Dan

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2018/04/26/claude-puel-fighting-save-job-leicester-city-club-plans-big/?WT.mc_id=tmg_share_tw Yeah, I'm pretty sure he's going to be booted. If it happens then hopefully it's before the end of the season as that'll pocket me £330 The director of football has got to go. This is surely the end.

I'm not totally sold on Puel, but I'm getting very worried that we've got a player power problem. It needs fixing. If Puel can't do it, he has to go. We will never build a side better than this if we allow players like Wes Morgan and Danny Simpson to run the team. Players who achieved the unthinkable, but ability wise are very dispensable now. Morgan coming in for Dragovic sums it up for me. Dragovic outperformed him, barely did a thing wrong, and has been dropped - now apparently no longer fancies joining permanently. There in a nutshell is our problem. Genuinely now buying into the theory that some players are a problem.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2018/04/08/claude-puels-methods-create-strained-atmosphere-within-leicester/?WT.mc_id=tmg_share_tw Here we go again.

The atmosphere in our ground isn't that good anymore, certainly not in the home end, I get the whole point that we're sort of in a hangover period as a fanbase as we're still coming off the back of the ultimate high, but it's a bit depressing there at the minute to be honest. L1 used to be a respectable block but it's shocking these days, that's from people actually in it. I'm in SK1 at the back, if the away fans are in the North East corner, I'm in the South East corner. I joined the atmosphere group that formed nearly five years ago and I think while it can be good up there, we'd rather have grown in numbers more now than we actually have. It doesn't help though when we've been selling out nearly every game and the likes of Huddersfield started when their ground was half full. Expansion I'd imagine will take us to 42k-ish. I really hope we do it just to get slightly above Villa's capacity as it'd make us the biggest ground in the Midlands. I've criticised our ground layout a few times and think that mistakes were made initially when designing it that haven't helped the atmosphere. There was a point when it was good but I still think having clappers makes it a bit artificial, and it doesn't actually sound that good.

Fantastic news. This has been rumoured for ages and it's great to hear it's true. While it's been a relatively drab season compared with recent, we're making some big strides off the pitch. This and the new training facility are both big news for us.

It's a shame we blew so much of that money on panic buys. We're a classic example of my theory that having a lot of money can breed a complacency and that's definitely happened with a lot of clubs in this country. It was like we abandoned everything that had made us successful overnight. I still don't think it's entirely been rectified either. You look at this summer's business and so far I think Maguire looks the only decent pound for pound signing. Iheanacho's been pretty awful in all honesty, Iborra's not bad but he's fairly old and doesn't appear to be fancied by the manager, Silva after all that waiting hasn't yet got above Matty James in the pecking order, then you've got Jakupovic who is somehow behind Ben Hamer in the pecking order. We've got a real recurring issue at this club that new signings seem to make little to no impact. Are they not that good, or is the player power talk actually true? I think as amazing as 2015/16 was, we'll always look back on summer 2016 with some regret. The one window in our history where we had the ability to attract real quality to the club and not one of the signings remains at the club. A summer we paid £16mil for Musa and a newly promoted Leipzig signed Timo Werner for £8.5mil. However, a massive however, is the new training facility. A state of the art facility costing us around £80mil was announced a few weeks ago and that's exactly the kind of investment we should be making. Even if we bodged it with the playing personnel we've at least got that to show for it and it'll definitely strengthen our position in future.

My money's been on negligence from the get go. I'd be amazed if this came out as being terrorism.

I'm not one who eliminates the possibility of terrorism that easily but I think in this case it's pretty obvious it's a gas explosion. That's just totally pointless speculation from him. Did you see the house in Birstall that exploded a few months ago? That was mental. One person I work with lives in Birstall and slept through it, someone lives 5 miles away and it woke them up Weird stuff.

They're pulling bodies out apparently. It sounds nasty. Does make you question how well some of these buildings are maintained. I don't live in the city, I live in a village about 6 miles outside of it, but I drive past this area pretty frequently.

In all honesty I don't know any more than anyone else as I've just gotten all my info from Twitter. Had no idea it's practically flattened a shop though. That's worrying.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/bayer-leverkusen-leon-bailey-england-12042341 We may have had a huge stroke of luck here. Leon Bailey of Bayer Leverkusen is apparently eligible to play for England (as well as Jamaica, Belgium and Malta, strangely) and would consider it. That's a game changer for us. He's quality and that for me is our weakest position. Exactly what we need.

Chester apparently need £50,000 to be saved, yet are due £55,000 from us in June through an installment on defender Sam Hughes that we signed off them in the summer. While I hope we just let them have the money, I do worry that it's not actually helping solve the problem, and more just patching over it before it comes back again in future. Clubs who end up in these scenarios have something fundamentally wrong with them and giving them the money doesn't fix that. It's akin to giving someone homeless some money to spend and they go and buy alcohol. But as stated, I hope we bring forward the payment and let them have it. We probably pay Kelechi Iheanacho that money in about 4 days and we're due to pay it to them anyway. Would be a shame for them if they did end up resorting to selling their sell-on clause to us as I think that's the single best way a smaller club can make money nowadays. Their fans really rate him as well and he's having a good year in our youth team.

I'm really unsure what to do this year. I've got two weekends away booked and that's it. Both big family ones, one in some place in Staffordshire and one in Butlins which we've done for about the last 20 years in-keeping with the Leicester tradition there. But as regards to going abroad there's absolutely nothing and it's purely because I've got a block of time up in Leeds, right during the World Cup which has pissed me right off. I'll miss a lot of the games and I can't go away as planned. Quelle surprise, most of my mates are going at that kind of time, a lot of them not together either, so I'm a bit stuck on my own this time around. I'm actually half tempted to do something a bit different on my own, nothing too expensive because I'm trying to save a bit of money this year, but something slightly out of the ordinary of Spain. Maybe Portugal.

They're too similar to play together.

Portugal's a no-brainer actually. Perfect.

Think I'm finally going to be an Ultimate Team wanker. Going to build a bit of a different type of squad though as I can't be arsed having the same as everyone else. Maybe something like Mexican or Uruguayan.

Expect him and Choudhury to feature at Fleetwood. Barnes seems to be getting rave reviews at every level he plays at so maybe all he needs is that chance that I expect Puel to give him. I look to the likes of Dele Alli and Marcus Rashford, players who by all accounts got a chance they weren't really expecting to and haven't ever looked back since. Not saying he's as good as them but you'll never know if you don't try. I've wanted us for years to have a manager who's a bit more ballsy with playing youngsters and Puel may be that man. There was one of the people there who left, it may have been Liebherr, and I've seen plenty say it's gone downhill since then. I used to see Southampton and Swansea as the model clubs. Now I think both, Swansea in-particular are a bit of a nonentity. Southampton aren't just not replacing their star players but they're hardly bringing any through anymore either.

I was going to have some on us -2 when Spurs went down to 9 men, at 2-1, with 15 minutes left. So of course it ends 6-1. They're absolutely flying though. I think it's a big problem at Leicester to be honest the lack of youngsters we've produced of any real quality over the years, I don't know if this group are really that good (Sam Hughes and George Thomas seem to be getting a lot of praise) but we do at least now have a manager who is happy to give youngsters those chances and that's something we've needed. No manager's done it here for as long as I can remember. Also found the above Twitter thread very interesting. It's mainly about Southampton but it reflects well on Puel - and pretty terribly on Southampton (and Les Reed, who I actually did think highly of).

I'm still sat on here at silly o clock at times.

Bet he orders a Korma

Drinkwater should've been on the plane to France last tournament. Absolutely ludicrous that he wasn't after he'd had such a decent season - yet bottlejob Hodgson went with a completely unfit and out of form WIlshere / Henderson instead, while eventually resorting to playing Rooney in midfield. Never seen such blatant big club bias in my life, which ironically might actually get him in this time. I do hope he does well. Pissed off that he left (although not as much as Kante) and even more pissed off that we completely screwed up getting Silva in on time but he was a fantastic signing for us really. Signed for under a million, gave us five and a half years, heavily involved in two league winning sides and eventually sold for £35mil. Fantastic move.

I never found him particularly attacking. Like I say, not even close to the creativity of Mahrez for me. The majority of his creativity would come from a longer ball through to Vardy for him to run onto rather than anything too intricate, which Mahrez is capable of.

I've not watched all of Chelsea's games when he's played but I've caught glimpses - and my immediate thought when looking out for Drinkwater was how much more he looks to attack for you than us. When he was here I thought he was a solid all-round player, technically pretty good, a strong passer both short and long range and a good engine, but he didn't really score enough goals and he was nowhere near as creative as Mahrez, for example. His goalscoring record for us in the Premier League is actually pretty shocking - 3 goals in 87 games which incredibly is less than Wes Morgan (5 in 114) and Robert Huth (6 in 82), although not Danny Simpson bad (0 in 91), a very low total really for a midfielder, especially when you factor in how Kante only got the one, Okazaki and Albrighton didn't score many either, shows how reliant we were on Vardy & Mahrez for goals. I don't think it ever helped him however playing the formation we played - him and Kante (and later King, Ndidi & Amartey) were playing as a 2 and as a result had less license to attack whereas at Chelsea he's covered by two other midfielders. I do wonder if we still had him whether he'd be used in more of an attacking role seeing as we look to finally be adapting to another way of playing under Puel (who like Shakespeare hasn't had his replacement available). I'm quite surprised he's holding a place down to be honest, I thought he tailed off big time towards the end for us and while I was livid at how we handled deadline day, we got a decent fee considering everything. I expected him to be behind Kante, Bakayoko and Fabregas but seemingly Bakayoko hasn't performed. His form tailing off so badly during last season will forever remain a mystery to me. While most of them dipped from the year before, he didn't for ages and then around this time of year he seemed to go well off the boil. He went from the best player in a bad side to the weak link of quite a good one. He's a strange player.

Concerning is very generous. I'd say disgraceful. What an absolutely terrible message to send out going into a World Cup - acceptance of failing in one of the easiest groups we could've asked for. You can't use the World Cup to practice for the future as they aren't frequent enough, this is the real thing - if we seriously can't come above fucking Tunisia and Panama then how on earth can you argue that we're moving in any kind of right direction? We've got a better squad than we had two years ago. We've actually got a lot of players playing well on the continent which is the first time in years you can say that's the case. I actually don't get what goes through these peoples heads at times. What an absolutely ridiculous thing to come out with. Covering our arses incase we don't better Tunisia absolutely unbelievable. He's got to go.