SOUTHAMPTON, ENGLAND - SEPTEMBER 15: Head coach Enzo Maresca of Leicester City looks on during the Sky Bet Championship match between Southampton FC and Leicester City at Friends Provident St. Mary's Stadium on September 15, 2023 in Southampton, England. (Photo by Robin Jones/Getty Images)
Mads Hermansen may have been guilty of a mistake in Leicester City’s 4-1 win over Blackburn, but that does not compare to the impact he has made to the team’s style and control
Relegation to the Championship forced Leicester City into a summer squad overhaul, and with a number of players leaving on free transfers, and with the most valuable assets needing to be sold to generate revenue, the club were left considerably short on options in lots of areas of the team.
One position they didn’t necessarily need to bring any new signings in was in goal. While players had departed in most other positions, the three goalkeepers City had in their squad in the Premier League had all remained.
Among them was Daniel Iversen. He had come in for the final 12 matches of the campaign and had done pretty well. His shot-stopping ability was on a level above Danny Ward’s, the Dane single-handedly earning City a point in their draw with Everton thanks to a series of superb stops.
The last time he had been in the Championship, a year earlier, he had been named player of the season on loan at Preston. It felt like, when so many other areas needed attention and money to be spent strengthening them, that Iversen was plenty good enough to be the club’s number one in the second tier.
His kicking and footwork was not up to scratch, and certainly not of the level that Brendan Rodgers wanted when Kasper Schmeichel was sold and he thought he would get a new goalkeeper last summer. But in the Championship, City were likely to dominate possession, and high up the pitch too, and so they didn’t need a goalkeeper who was especially good with his feet until they returned to the Premier League.
So when Mads Hermansen came in for £5m from Brondby, it felt like it wasn’t a priority signing. At that point, City were still drastically short on wingers, and they were running low on midfielders too.
But the difference Hermansen has made has been incredible. City would be nowhere near as good as they have been this season without him.
This comes off the back of his first real error as City’s first-choice goalkeeper. The decision to try to find Harry Winks with a goal-kick at Blackburn when the midfielder was under heavy pressure was a bad one, and it was punished.
But it won’t change City’s approach and rightly so. City have made themselves an 11-man team on the ball and it’s greatly improved their control of possession and how they are able to build attacks.
Hermansen will step forward into the back line and make himself an option. A massive 38 per cent of his touches come outside of his own penalty area, that’s compared to 19 per cent for Ward in his Premier league appearances last term. And while City are often stationed high up the pitch, Hermansen gets involved much more often than his predecessors, with 53 touches per game on average compared to Ward’s 38 and Iversen’s 34.
Once on the ball, that’s where he can work his magic. There have been so many occasions this season where Hermansen has slipped a ball through the defensive line and into the feet of a midfielder, something rarely, if ever, pulled off by Ward or Iversen.
On average, Hermansen’s passes cover 634 progressive yards per match. That’s double the average of 313 yards for Iversen last season, and way more than Ward’s 403. He’s not pumping it long to a big man to get those numbers up, that’s purely through playing it into team-mates’ feet, or occasionally going long to find the run of a winger or midfielder.
Maresca did not try to defend Hermansen after his error on Sunday, he knew it was a mistake. And he also said that more misplaced passes leading to goals will come in the future.
But in the grand scheme of City’s season, and indeed the project under Maresca, those will be minor problems given how much Hermansen brings to the team’s passing game. He is integral to bringing Maresca’s vision to life, and to putting City on top of the Championship table.
