Leicester players reported back today, to be part of a new and very exciting pre-season campaign. Getting ready for that opening Premier League home fixture vs. Spurs on the 19th of August.
Little has so far been said about Steve Cooper’s coaching staff, with the only published news and rumour being Andrew Hughes. He is confirmed and will be joining at the new set-piece coach.
No surprise to see Alan Tate joining up either. He is well known to Steve Cooper, and will take on the assistant manager position. the very same role he had under Cooper at Swansea and Forest. Tate (41) started his life in football with Manchester United, coming through their academy in start of this century. He had a loan spell at Royal Antwerpen, playing 7 league games for the Belgian club in the 2001/02 season. Then moving to Swansea in 2002, spending the rest of his playing career in South Wales, just having a few loan spells away at Leeds, Yeovil, Aberdeen and Crewe during those years. Tate worked in the youth set up at Swansea, until Steve Cooper arrived, becoming his assistant and following him also to Forest.
New goalkeeper coach is Danny Alcock. Alcock (40), is a well known goalkeeper coach, starting up in Stoke’s academy, and mostly recocgnized for his time with male youth England national teams, and also been involved as a goalkeeper coach for the England women team. He comes in from Forest, staying on as their goalkeeper coach also after Steve Cooper left. Alcock played as a goalkeeper himself, mostly at non-league level, starting up at Stoke, born in Newcastle-Under-Lyme, capped at England C level, among his clubs Tamworth and Stafford Rangers, also been at Nuneaton, Barnsley and Accrington. He comes from a goalkeeper family, his father, Barry was long servant in that position for Stafford Rangers, his brother Andy Alcock was also a goalkeeper.
Steve Rands is the fourth new face in this group. He was prevously with Steve Cooper at Forest and has also worked with Pep Guardiola at Man City and Frank Lampard at Derby. The role he had at Forest, was called head of performance, we will see what type of role and title he will be given at Leicester.
The recruitment of more caoching capacity personal is ongoing, but it looks like that a good foundation is in place and that the players will be taken good care of. We will follow up on any new information regarding the coaching staff, when we have news to report.
Looking at the different pictures coming through today, James Justin, Hamza Choudhury, Conor Coady, Tom Cannon, Kasey McAteer, Ben Nelson, Harry Souttar, Jamie Vardy, Harry Winks, Stephy Mavididi and Jacub Stolarczyk all came through the door.
There are of course a lot of different topics to look at during the pre-season campaign, hopefully pictures from the upcoming training sessions will give more clues of all happenings.
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