Leicester missing Kante?

Chelsea’s N’Golo Kante lines up against his former club Leicester live on Sky Sports 1 HD on Saturday.  His departure has left a gaping hole in the Foxes’ midfield, writes Nick Wright…

When N’Golo Kante arrived at Leicester’s Belvoir Drive training ground for the first time last summer, the story goes that he was mistakenly directed towards the schoolboy players. The little Frenchman did not look like much at 5ft 6ins, but he soon set about defying the doubters, and over the next nine months he was a towering influence in Leicester’s historic season.

By the end of it, Steve Walsh, the head of recruitment who brought Kante to Leicester from French side Caen, had made a habit of telling the same joke. “We play three in midfield,” it went. “We play Danny Drinkwater in the middle with Kante either side.”

Kante had been the driving force behind Leicester’s title triumph, and Claudio Ranieri echoed Walsh’s comments after the midfielder’s £32m departure to Chelsea in July. “If Chelsea bought Kante, it’s because he played as two players last season,” he said. “The referee counted 11 but we were 12.”

It was a typically good-humoured response from Ranieri, but adapting to life after Kante has been no laughing matter. The 25-year-old made more tackles and more interceptions than any other player in Europe’s top-five leagues last season, and seven games into the new campaign the champions sit 10 points off the top having struggled to fill the sizeable Kante-shaped gap in their midfield.

Without Kante’s superhuman energy in midfield, Leicester have become far more vulnerable at the back. Leicester are averaging 16 tackles and 14 interceptions per game compared to 23 and 22 last season, and with Wes Morgan and Robert Huth no longer afforded the same protection, the Foxes are now facing 5.3 shots on target per game instead of …

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