Nampalys Mendy was omitted from the original squad in the summer and has only played one League Cup match. However, the departure of Filip Benkovic has made one place in the squad and Leicester have confirmed that Mendy has returned in their updated list. Mendy is currently busy playing for Senegal and helping his nation reach the AFCON finals. Senegal will be facing Egypt in the AFCON finals and Mendy will have a huge role to play.
Leicester City signed Nampalys Mendy in the summer of 2016 from the French outfit Nice. They loaned him out to Nice again and joined the Leicester squad in 2018. Mendy has played 80 times for Leicester City out of which 29 appearances came in the last season. He did a good job to step in for Wilfried Ndidi who was injured.
Mendy also signed a new contract in 2020 and did a good job in the midfield last season. Therefore, it was a surprise when he was not included in the squad for this season. Mendy will now have the second half of the season to prove the selectors wrong in his case. However, he will have to fight for his place due to tough competition in the Leicester squad.
Leicester look settled with the midfield they have now. However, they have struggled in the last two games and might need some refreshing. Mendy can do exactly that at Leicester and wake their midfield up to get good results again. His man-of-the-match performance against Equatorial Guinea in the quarter-finals in AFCON must have caught the eye of Brendan Rodgers.
Why Nampalys Mendy could act as a new signing for Leicester City?
Mendy has previously drawn comparisons with the legend of Claude Makelele who was a master in that position. This comparison is enough for some people to understand what Mendy could have been if he got the right treatment. However, he can still do a lot of that at Leicester if only he gets a good amount of game time.
Mendy is a defensive midfielder like Wilfried Ndidi at the club. He has good intelligence and awareness of the game which he uses very well for his team. Moreover, his ability to fall back and recover is also highly rated and very important to the team. Despite being a defensive midfielder, he had very good ball distribution that can hurt his opponents.
Although he does not have a strong and tall physique, he still deals well with the physical duels and has good aggression and energy to win the ball. Overall, he is a very mature player who can stay calm in intense moments of the game. Brendan Rodgers will get a different variety of skills with Mendy than what he already has.
Brendan Rodger might face a dilemma of whom to start in the midfield as he has now very good options to play. Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall has emerged as an important player to the squad for Leicester. Moreover, Wilfried Ndidi is undroppable at Leicester, and Rodgers would not include Mendy in the squad to not play him. Therefore, he will have an even tougher job managing the game time for his players.
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