Swansea v Leicester: Kevin Phillips says misfiring Foxes have been working on finishing

Leicester lost a late kick-off at Newcastle but will be clinical on SNF at Swansea, says Kevin Phillips.

It’s Leicester’s turn to play in the late Saturday kick-off this week, when we travel to Swansea for the Saturday Night Football fixture – although we were almost playing at that time last weekend!

Our game with Newcastle was delayed for an hour due to a problem with a new big screen at St James' Park. It was bizarre, comical at times – although there could have been some damage done - and certainly something I’ve never experienced before.

It was bizarre, comical at times and certainly something I’ve never experienced before in football.

When teams get to an away ground they typically grab a programme and some of the players head to the pitch to have a look at the stadium. One of our players spotted something on the scoreboard flapping around in the wind and before you knew it word had got back to the dressing room and everyone went to have a look.

As the English public do when there’s a problem, we all just stood there and looked at it as though it was going to fix itself. However, Newcastle had to make a decision by 3pm as to whether the game would go ahead and fortunately their safety guys and workmen were able to put it right.

In the meantime, Newcastle kindly supplied some food for our lads to keep them fuelled up and Nigel Pearson had a chat with our players and just said, these things happen, let’s just take it in our stride.

We wanted the game to be played because we travelled all that way and we were in the right frame of mind. We also wanted to take advantage of another hour’s pressure on Newcastle, given the problems going on up there. Obviously it didn’t turn out that way in the end, but we were very professional about the delay.

As it was, we kicked off an hour late and Gabriel Obertan scored a good goal to give Newcastle a much-needed win.

Clinical

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After the game Pearson said some of our finishing could have been better and I agree. If we’d been a bit more clinical we could have won the game.

As the strikers’ coach at Leicester I’ve tried to address that this week, and we’ve been working on our finishing every day. We’ve made a big point about getting our delivery into the box right and making sure we put away those opportunities. Hopefully, if we get a chance on Saturday, after practising all week, we’ll take it.

We know Swansea is a tough place to go, though. They had a fantastic start to the season and their boss Garry Monk picked up the Manager of the Month award for August. The curse of winning that award seems to have set in since then and we’ll look to take advantage of maybe a lack of confidence in their camp.

I covered their game against Stoke last week for Sky Sports and we all know how they like to keep the ball and use the pace in their team. But we’ve worked on our plans to stifle that and the shape we intend to use there and hopefully we have a good chance of winning the game ourselves - and enjoying Saturday night. 

Watch Swansea v Leicester on Saturday Night Football from 4.45pm on Sky Sports 1 HD