The defender grabbed his first goal of the season in Sunday’s defeat to Manchester United, but picked up his fifth caution of the campaign in the process which results in a one-match suspension, and the head coach spoke about the absence of the skipper for the game with the Foxes at the Amex later this month.
He said, “We’ll be missing Lewis and it’s a blow because he’s been great, but part of football is finding solutions to situations and this is one of those occasions.
“We’ll do that over the next couple of weeks. We picked up a few yellow cards and that’s about the speed of the game and the speed of the attacking players that the opposition had.
“It’s not easy and when you mistime a challenge it doesn’t look so good, we’re not a malicious team but when the likes of Dan James, Anthony Martial and Marcus Rashford nip the ball away from you then these things can happen.”
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The duo of Glenn Murray and Solly March were introduced at the break in the north west on Sunday with the Seagulls 2-0 down at the interval, and Potter spoke about the thinking behind the changes.
“We made some switches at the break to put Steven [Alzate] and Solly in the wide areas. Martin Montoya was on a yellow card and we just felt like we wanted to try and attack with a bit more width,” he continued.
“If you’re going to try and do that then it made sense to have Glenn in the box, it was a mixture of a few tactical tweaks and the fact that we did have a few of the lads on yellow cards.”
Potter came up against one of his former players at the weekend in Daniel James, and the boss praised both the forward’s talents and the performance of the home side.
“Dan has made great progress and I’m delighted for him, this time last year he was playing regularly for Swansea City. It just goes to show how quickly football changes, his sprinting ability is sensational and he’s so brave in repeating that within matches with the runs he makes.
“He’ll continue to get better in the final third, it’s a big step to go to a club like Manchester United but he looks like he’s doing it well, I’m really pleased for him. They were too good for us on the day, we tried hard but we didn’t play at the levels we know we’re capable of.
“Credit to Manchester United because they did stop us playing, so it’s a bit of both. Despite their dominance we still had a moment when we scored, but in the end the third goal ended it as a contest. If you asked the players they’d admit they didn’t play as well as they would have liked, but there’s two teams on the pitch and I felt our opposition did very well."