 goals from set piece situations between them in the season so far.

Rather than ask some questions by putting a decent delivery into the box, Jurgen Locadia and Gaetan Bong find themselves over the ball. After a long-winded conversation between the two, the former ends up twatting it out of play.

No, it’s not some sort of cheese nightmare. It’s what we had to put up with at the King Power last season.

Our favourite player to play for Brighton and Leicester City
A whole host of players have moved between Brighton and Leicester over the years, to the point where we could add 2,000 more words to this match preview listing them all.

Anthony Knockaert, Paul Dickov, Matthew Upson, Robbie Savage, Jesse Lingard, Dean Hammond, Junior Lewis, Simon Royce, Trevor Benjamin, Paul Brooker and of course, Ulloa. Then there are the managers. Mark McGhee, Micky Adams and Peter Taylor have all sat in the dugouts of both clubs.

How on earth do you narrow it down from that little lot?

What we like about Leicester
Most of Brighton’s visits to Leicester have taken place on Tuesday nights in recent seasons, allowing us to “do the double” of going to Leicester Racecourse in the afternoon before hacking up to the King Power after.

That has taught us that the city is an excellent night out and its title as the curry capital of England is well earned. There aren’t many other places in which a former king with a hunchback is buried under a car park either.

Prediction
We were spot on in our Arsenal match preview by predicting a 2-1 Brighton win, but it is difficult to be so positive again given how good Leicester have been this season. A 2-1 victory for the hosts.