Birmingham City vs Leicester City – Preview

Team News

Stephen Carr is available but Curtis Davies is still out with his knee injury.

Leicester could welcome back Richie Wellens, Michael Johnson, Andy King and Jermaine Beckford, who all missed the win against Derby through injury but striker Paul Gallagher is set to miss out again.

Last Meeting

The sides last met in April 2007 at the Walkers stadium with Blues winning 2-1 thanks to early goals from Rahdi Jaidi and Sebastian Larsson.  The meeting at St Andrews finished 1-1 as a late Elvis Hammond goal cancelled out Gary McSheffrey’s opener.

Recent Form

Blues sit 17th on 11 points but by the time this game kicks off will have three games in hand on most sides above them. They have won two, drawn two and lost two of the last six league matches.

Leicester have three wins and three draws from the last six.  They are unbeaten away from home but all but one of those games ended even.

Outlook

So after an excruciatingly long international break Blues are back in action this Sunday at home to Leicester City.  Those not going will be able to watch it live on the BBC in glorious high definition.  I wonder if Blues play any better in HD.  I’d like to predict now that the following will happen during that broadcast,

1.  Robbie Savage will be involved in some capacity.
2. The pre-match talk will compare our money troubles with Leicester’s big spending.
3. Alan Hansen / Shearer will look like they’d rather be somewhere else.

The game itself will be a good test for Blues as Leicester should still be considered as a contender for automatic promotion even though they have not had the best of starts.  Like Blues I expect them to get better as the season goes on and the new players start to gel.  I’m still not convinced by Sven as a manager and I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t last the season although this wouldn’t necessarily be for footballing reasons.  In recent games they have had some good results particularly beating Derby 4-0 last time out.

This is the first of five games in just under two weeks for Blues but at least they should be fresh for this one.  There are four league games in that period, three at home and one away to bottom of the table Bristol City.  You would normally look at a run like that and expect a good points haul but the frequency of the games will make that difficult.  It’ll be interesting to see who starts up front as we didn’t look like scoring at all against Forest until the changes were made.  That result flattered us but it does show how a poor performance can still lead to a good result if you have quality strikers to take the few chances created.

This game will give us a good idea as to how serious our promotion challenge is.  At home I am confident that we can match anybody but we will have to see a marked improvement in performance from the last match against Barnsley.  I think there is a very good chance of this ending as a draw.

My prediction 1-1.  Someone called Chris to score for us.

C’mon you Blue Boys.

@Aylesbury_Blue