Bristol City 1-0 Leicester, Alonso stays with Bayer Leverkusen: football news – live | Championship

Full time: Bristol City 1-0 Leicester

Bristol City 1-0 Leicester: Five minutes of stoppage time. Dewsbury-Hall, Leicester’s best player in the second half, wins a free-kick in the middle but – for now – the hosts are looking good for their 1-0 advantage.

Bristol City 1-0 Leicester: Harry Winks is trying to get something going in the middle, dictating play in the rain, but Bristol City are dangerous on the break. Nahki Wells goes down in the box after a challenge from the aforementioned Winks. The referee says it’s shoulder-to-shoulder.

Bristol City 1-0 Leicester: Leicester urgently trying to get some momentum, having scored in each of their last 21 league games. They have a corner but Abdul Fatawu heads a difficult chance over while surrounded by City players.

Bristol City 1-0 Leicester: The visitors are rocking now. That was a sublime finish from Mehmeti, even if Hamza Choudhury could have done better in closing him down, the shot was simply unstoppable. Big test for the team that were once running away with the Championship. Vardy is substituted now; a match he won’t want to remember for long.

GOAL! Bristol City 1-0 Leicester (Mehmeti)

Bristol City 0-0 Leicester: Good spell of pressure from the home side. Ross McCrorie cuts in dangerously from the right but fires a shot into the side-netting. Positive play from the substitute.

Bristol City 0-0 Leicester: Vardy fails to take another chance to put Leicester ahead! Bristol City try passing it out from the back but make a hash of it, pinging it straight to the Foxes’ No 9 in front of goal. However O’Leary, his nemesis, pulls off another excellent save. Again, Vardy will feel he could have broken the deadlock if he’d fired off his shot just a smidgen quicker.

Bristol City 0-0 Leicester: Tommy Conway puts a shot agonisingly, narrowly past the post … but then the offside flag goes up. Both sides looking a bit more dangerous though. You sense a goal is coming (he says, inevitably condemning this to a goalless draw).

Bristol City 0-0 Leicester: Jamie Vardy misses a great chance to put Leicester ahead! It’s his own excellent work, via a one-two with Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, that creates the opening. Vardy is through on goal but fires the ball straight at Max O’Leary, who saves. The goalkeeper does brilliantly to keep out a second attempt by Stephy Mavididi. But Vardy will know he should have done better with the initial effort.

Bristol City 0-0 Leicester: We’re into the second half and it’s the home side who’ve started the livelier. Scott Twine has a shot blocked inside the area. No sign of a much-needed cutting edge as yet.

Millwall 1-0 West Brom: We didn’t get a goal in the first half at Ashton Gate but there has been one in the Championship’s 1pm kick-off, Duncan Watmore putting the hosts Millwall ahead of West Brom.

Kane fit for Borussia Dortmund clash

Thanks David. I greet you with Liverpool, and possibly also Real Madrid, heartache: an updated story on the news mentioned earlier that Xabi Alonso will stay at Bayer Leverkusen for at least another season.

“Last week I had a meeting [with club officials] and informed them of the decision to continue being coach of Bayer Leverkusen,” Alonso said.

“After lot of talks about my future, I used the break to reflect and make my decision. I feel this is the right place to be for me as a young coach. My job at Bayer is not over. I want to help the club, help the players to develop, the board is great … it’s all fantastic here.”

Half-time – Bristol City 0-0 Leicester: That’s half-time. An opening 45 not without incident – the Bristol City penalty claim and Vardy clipping the post – but it remains goalless. Time for me to hand over to Alex Reid.

Here’s more from Louise Taylor on Eddie Howe’s comments over Sandro Tonali’s betting ban and the threat of further sanctions.

Bristol City 0-0 Leicester: Leicester have gone closest to a goal but the shot count is 12-6 in favour of the hosts. The visitors have had 57% possession.

Bristol City 0-0 Leicester: Action at both ends. Wonderful feet from Mehmeti creates room in the Leicester box but the shot is delayed and then blocked. The visitors break and Vardy fizzes another effort across goal but wide.

Alonso says he’s staying at Leverkusen

Bristol City 0-0 Leicester: Massive chance for Vardy who darts into space and then reverses an angled shot that looks in but spins away and catches the outside of the post. Is a Leicester goal coming?

Bristol City 0-0 Leicester: Best chance for Leicester so far as Faes peels off his man at the far post and nods a Winks free-kick across the six-yard box but wide of the post. Still 0-0 as the clock ticks to 30 minutes.

Bristol City 0-0 Leicester: Leicester are starting to grow into it a little and win their first corner of the game with 24 minutes on the clock. It’s a complete waste. Vardy then shows he still has high pest content by attempting to charge down a clearance and catching the goalkeeper.

Bristol City 0-0 Leicester: Conway continues to cause a threat and there are vociferous appeals from the home crowd as Leicester defender Wout Faes gets in a positional muddle and pulls on the striker’s shorts in the box. No penalty though! Hmmm.

Bristol City 0-0 Leicester: The hosts definitely having the better of this so far with 15 minutes on the clock. Tommy Conway stings Hermansen’s hands with a fierce shot and the Leicester goalkeeper beats away the follow-up effort too.

Bristol City 0-0 Leicester: Jamie Vardy is still knocking them in at the age of 37. The Foxes striker has seven in his last seven Championship games but hasn’t had much to go at here yet, barring a looping header when stretching that floated into the goalkeeper’s hands.

Bristol City 0-0 Leicester: The sun is shining at a sold-out Ashton Gate and the hosts have made the brighter start, winning an early corner and penning Leicester in.

Peep! Let’s go at Ashton Gate. It’s Peter Shilton v Mark Wallington, it’s Joe Jordan v Gary Lineker, it’s Gerry Gow v Keith Weller, it’s Bristol City v Leicester City.

Bristol City v Leicester fun Opta facts. Not long now. Time to digest these ahead of the 12.30pm kick-off.

• This is Leicester City’s first league game on Good Friday since 2013, when they lost 1-0 to Millwall. The Foxes haven’t won on Good Friday since 1973, when they beat Crystal Palace.

Here’s Thursday’s Football Daily if you missed it, with Arsenal v Man City the focus. Another one of these later today.

Here’s Sarah Rendell with a piece on Arsenal’s Swedish striker Stina Blackstenius.

Arsenal have some catching up to do in the Women’s Super League.

“I punched something”, revealed Nuno Espirito Santo after hearing of Nottingham Forest’s points deduction. An inanimate object I suspect. Definitely not in Jim McLean’s league.

Here’s how The Guardian reported McLean landing a right cross.

Rangers and Celtic agree Old Firm ticket allocation

A bit of fixtures-based housekeeping. The ‘Big Three’ in the Championship (highlighted in bold to heighten your reading experience) are all on the tellybox so have their own kick-off times.

12.30pm – Bristol City v Leicester
1pm – Millwall v West Brom
3pm – 8 x matches
5.30pm – Blackburn v Ipswich
8pm – Watford v Leeds

All 12 games in League One and League Two kick off at 3pm GMT.

Here are the teams for that early kick-off at Ashton Gate. Bristol City can move from 14th to 12th with a win.

An hour to kick-off in today’s opening game in the Championship – Bristol City v Leicester. The Foxes can return to the top with a point or a win. Here’s the top of the table. That’s quite the gap between third and fifth.

Away from the helter-skelter and general madness of the Premier League, here’s a lovely piece from Daniel Harris about a YMCA club set to make their top-flight debut in Norway.

Nottingham Forest boss Nuno Espirito Santo paid tribute to Larry Lloyd in his press conference ahead of Saturday’s home match against Crystal Palace, saying: “He was one of the miracle men. Our feelings are with his family. It’s a sad moment.”

Forest are 18th in the table with nine matches to go after they were deducted four points for breaching the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability rules. They’re appealing the penalty.

They have the chance to take a big step towards safety over the next four days with back-to-back home games against Palace and Fulham (Tuesday) and Nuno wants the crowd to play their part.

Very important games, definitely. We go game by game, it starts against Palace. Good team, it’s going to be tough, we are at the City Ground, the situation that we have – big game for us. The support of the fans, the noise of the City Ground – we need them and they are going to back us up for sure.

Starting the game well, on the front foot, engaging everybody, engaging the fans, the crowd, this is our mentality. (They are) more than the 12th man – they are very important.

Sad news yesterday about the passing of Larry Lloyd, a key man in Nottingham Forest’s back-to-back European Cup wins.

I like this from Steven Pye’s 1980s sports blog on the 1980 final win over Hamburg.

The goal gave Forest something to hold on to, setting up the game as a backs-against-the-wall assignment. Centre-backs Larry Lloyd and Kenny Burns were superb. Lloyd, who passed a late fitness test on his ankle, had warned his old mate Keegan that his defensive partner Burns was after him. Burns’ tackle on Keegan that earned him a yellow card in the first half certainly confirmed his intentions.

Quiz question: which Premier League team are on the longest winless run going into the weekend games?

The answer is Everton and boss Sean Dyche has addressed that frustrating stretch which, combined with a points deduction, sees the Toffees in 16th place and just four points above the drop zone ahead of Saturday’s visit to Bournemouth.

If we’d won five out of this run, everyone would be saying, ‘Yes, no wonder, because they’re playing well’. But you’re not winning and then they go, ‘They’re not playing that well’. That’s the difference between perception and facts. It’s my job to look at the facts.

We are doing lots of the right things, but all the right things are deemed different if you’re not winning. Whichever way you look at it, the bit that’s missing from a lot of our performances is the final moments. Can we add in the final moments to, not just be consistent in performance, but win games? We’ve got to win games. That’s the job, end of.

He’s not the first Merseyside boss to go off on one about “facts” but Opta back up much of what Dyche is saying.

• Everton have scored just one goal in their last five Premier League away games, despite having 65 shots (14 on target), an xG of 4.8, and seven big chances in this run. In their last away game, they had 23 shots against Man Utd without scoring, their most without a goal in an away league match since August 2010 at Aston Villa (also 23).

Newcastle boss Eddie Howe is about up and early as ever and he’s been responding to yesterday’s news that the FA has charged Sandro Tonali with 50 alleged gambling offences relating to bets the Italy midfielder placed after swapping Milan for Tyneside in a £55m transfer last July. Tonali is partway through a 10-month worldwide suspension imposed by Italy’s football federation and there are fears he could now face further, extended sanction. Newcastle and Howe hope any further punishment from the FA would run concurrently.

The news that there was an FA charge, that illness didn’t stop when he moved from Italy to England, that illness was there and people should look at it that way, not ‘let’s throw the book at him and let’s punish him even further’ because I don’t think that gets to the root of the problem. We need to protect all our players because this is something that’s open to everybody and becoming a bigger problem in society, so this isn’t just a problem for Sandro.

I certainly hope for Sandro that there is no further consequences. He has suffered during this period, he has sought help, he’s been very honest, he has admitted he has an issue, and I think the best thing for Sandro would be to resume his career having taken his punishment and having learned a lot of lessons from this.

Let’s set the scene for the weekend Premier League action with another edition of Ten things...

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Alonso set to stay with Leverkusen

Preamble