Willie Kirk is confident that there will be no repeat of Leicester City’s 8-0 defeat against Chelsea when the two sides meet at Kingsmeadow on Wednesday evening.
The Blues defeated The Foxes by that heavy scoreline when the two sides met at The King Power Stadium in the reverse fixture back in December. Chelsea were 5-0 up by half-time in that match.
Leicester City’s home clash with Chelsea was head coach Kirk’s third match in charge. His side have grown significantly since that day and he expects Leicester City to provide evidence of that improvement at Kingsmeadow on Wednesday evening.
“Closing that 8-0 gap is the first thing (we want to change),” Kirk said when speaking in the pre-match press conference. “We tried to close the gap against Arsenal. I felt like we did that and on a different night, we might have come away with a point.
“I think against Chelsea it is about being competitive, it’s about being in the game as long as possible and then seeing how much Chelsea react to that just as much as us.
“They have to continue winning. They might get away with a point but they’d rather take three with such a backlog of games. We might be able to capitalise on them having a cup final four days’ later but it comes down to us looking after our mentality and the way that we go about it.
“I’ve got no doubt that we will be more competitive than that last game (the reverse fixture), it was a bad day at the office but I think that gets classed in the same way that we look at that last Arsenal game (at home). Those games were a little bit of searching and finding out for me in terms of who is or isn’t going to continue the journey and what we needed to improve on. I feel that we have ticked a lot of those boxes now and you are seeing a different Leicester.”
After being sat on zero points at Christmas, Leicester City now have 13 points on the board and they are outside of the relegation zone. A lot of the hard work has been done by The Foxes but Kirk does not want his side to let things slip now.
He said “We’ve put ourselves in a position where it’s in our hands and I don’t think anyone would have believed that would have been possible four months ago. We have to capitalise on the situation. I said to the players that we’ve not come this far to only come this far. We have put ourselves in a fantastic position and we need to see that through, be ruthless and accumulate the points tally that we set out. We’re on course to achieve that.
“It’s very achievable but I won’t give anyone the target or what it is. We’re in a good position, we have three games and it’s in our hands, that’s all we can ask for given where we were.”
Leicester City’s Barclays Women’s Super League fixture at Chelsea kicks-off at 7pm on Wednesday evening.
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