JOE Edwards is looking forward to facing off again with Leicester City tonight – just years on from high-stake Premier League battles against the Foxes.
While a first-team Chelsea coach under Frank Lampard and Thomas Tuchel, Edwards was part of teams who twice had to fend off Leicester for a Champions League spot on the final day of the Premier League in the 2020 and 2021 seasons.
The Foxes also beat Chelsea in the 2021 FA Cup Final with Edwards in the losing dugout at Wembley on that occasion. Just two years later Leicester, the Premier League champions of 2016, would be relegated from the top-flight.
Tonight Edwards will be up against the Midlands side in the Championship and is expecting a challenging game at the King Power Stadium with his Millwall side in need of a morale-boosting result.
He told NewsAtDen: “To be honest, the coach [Enzo Maresca] has obviously done a very good job because they do play good football and they can hurt you in different ways. If you sit off them and let them have too much of the ball they can open you up with different passes, but equally if you get caught going too aggressive they can just go in behind with the speed they’ve got. They are well-coached so credit to the coach for that.
“But what I would say is that they’ve not obviously surprised me in terms of how they’ve dominated the division. I think it was more of a shock that they were even there in the first place.
“My personal experience at Chelsea where, for a couple of years, we were competing with Leicester for a place in the top four and in 2021 I was actually on the receiving end of losing an FA Cup final to Leicester. So it shows the level they were used to working at and playing for a period of years.
“So when a club of that stature comes into the Championship and retains the amount of players that they did, I think it’s understandable how they’ve been so dominant and it makes for a very difficult fixture.”