Leicester City: Conor Coady reveals Leeds, Ipswich and Southampton admission | OneFootball

The battle for the automatic promotion spots hotted up even more last night thanks to Southampton's 3-0 win over Preston North End, and Conor Coady has given an insight into Leicester City's dressing room amid their form slump.

The Saints easily bypassed play-off chasing Preston in their re-arranged game, after the original date for the fixture at St Mary's had to be pushed back due to a large fire that broke out in a building next to the ground.

Che Adams got the first two goals of the night inside the first half an hour of the match, with the first being a relatively simple from a cut-back from Adam Armstrong, and the second coming at the end of a beautifully worked goal by Russell Martin's side. Those two goals were his 100th and 101st goals of his senior club career.

Fellow Scottish international Stuart Armstrong killed the game off just four minutes after Adams completed his brace, and they had a pretty easy ride for the remainder of the game.

That win put more pressure on the top three. They will all still be ahead of the Saints if they win their games in hand, but the form of Martin's men is easily the best at the moment of the top four.

The biggest stumblers have been Leicester, who once held a 17-point lead on the rest of the league, and now they have been dragged back into the battle because of the six losses and one draw they have suffered in their last 10 Championship games.

Veteran defender Coady has spoken about what it's been like in their dressing room during this tough run.

Conor Coady's promotion rivals admission

The former Everton and Wolverhampton Wanderers defender has admitted that he has been "praying" for the teams around the Foxes to drop points.

Speaking on BBC Radio 5 Live, he said: "Whether I should or I shouldn’t do it, I look at the other results. You’re hoping they’ve lost if you’ve won to gain a bit of ground or bridge a gap.

"I’d be silly if I sat here now and said I don’t look at any results. It’s the first thing you do. You can have managers or people around you telling you not to check on it. But it’s the first thing you do.

"When they’re on the telly, you watch them and you’re praying they drop points. It’s a natural thing to do. But you’ve got to curb it and make sure you’re doing your job when it comes to training and playing."

Even though Coady revealed that he does keep tabs on how their promotion competitors are doing, he said that the team do just need to focus on themselves during these hard periods of the season.

"The last couple of weeks with Leicester, we’ve had a tough time," added the 31-year-old.

"We’ve spoken as a team over the past week in terms of the results we’ve had. Because we can’t concentrate on anybody else, we can’t affect what anybody else is doing, so we’ve looked at ourselves and said: 'It’s us and that’s it.'"

A story from The Athletic said that, following City's 1-0 loss to Plymouth Argyle last Friday, manager Enzo Maresca locked his team in their dressing room for an hour after the game to hold crisis talks with his players.

Leicester's tough run-in will prove whether they are Premier League worthy

There are serious questions being asked about the Foxes at the moment, and those same queries and doubts have probably started to creep into the dressing room.

As they look ahead to their final four games of the season, it's not looking like a smooth ride for Maresca and his team. Three of the four matches are at the King Power Stadium, but the first two of those are against West Bromwich Albion and Southampton. They then face two Lancashire sides - Preston (A) and Blackburn Rovers (H) - in their last two matches of the 23/24 campaign.

None of the promotion chasers have a simple run-in but, with the form that Leicester have been in, no game looks easy, and those next two are particularly hard.

They needed that cushion that they had built so that the pressure on these remaining games wasn't so intense. That buffer is gone, and now the pressure is really ramping up; seemingly to a point where they are struggling to manage.

With that said, if they can get through these final four and win automatic promotion, then there won't be quite as many doubts about their top flight legitimacy.