Beaglehole Pleased With Weekend Win

While Nigel Pearson’s first team group took on the might of AS Monaco at King Power Stadium, a squad made up primarily of players from the Club’s Under-21 squad made the trip to Steel Park to take on our neighbours from the Southern League Premier Division.

Joe Dodoo gave the young Foxes a flying start on two minutes when he found the bottom corner from the edge of the box after good work from Marko Futacs.

And Futacs himself doubled the advantage eight minutes later after a neat one-two with Jacob Blyth.

Corby came back strongly before half-time though, troubling a makeshift Foxes defence missing the injured Alie Sesay and Callum Elder, and hit back through Avelino Viera before Nabil Shariff levelled on the stroke of half-time.

“We had players playing out of position in defence and we looked a bit disjointed across the back four if truth be told,” Steve admitted.

“Tom Hopper was playing at centre-half, we had a full-back at centre-back and a midfield player at right-back. They’re all capable players and Tom in particular looks the part in there, but you could see they had not played there together before.

“It was disappointing because we’d started the game really positively and were so dominant that, if we’d scored a third, I think we could have gone on to win the game comfortably.

“But credit to the players – it became a bit of an end-to-end battle in the second half and we found a way to win the game, which was important after the draw at Ilkeston.”

As the game became stretched, it appeared the next goal could be a decisive one. The only surprise was that it took until the closing stages for it to arrive, from the gifted feet of first-year pro Harry Panayiotou.

“Harry wasn’t really fit enough to play the full game, so we put him on for the final 20 minutes and moved Tom Hopper up alongside him,” Steve said.

“Tom started to pull defenders all over the place, which created space for Harry to work in and that’s what happened for the goal – Tom flicked the ball on, Harry beat a couple of defenders and hit a terrific strike from distance.

“Overall we were a lot more effective in terms of the number of crosses we put into the box and the number of shots at goal we had, but defensively we were not as solid as we’d like to be, which was understandable given the players we had missing.”

City’s Development Squad is expected to form the core of the group that travels to Coalville Town on Wednesday night for the Westerby Cup Winners’ Cup Final. Kick-off at Coalville’s Owen Street Sports Ground will be at 7.30pm.