My Question for Paulo Sousa

As anyone who has listened to BBC Radio Leicester over the last week will surely be aware, Paulo Sousa will be appearing on the Football Forum tonight. You’ll be able to listen to it on the BBC Leicester website from 6 p.m.

Since I’ll be on a train when the Football Forum is broadcast I thought I’d post a question online in the hope it might be read out. Regardless of whether it actually does, I’m looking forward to hearing from the man himself. It should be a very interesting hour.

My question:

Paulo, much has been made of the playing style of the two sides you have managed in England thus far. I want to ask you about the approach you take when your side is in the lead.

During your spell at QPR the side dropped 9 points from winning positions. Likewise at Swansea last season the team dropped 18 points after leading in league games. In addition, 8 of the 37 goals Swansea conceded last term came in the last five minutes.

Over the coming weeks and months I’m looking forward to seeing Leicester create plenty of chances and score goals. After watching the second half performance at Crystal Palace I’m confident we have the players to do just that.

But how will Leicester approach the game after taking the lead? Will Leicester under your management attempt to hold what they have, or will we try to put teams to the sword?

Match Preview – Crystal Palace

If you had to pick an away trip for the first game of the season, you could do a lot worse than Crystal Palace. Selhurst Park is no longer the fortress it once was, with successive managers failing to capture satisfactory home form.

In 2005/06 the Eagles won 13 matches and took 45 points at home. Since then their points return from home fixtures has read 39, 36, 35 and last season, 29.

In 2005/06 Palace scored 39 league goals at home. In the following seasons they have managed 33, 31, 26 and 24. Only Swansea and Plymouth scored fewer at home than the Eagles in 2009/10.

If the above has failed to convince you of how poor Crystal Palace were at home last season then the fact that 10 Championship sides, including Leicester, left Selhurst Park with all three points should do the trick. Only Plymouth and Peterborough lost more games at home last term.

Leicester have won seven league matches at Selhurst Park, but last season’s victory was the club’s first since 1998. The match was also notable from a statistical point of view as City retained 64% of the possession, the highest share they would control in the whole on the 2009/10 season.

It was the sort of ball retention that Paulo Sousa will be hoping his side can recreate on a regular basis this season. Sousa’s own record at Selhurst Park is encouraging too. In just his third game in charge of QPR his side claimed a goalless draw, then his Swansea team took a 1-0 win last season.

One point to note is that the game will be overseen by Mr K A Woolmer who awarded 4 penalties last season in the Championship, all of them for the home side.

As the season begins every supporter has high hopes. These are both clubs who have experience in reaching the playoffs. Crystal Palace (17) are the only team to have played in more Championship playoff matches than Leicester (14). But it seems like only one of these clubs has any realistic hope of reaching the playoffs this year. Leicester should have enough to get Paulo Sousa off to a perfect start.

On This Day – August 7th 1999

A last minute own-goal from Frank Sinclair saw City lose their opening day match at Arsenal 2-1. City had taken the lead through a 57th minute strike from Tony Cottee, only for Denis Bergkamp to equalize eight minutes later and Sinclair’s misdirected clearance to cost City the points. It would turn out to be Sinclair’s first of two last ditch own goals in a week, meaning City started the 99/00 campaign with four points from a possible nine instead of seven.

Paulo Sousa: What to expect

Despite reaching their highest league position since 1983 Swansea fans had very little to cheer about last season, literally. Paulo Sousa’s side scored just 21 league goals at the Liberty Stadium last term meaning your average Swansea season ticket holder paid approximately £17.86 for each home goal.

Infuriatingly, Swansea fans could have covered the cost of their season ticket by backing boredom. Last season the Swans featured in a yawn inducing 10 goalless draws. Savvy punters, by placing £10 on every Swansea match failing to trouble the scoreboard, could have waked away with a profit of £390 come May.

Is this what we have to look forward to?

The case for the defence is that Sousa had very little in terms of attacking talent. Swansea were definitely left with a Jason Scotland sized hole at the heart of attack, and his replacements never looked like filling the gap. Darren Pratley, a midfielder, was the club’s top scorer with seven league goals.

Further, it wasn’t as if Leicester set the scoring charts alight last season. Away from home the two sides shared almost identical records. The Foxes took two extra points and scored two more than Swansea, Sousa's side conceded two fewer.

What Swansea needed but never got was that little extra killer instinct. Leicester won 14 games by a single goal and drew 13 matches; Swansea won 11 matches by the odd goal and drew 18. The gap between the two teams come the end of the season was seven points. Put simply, four more Swansea goals in the regular season could have seen Leicester playing Forest in the play-offs and Sousa’s side making the short trip to Cardiff.

Financial restraints certainly made it difficult for Sousa to improve his squad’s toothless attack. Indeed in the transfer market it’s hard to make too many concrete judgements about Sousa’s capabilities. The only transfer fee he paid was to Southampton to make Nathan Dyer’s loan move a permanent one. I’m sure there are few Swansea fans who would disagree with the wisdom of that decision, but given that his predecessor had brought Dyer to the club in the first place we can hardly praise the Portuguese boss for Craig Shakespearian scouting.

In the loan market Shefki Kuqi’s goals brought vital wins at Crystal Palace, Watford and Derby, but he didn’t exactly set the Championship alight. Craig Beattie managed 3 goals in a dozen starts and a further 11 substitute appearances. But these are the chances you take with the loan market, sometimes they take off spectacularly (Mark Davis, Jack Hobbs, Martyn Waghorn) and sometimes they don’t (Ryan McGivern, Astrit Ajdarevic).

What we can expect is possession football and lots of it. Swansea had the majority of possession in 32 (70%) of their league matches last season. By contrast Leicester managed this in only 18 (39%) of their Championship games.

So in summary, Foxes fans will see more of the ball, but possibly less of it in the net and would probably do well to hedge bets on a few goalless draws. Let’s get that promotion bandwagon rolling.