Leicester City’s two strikers each scored on Saturday against Stoke, both getting their fifth of the season to secure a sixth straight Championship win for the club
Sharing the game-time between Kelechi Iheanacho and Jamie Vardy is getting the best out of both strikers, Leicester City manager Enzo Maresca believes as he avoids handing either an impossible job.
City’s two leading strikers each got on the scoresheet on Saturday afternoon to secure a 2-0 win over Stoke for Maresca’s side. That’s now six Championship wins on the bounce for City, a run of results that has seen them move 10 points clear inside the top two.
It also means Iheanacho and Vardy are now tied with Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall and Kasey McAteer as the club’s top scorers. They have been sharing the role up front, neither the outright first choice, with Iheanacho starting on Saturday after Vardy had led the line for the previous two games. That is a plan Maresca will continue with throughout the season to avoid either wearing themselves out.
The manager said: “That’s why we try to (switch them around). The other night, Kele was probably not happy to be on the bench. But he came on and was fantastic. Today, because they want to play always, Jamie was not happy to be on the bench. But he came on and scored and was happy.
“To be competitive, you need two players for each position so they can compete between them. In the end, we can choose one of them.
“Here we left out Wout (Faes), Stephy (Mavididi), Jamie, Wilfred (Ndidi). JJ (James Justin) was playing always so we have to be careful. But they cannot think to play 46 games. It’s impossible.
“At the moment, how football is, no human being can play 46 games at the same level. Because we are looking for a high level, we try to change. Maybe next time, I’ll make six changes, we’ll lose and I’ll be wrong. But we have to make those decisions.”
The match played out in a similar fashion to many of City’s fixtures this season, with Maresca’s side dominating possession but struggling to create chances until their opponents became more expansive. Then the opportunities came regularly.
“It was a tough game,” he said. “As expected, they sat back. It was very complicated. We maintained the possession and moved the ball and tried to find the gaps, solutions and spaces, but we struggled. It’s not easy.
“The two strikers were with Ricardo (Pereira) and Harry (Winks), so the only free players were Jannik (Vestergaard), Harry Souttar, Hamza (Choudhury). We tried to find solutions outside with Yunus (Akgun) and with Abdul (Fatawu), attacking with Cesare (Casadei) and attacking with Kiernan, but even with that it was not easy.
“We scored in the first half, a good pass from Ricardo to Kele but even in the goal you can see how tight they were and how difficult it was. In the second half it was much better.
“When their keeper was down, that was 60 minutes, they were a little more aggressive. As we have said many times, when we face teams that are aggressive, it’s much better for us, because we have more space in behind, we have more space in the middle.
“The problem is when we face teams who sit back, we need to be patient, make them run, make the game very long. As we saw in the last 20 minutes, we had more chances.”
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