Leeds and Leicester will be hot favourites to go up

10:22am Friday 1st August 2008

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AS we look forward to the new season, we can begin to assess the strengths of the various clubs in League 1 and look at the ones we think will be in contention for promotion.

Leeds United are probably the biggest club to have played at this level for many years and will be everybody’s favourite to go up.

That puts immense pressure on their manager Gary McAllister to get things right.

Not only will supporters be expecting promotion, they will be expecting to have won the league by Christmas.

There will be some stern opposition for them.

It will be interesting to see how Leicester City fare under new manager Nigel Pearson.

I have known Nigel since he was a fresh-faced 18-year-old who joined us at Shrewsbury and made a very good career for himself.

In his coaching capacities he has had a lot of experience working under a variety of managers and was England under-19 coach.

After a brief caretaker role at Southampton, this will be his first full season in the job and Leicester themselves will expect to be among the front-runners so again there is a lot of pressure on him.

There will not quite be that problem for most of the other managers but, having said that, Colchester United have spent quite heavily on players and so, too, have Scunthorpe United. Although to be fair to Scunthorpe, they did sell well during the closed season, bringing in well over £1m for a striker.

So you would expect those sort of sides to occupy the leading positions.

As we look at the clubs who came up alongside us, there has been a big upheaval at MK Dons with the loss of Paul Ince.

We are told that they have hit a financial problem with Marks & Spencer pulling out of a big development which would have enabled them to complete the work on their ground.

They have taken on an untried manager with very limited experience of this level of football in Roberto di Matteo.

I would expect Peterborough to go well.

The crop of young players that they brought in during last season will stand them in good stead for the battle ahead.

And Stockport, despite having lost a key player in Liam Dickinson, have spent the money brought in for him in the accumulation of a new team.

You have the solid, experienced, hard-working sides like Tranmere Rovers.

I have a lot of time for their manager Ronnie Moore who has been a lower-league manager with some success and his sides are always difficult to play against.

Crewe Alexandra will be the same and possibly our opening-day opponents Leyton Orient will be as tough as they come.

But it would be a foolish man who put any of his money on anyone other than Leeds or Leicester to win it.