Harry Winks: 100 miles away but he’s back in town

On paper, he should be the kind of player that most top-flight sides would want in their squad, let alone a team like Leicester in the Championship relegation zone.

He’s out of contract this summer and For Fox Sake recently conducted a poll to canvas fans’ opinions of the central midfielder.

Let’s take a look at the ups and downs of Winks’s City career so far to see just why the fanbase is so split on a player who Mauricio Pochettino once said had ‘the profile of the perfect midfielder’.

Winks was signed for around £10million from Tottenham in 2023 after his career had stalled in North London. He’d had a loan spell at Sampdoria in the 2022/23 season, making 20 appearances as they finished rock bottom of Serie A with only three league wins.

So, whilst the highlights of his CV are impressive, Harry Winks needed Leicester City to get his career back on track – why else would he have dropped down to the Championship? Well, apart from the £90,000 a week contract, that is…

Let’s also not forget that Leicester City gave him the first trophy of his career – although you probably could have guessed that given the fact that he’s spent most of his career at Spurs.

Winks played in all but one game in the Championship winning season under Enzo Maresca. He was pivotal in the Italian’s possession-based system. Winks was the metronome that kept the title win ticking to secure an instant return to the Premier League – exactly what both Winks and City were after.

Whether he planned to play a major role in re-establishing the Foxes as a top-flight side, or just to use it as a shop window to get a move back to a ‘bigger’ club, I’m sure Winks was as frustrated as the rest of us when Chelsea came calling for Maresca.

We don’t need to go into too much detail about what happened that season, but we do need to take a closer look at the role that Winks played – or rather didn’t play.

City’s first six games of the season yielded three wins and three draws, with Winks playing every minute, as well as getting a goal and an assist in the EFL Cup win against Tranmere.

On 5th October 2024, he was not in the starting lineup for a league game, when available for selection, for the first time in his Leicester career. He’d only missed one game in the Championship in the previous campaign, through suspension.

Steve Cooper explained his omission as him looking for a ‘little solution’ and it paid off, with the selected pairing of Wilfred Ndidi and Oliver Skipp doing the dirty work in midfield as City got their first Premier League win of the season with a 1-0 victory over Bournemouth.

There was no suggestion that this was anything other than a footballing decision, and Winks went on to feature in all of Cooper’s remaining league games in charge, hobbling off after 11 minutes of the 2-1 defeat to Enzo Maresca’s Chelsea on 23rd November which cost Cooper his job.

That night was an interesting one off the field, as a lot of the Leicester players headed over to Copenhagen for some pre-planned time off. Winks was dressed as an Oompa Loompa; senior pros such as Conor Coady, Jannik Vestergaard and Hamza Choudhury were also in attendance.

A sign was held up near the partying players which said ‘Enzo, I Miss U’, drawing laughter from the City stars, who didn’t seem to be in low spirits despite having had a tough start to the season.

Cooper was sacked the next day, with reports suggesting that he had fallen out with a number of players, with Winks, Vestergaard and Choudhury being named amongst them.

Five days later, Ruud van Nistelrooy was appointed as the new manager. The Dutchman didn’t take charge of the defeat to Brentford on 30th November, kicking off his career with a promising 3-1 win over West Ham on 3rd December. Winks was injured at this point, but did return before Christmas to play his part in seven straight league defeats.

Under van Nistelrooy, Winks completed the full 90 minutes just three times. A 3-0 defeat to van Nistelrooy’s former side, Manchester United, on 16th March would prove to be his final appearance of the season.

With nine games to go, City were nine points from safety, in 19th place, with their £90,000 a week midfielder nowhere to be seen.

The manager’s issue with Winks was the 100 mile commute he was making to training each day – a journey he’d done the previous season under Maresca with no issues.

Van Nistelrooy wanted Winks to stay at Seagrave one night a week to reduce the amount of travelling, but Winks refused and things got heated. Winks’s reasoning was surely centred around the fact that his daughter was less than a month old at the time, whilst he was reportedly one of three senior players whose daily commute was over 90 miles.

Leicester lost four of their next five games, a run of ten defeats in 11, which confirmed their relegation to the Championship despite a late season uplift in form which saw them take two wins and a draw from their last four matches.

Winks would surely leave in the summer. He’d been frozen out; he could surely find a Premier League club nearer to home in a move that would suit all parties. On the flip side, who would be willing or able to get anywhere near his astronomical wages? And would teams want to take a risk on a player who was being portrayed as a bad egg?

After dragging out the inevitable, Leicester finally relieved Ruud van Nistelrooy of his duties and Winks was back in the fold, featuring regularly in pre-season. Marti Cifuentes came in and whilst Winks did get some game time in the opening few games of the season, it wasn’t until 20th September that he started a run of regular 90-minute matches.

From that point, he played ten consecutive games from start to finish (W2, D5, L3). He then played 83 minutes on 22nd November in a 2-1 win against Stoke, assisting Stephy Mavididi’s opener.

He played 80 minutes in the subsequent dismal defeat to Southampton and then was hauled off at half-time after City’s dreadful opening 45 minutes against Sheffield United.

That was the last time Winks was seen under Cifuentes.

He was dropped for the away win at Derby, with reports emerging that playing and coaching staff were frustrated with the way Winks had prepared for the Sheffield United game, and wider training issues. After the Derby victory, Cifuentes stated that Winks’s omission was a ‘technical decision’ and simply repeated that phrase twice when pushed for further details.

We know that Winks was available for the remaining games of Cifuentes’s tenure, but he never featured in a matchday squad again under the Spaniard.

A defeat to relegation-threatened Oxford United was Cifuentes’s final act, and in the very next game against Charlton, under the interim leadership of Andy King, Winks reappeared. There were rumours circulating in the build-up to the game, and King has subsequently confirmed that Winks had always been available for selection and had always trained with the first team.

Whether it was down to a lack of match fitness, or the possible crowd reaction, King opted to start Choudhury and Louis Page in the midfield, with Winks on the bench despite Oliver Skipp, Boubakary Soumare and Jordan James being unavailable.

But his hand was forced early on as Choudhury went off injured with 29 minutes on the clock. On came Winks, to a mixed response, as City lost. Another red card in the next game against Birmingham – this time for Bobby De Cordova-Reid – meant that Winks came on at half-time as City changed their shape.

He made his first City start in 15 games in the catastrophic capitulation against Southampton, then came off the bench as City lost to Saints again, this time in the FA Cup.

That brings us to the present day, with Winks starting - and scoring - in Gary Rowett’s first game as Leicester boss: a 2-2 draw away at Stoke. The way that Winks passionately celebrated with the City supporters and his team-mates would suggest that whatever has gone before, he feels part of the group and cares about winning the football matches required to keep this club in the division.

Rowett said of Leicester’s no.8: “Winksy, he can control games of football in the Championship. Clearly for us at the moment, we’re better controlling the game with the ball than we are without the ball. He’s going to be a key player for us.”

It would seem, then, that Winks has the backing of the current manager – for now at least.

With City languishing in the drop zone and facing fan unrest with regards to the off-field issues, maybe we need to follow Rowett’s lead and get behind Winks and his team-mates for the final 13 games of the season.