Dewsbury-Hall: We’re Fitter & Stronger
- Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall analyses Leicester City’s 2-1 pre-season friendly win over Preston North End
- The Foxes followed up the day’s earlier victory over Derby County with another success
- Dewsbury-Hall teed up Jamie Vardy and Harvey Barnes in the first half at Deepdale
After one City XI beat Derby County 3-1 earlier in the afternoon, Dewsbury-Hall was part of another side that defeated Preston at Deepdale thanks to strikes from Jamie Vardy and Harvey Barnes.
Although the double assist-maker welcomed the win – Leicester’s third in a row this pre-season – he was keen to emphasise the value of a first 90 minutes of the summer for a healthy contingent of Foxes across the afternoon.
“That’s the main thing, it was nice to get 90 minutes under the belt,” he told LCFC TV. “It was the first one of pre-season for a lot of the lads, and it’s good to get those minutes in the tank because you can’t replicate that in training.
“It’s a good win in the end, we played excellently in the first half and showed what we’re about. The second half was a bit tougher fitness-wise, we just had to keep in the game and we saw it out pretty well.
“That’s a positive of today, we’ve had to deal with different strategies during the game and had to change while the game was going on, so we prepared for how they would start, they changed it and we had to figure that out in the game.
“I felt like we did that well, the lads are all in a good place at the moment. We’re all feeling fitter and stronger, so now it’s about recovering and working towards the next game.”
Two neat passes into Vardy and Barnes were finished well, and Dewsbury-Hall is hoping his hard work in pre-season will lead to further contributions throughout 2022/23.
He said: “It was a good season for me, breaking through last season, but I want to kick on this season and one of the ways of doing that is adding goals and assists to my game. If I do that, I want to be that all-round midfielder that can do everything, so I’m happy that I’ve got a couple more assists today and I’ll be working hard to continue that.
“When you’ve got Vards (Jamie Vardy) and Barnesy (Harvey Barnes), the threat they have is unbelievable, so if you put the ball through, there’s a good chance they’re going to score and I’m glad they did today.”
City have one final pre-season game to contest, against Sevilla at King Power Stadium on Sunday 31 July (6pm BST kick-off). The Academy graduate knows Leicester will face a fearsome opponent, providing perfect competition ahead of their Premier League opener against Brentford seven days later.
“They’re a big team, a footballing team like you expect, playing in La Liga,” Dewsbury-Hall said of Sevilla. “We’ll keep preparing, working a lot more on tactics – we’ve done a lot of that in pre-season, behind closed doors, which people won’t know about.
“There’s a lot of different ways of playing and you can see that in the game. I feel like we build it through the pitch a lot better and, in the final third, we’ve got a lot more people with the full-backs coming inside, so it’s about continuing to do that. We’ve got a great test next Sunday going into the final game.”