The praise is nice. The Premier League points tally is impressive. So, too, that record 9-0 victory over Southampton, which came amid a club record run of consecutive top-flight wins. But, ultimately, football is not so different to primary school and what Brendan Rodgers and Leicester really want is something big and shiny to show for their progress – a trophy, which could lead to others. Their first chance to win one is this season’s Carabao Cup, which is why Wednesday’s semi-final first leg against Aston Villa is so important.
Rodgers knows his team are heavily fancied to beat Villa, not least because they thrashed Dean Smith’s side 4-1 at Villa Park a month ago. He also knows that has little relevance. Nothing is fated. Villa reinforced that message to him a long time ago: Rodgers has prevailed in his past 30 domestic cup ties, a run straddling periods in charge of Liverpool, Celtic and now Leicester. But Villa were the last opponents to knock out one of his teams, when they shocked Liverpool by winning 2-1 in the 2015 FA Cup semi-final.
That was not supposed to happen. Scriptwriters had envisaged Steven Gerrard playing in the FA Cup final in his last match for Liverpool, on his 35th birthday. But Liverpool froze in the semi-final, with Rodgers lamenting afterwards that “it meant too much” to his players. If Leicester are to make a big step forward on Wednesday, they must show they can take heavy expectation in their stride.
“There was a lot of pressure going into that game, there was everything on that,” Rodgers said as he recalled the lessons of his last domestic cup defeat. “It looked as though [Liverpool] were going to miss out on the top four, arriving at the semi-final, Stevie was leaving that year and the FA Cup final was going to be on his birthday so there was so much going on and we did not play well at all. Aston Villa were much better than us on the day and deserved to go through.
“You learn from lots of experiences and, going to Celtic, it is [about] dealing with the pressure. That is what is important. You don’t magnify things – you don’t trap players under the pressure and magnify that any more.”
In 2016 Rodgers won his first trophy as a manager, the Scottish League Cup, which “gave us as a team and squad real belief in the work we were doing together”. That trophy proved to be the first of many, as Celtic and Rodgers swept everything before them over the following years, adding two league titles, two Scottish Cups and two more League Cups. It is harder to achieve such dominance in England but the principle of rising to big occasions is the same: Rodgers suggests the key to coping with pressure is to treat it as routine.
“That’s something we train for, something we made clear when we came in [to Leicester],” he said. “A winning mentality comes from training, work, fight and running, being better and proving them wrong, and you take that into your game. So I would love to say there’s been a bigger intensity [in training this week] but there’s not. That’s systematic in the players, so hopefully we can take that into the semi-final.”
Another feature of the 2015 disappointment that Rodgers remembers, and which could be pertinent again, is the role of Jack Grealish. At 19 the playmaker delivered a breakthrough performance for Villa at Wembley and now, aged 24, his influence at his hometown club is enormous, which comes as no surprise to Rodgers.
“I came away that day thinking: ‘What a player that boy is,’” Rodgers said of the 2015 match. “He really stood out. He was drifting in and he showed he had the personality to play on the big stage.” Rodgers has admired the way the player has developed, saying: “He has matured a lot since the time he was a talent and looks like he has fully developed physically and is a wonderful player.”
Leicester do not rely on any player as much as Villa count on Grealish but, even so, the tie’s outcome could to an extent be decided by the displays of two players, Grealish and James Maddison, who are thought by many to be competing for the same spot in Gareth Southgate’s England squad. Not by Rodgers, though.
“People compare [Grealish] to Maddison but he is totally different,” Leicester’s manager said. “They both have individual qualities but they are different players. Great skills, great ability. James Maddison is playing as a central midfielder. He not only attacks and scores goals but he also presses the game. Young Jack has a different role in the Villa team but he is a big talent.”
Grealish is so important to Villa that Smith may be tempted to leave him out to preserve him for the club’s fight for Premier League survival, especially in the wake of a recent spate of injuries. Leicester have no such worries and even look quite comfortable in the top four, sitting in second place with a 14-point gap to fifth-placed Manchester United.
Rodgers is likely to field his strongest possible lineup as he as aims to take Leicester to their first cup final since the 2000 edition of this competition. The team they beat in the semi-final back then? Villa, of course. “Let’s create a new history,” said Rodgers.
