N’Golo Kante: Leicester City midfielder to miss next two games

Leicester City and West Bromwich Albion will play their twenty-eighth game of the Premier League season at the King Power Stadium on Tuesday, 1st March.

Second-placed Tottenham Hotspur, who host Swansea City on Sunday, and third-placed Arsenal, who travel to Manchester United on Sunday, are now under pressure to win to keep pace with the leaders.

Kante, who was injured during Saturday’s 1-0 win over Norwich, will miss Tuesday’s home game with West Brom and the trip to Watford on Saturday.

Arsenal have not been crowned champions since 2004 and are five points adrift of Leicester following Sunday’s 3-2 defeat at an injury-hit Manchester United.

“I said before the Arsenal match that Norwich would be more hard”.

“Our job is done, we wanted to be safe but now there is something new if we think match by match”.

“A thousand managers would come to Arsenal and say ‘don’t give me a penny, but if I get Arsenal in the top four then pay me 10 million quid”.

“Kante felt something in his hamstring and we managed him during the training sessions”, said Ranieri.

However, while they might not be playing the top teams in the division, they will be facing a lot of sides that are prepared to defend for long periods and sneak a goal at the other end – the exact tactics that Leicester tend to struggle against.

Alex Neil’s visitors lined up with a back three and sat deep, forcing Leicester, who had previously averaged just 44 percent of possession in their home league games, to take the initiative. That is a very, very important thing.

“It’d be that big, I really do think”. That didn’t happen then and in truth, Leicester will need to play much better than they did on Saturday if it’s to happen to them now. In recent weeks we have been 2-0 up against West Ham, 3-1 on Liverpool and today we had a great opportunity to get a point or maybe three.

It was one of my thoughts at the interval, after a first half in which City had halted the Foxes’ renowned threats of a wide Riyad Mahrez, free-scoring Jamie Vardy and all that space they like to counter into. We don’t have any other goal than that, no specific target.

Ranieri said: “He felt something to his hamstring”. The only way we can stop the expectations rising is to lose games, which of course we don’t want. Norwich came very close to shutting Leicester out last weekend and Villa succeeded in doing so just over a month ago. Defeat would leave them nine points adrift of the top and in they eyes of many, too far off the pace to stand a chance.