Lost it, Blip or Tactics?

King used to score a lot of goals - I think he's scored 50 for the club; however he's fashioned himself as more of a defensive midfielder these days and has looked reluctant to shoot for some time.

Mahrez looks a bit down on himself at the moment, partly through costing us points through missing a couple of important penalties and partly because he's being targeted in games - not necessarily kicked but studied widely and denied any space to enjoy himself. The more rest we can give him, the better.

I didn't realise he was that prolific, that's a good record for a midfielder.

Did he play a bit further forward, or in the pair?

Admittedly most goals were in the Championship, but he was part of a midfield pair. I think he tried to model himself on Frank Lampard and arrive late in the box.

However, he's received criticism over the years for not influencing games enough generally so he's tried to address that to make sure he holds up his end defensively. As such, he just doesn't get into the opposition penalty area as much as he used to. He's also far more reluctant to take long-range shots, which is a shame because his shooting from range was quite good. I keep hoping that Ranieri will try to get this quality out of him again because he was always a pretty decent finisher, but I haven't seen it as yet.

Your line up last night was begging for that from midfield to be fair. Does Ranieri know him from Chelsea?

Who, King? No, he was at Chelsea's academy before he came to our academy, but he came through there into the first team and has been with us since. He's our longest serving player by some distance and got a few starts before we took our foray into League 1. And that was probably around 7 or 8 years ago now.

It would certainly help if more goals could be scored by our central midfielders, but as you say Dunge, only King is renowned for this. On a different note though, how good a prospect does Chilwell look? Really impressive so far. Same goes for Gray.

Once his nerves settled I thought he looked really good - although as I've put in another article he still has some defensive craft to learn.

Gray I think is near a first-team start after that performance, particularly with Mahrez and Albrighton struggling of late. Certainly he's clearly ahead of Dyer now, although he too (being young) needs to learn greater defensive craft in the longer term.

Gray could well cope with starting, with Fuchs behind him he'd have a great player to prompt his actions, defensively or going forwards.

Good point about Fuchs and Gray TB. I'd like to see that. Another thing I'd like to see is not necessarily wingers being played on the correct wings instead of inverted but swapping it up a bit. Early on the in season Ranieri seemed to play with wingers interchanging through a lot of the game. That must have made it hard for defenders who got used to tracking one guy, then another, and then the first back again. Thought this was really exciting to see and had some good results. But now it seems that slowly slowly we've stuck to playing left footed wingers on the right and vice versa. I'm not neccessarily against this but please mix it up again! Make the opposition think a bit harder!

I've always likes that too, Jagalags. It's related to another problem I've noticed: Earlier in the season some had us pegged as a pressing side, but that wasn't necessarily the case: Sometimes we pressed as a team, other times we sat back as a team. We alternated as the game went on according to the pace at the time. Now we seem to be /just/ sitting back and playing a very deep counterattack. We've become a bit too predictable, and I think it's down to mental tiredness as much as anything.