Harvey Barnes makes admission about West Brom ahead of clash v Leicester
Harvey Barnes has admitted that West Brom will be a “difficult” opponent for Leicester City when they take on the Baggies in their Premier League opener on Sunday.
Albion welcome the Foxes to The Hawthorns off the back of winning automatic promotion from the Championship last season.
Brendan Rodgers’ side, on the other hand, suffered the disappointment of letting slip of what seemed like a guaranteed Champions League spot to finishing fifth in the Premier League.
Albion tore the Championship to shreds at times last season and although Barnes spent the first half of the 2018/19 season on loan in the West Midlands, he admits that he doesn’t know what to expect from his former club.
“Of course, we know it’s going to be a difficult game,” Barnes said, as quoted by Leicester’s official website. “They’re newly promoted so you don’t always know what to expect, but we’re going there confident and we’ll be looking to pick up a win.
“Normally they’d have the crowd behind them which could be a factor for us. Normally you have to deal with the crowd at a newly-promoted club as well as the team.
“We know ourselves that if we play our game and put in the sort of performance that we know we can do, then we should do well.”
Barnes was electric in that loan spell at West Brom and since returning to Leicester he has held down a spot in Rodgers’ starting line-up.
No West Brom fan needs telling that he’s going to be a threat this weekend and while we’ll be glad to see Barnes back at The Hawthorns – we hope that Bilic’s defence can find a way to keep him quiet.
Leicester have some very pacey players in their attack while West Brom’s defence, on the whole, is quite slow.
That leads us to believe that Darnell Furlong could start at right-back with Semi Ajayi definitely starting at centre-back as they’re the two fastest defenders in the squad.
Dara O’Shea isn’t the slowest and neither is Cedric Kipre but they lack crucial Premier League experience so one of Kyle Bartley or Ahmed Hegazi could start alongside Ajayi at centre-back with Kieran Gibbs on the left-hand side of the back-four.
In other West Brom news, Kevin Phillips has predicted the outcome of Albion’s clash against Leicester.
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