Cup night at Leicester for the under-21s
The under-21s are set to play their first game in this season’s Premier League Cup tonight with a visit to Leicester City.
This season we’ve been drawn in Group G in the competition along with Brentford, Fulham and Leicester and all four teams get their games underway this evening with Brentford hosting Fulham.
After losing our opening game of the league season, we go into the game with some confidence after a good run of results. We drew against Cardiff when only a goal deep into stoppage time cost us a win and we’ve followed that up with big wins at Colchester and at home against QPR to move into fourth place in the table.
Leicester are a level above us as a Category 1 academy and play in Premier League 2 but having beaten Derby 2-1 in their opening game, they’ve been beaten 4-1 at both Arsenal and Blackburn which they followed up with a 3-2 loss at home against Norwich.
They will have been disappointed to have lost that Norwich game. They led 2-0 at half time with goals from Silko Thomas and Tawanda Maswanhise and were still in front by those two goals as the game went into the final twenty minutes only to concede three in a thirteen minute spell.
The six goals they’ve scored have been spread across five players with Zach Booth the only player to score more than once. He netted their second in that win against Derby and scored the Leicester goal in the defeat at Blackburn. For us, Joe Westley leads the way with five of our ten league goals.
This season will be the first time Leicester have entered the competition since the 2018/19 season when they qualified for the knockout stage having finished second behind Nottingham Forest in their group and then went on to play us in the round of sixteen with a Dan Agyei goal giving us a 1-0 win and a place in the last eight where we were beaten by Leeds.
It was the last time we got through the group stage. Last season we finished third in our group behind Arsenal and Stoke with our one win in the competition coming against Stoke, a 3-1 win at Leyland with goals from Michael Mellon, Joe McGlynn and Westley.
Speaking ahead of the game, Leicester midfielder Brandon Cover said: “We know Burnley are a physical team, we’ve watched their clips and we know they like to play long balls and get in and around the box. I know they’re not in our league, but it’ll be a good test because we’ve never played them before so it will be something new for us.
“Knowing Leicester, we always try and go far in every competition. We got knocked out in the group stages last year, after some good results, but this year we want to reach the next stage.”
Meanwhile, Burnley’s Basilio Rieno Socoliche (pictured) is looking forward to tonight’s game and said: ““We know it’s going to be a tough game, but we’ve prepared well all week and I feel very confident that we can deliver a good result.
“We’ve had a couple of days training with the first team this week, and I think that has benefitted us as a group in terms of the quality of training, and it’s made us more than ready to go into the game.
Tonight’s game is being played at Leicester’s training ground at Seagrave and kicks off at 7 p.m.
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