The first few rounds of the League Cup have an air of despair to them. They are the first Monday back after Christmas, the team away day.
Nothing good ever happens in these games. Every year you try to trick yourself into thinking that, this time, it might be alright. A chance for someone to prove themselves, an opportunity to see the youngsters.
This time, again, it felt different. Seven academy products in the starting XI, a huge opportunity for highly-rated prospects like Ben Nelson, Will Alves, and Jeremy Monga to start – the latter two for the first time in a Leicester shirt – a strong team on paper to build on the momentum from Sunday.
Then the reality hits. Wait, I’ve seen all this before.
It could be December 2022, when Leicester took on MK Dons and Luke Thomas, Wout Faes, and Boubakary Soumare all started, and Kasey McAteer and Patson Daka came off the bench. We could be at Kenilworth Road, September 2019, when Hamza Choudhury is in the team.
Thomas, in fact, has started all seven League Cup games against non-Premier League opposition going back to 2021. Eight players involved in this game featured in the victory over Tranmere a year ago. The Carabao never changes.
Leicester have a curious recent record in the League Cup overall. Going back to the start of the 2018 season, we have played 22 games in the competition and fully half of them have been draws. We’ve only won the match in regulation eight times.
And so it came to pass again, 22 men plus an awful lot of substitutes kicked the ball around for 90 minutes and we ended up in a penalty shootout.
What does it all mean?
1. You probably won’t win anything with kids
The most interesting thing about this game was the presence of so many younger players, with Nelson, Alves, and Monga in from the start and Louis Page, Olabade Aluko, and Silko Thomas on the bench.
This is one potential vision of what the actual Leicester squad might look like in a month’s time. Rumblings about potential exits have grown significantly louder over the last week, with Bilal El Khannouss, Abdul Fatawu, James Justin, and Harry Winks all linked to a move away. If they leave, the squad for this game is kind of just the squad we have to choose from.
It is easy to project how exciting and brilliant that team of young players might be in their stead. The reality, shown at the “Accu Stadium” against a group of people with “Hey Dude” emblazoned on their shirts, is that there are going to be a lot of growing pains.
Alves was completely anonymous in the 45 minutes he played, to the point where you start to worry if he, like Sammy Braybrooke, was mortally damaged by suffering such a serious injury so early in his career. Nelson was inconsistent at best and fortunate not to concede two penalties. Aluko and Thomas didn’t see the field.
Monga and Page came out of this game with more credit. It is remarkable how easily the former can beat professional players 1v1 at such a young age. But he is 16, he is a long way from being a consistent producer at this level. He still has the air of a player who is used to playing with people much worse than him, so he tries to do everything himself and his decisions in the final third are not the best.
The difference when Stephy Mavididi replaced him was dramatic and instant. He knows that you don’t need to beat the full back again and again and again. Sometimes the right decision is to square it, which he immediately did to set up Winks’ goal (of which more in a minute).
Some of the first team players who came on late showed most of the team up in terms of their energy in tracking back. Maybe this is a feature of them being the best players, maybe there’s something about these games that sinks them into a slow morass for the first 85 minutes, or maybe some people who started badly let themselves down.
Page, at least, has done himself the most favours. Where Alves looked small, fragile, and failed to get into the game at all, Page has size combined with a languid mobility and technical skill that meant he could roam around the pitch and cause problems.
His movement alone opened up space for other players in a way that Alves completely failed to do, he had one good chance to score himself, and was probably a main reason Leicester looked like a vaguely competent attacking team in the second half.
Based on his pre-season campaign and this run out, he has surely leapfrogged Alves in the pecking order now. If El Khannouss ends up leaving, he is primed for a lot of game time. Which may have the added benefit of getting him to sign a new contract.
2. It’s time to overhaul the midfield of discontent
The opposite is true of Oliver Skipp, who has been hooked within the hour twice in a row and must have played himself out of the team for Preston.
Aside from the raw fact that he played very badly, this game highlighted the lack of depth to Leicester’s midfield. Skipp and Soumare started together again, with Winks kept aside, presumably, for a weekend start. Beyond that there are no real options for these positions.
This is an even more pressing concern after Winks’ display of embarrassing pettiness in not celebrating the goal that put Leicester 2-1 up. He scored, put his head down, sulked and ran away from the away fans in front of him.
Over the last four days we have, incredibly, seen two separate players score and act like complete mugs over criticism they’ve received from the crowd. The one benefit to Winks’ histrionics is that it at least makes you respect Wout Faes actively trying to fight the fans more. At least he had the balls to face people down.
This whole situation is, obviously, ridiculous. Winks was front and centre of Enzo i miss u-gate and then effectively went on strike last season. Faes, at least, was actually booed in the game in which he lost his head and is being singled out, perhaps a little unfairly, for his performances and demeanour. Winks has no such excuse.
Marti Cifuentes spoke well before this game about the incident on Sunday, defending his player while also explaining how he was working to understand the culture and environment at the club in recent years. This is another example of the challenge he faces in trying to change that culture.
He has made one notable decision in not putting either player on the leadership committee. Leicester’s game of pass the captaincy has taken it from James Justin to Jannik Vestergaard to Hamza Choudhury to Stephy Mavididi. Under Enzo Maresca, Winks would certainly have been handed the job.
Maybe he will also come to the realisation that these players have to go. In many ways Winks’ non-celebration was a minor thing, but it actually spoke volumes of the dismal attitude that has been rampant at the club since the first relegation season. There is no sense of accountability or leadership from senior, experienced players. They act as if they’re untouchable, and they lose every week.
3. Dodgy defenders keep defending dodgily
The actual result of this match doesn’t mean a lot in the grand scheme of things. Leicester were not going to win this competition, and we could probably do without the extra games.
More so than the Sheffield Wednesday defeat, though, there were some concerning signs of defensive frailty, more similar to what we saw in pre-season than in the first Championship game.
Part of this may be an organisational thing, where the absence of Vestergaard is a major problem. Faes has never seemed particularly good at organising and leading a defence, while Nelson is obviously much too inexperienced for now.
Another problem is the simple fact that most of the defenders have been here for ages. There has been no injection of fresh blood, no overhaul of the defence. To some extent there is a limit to how much we can expect the same set of players to suddenly improve dramatically.
Whatever the reason, there were a huge number of sloppy mistakes and poor decisions that meant Leicester were fortunate to only concede twice.
Nelson is one player who can obviously improve. He had some good moments alongside a lot of iffy ones, the first penalty shout against him looked nailed on and he was sometimes guilty of trying to do way too much. At one point late on, Faes followed one of his attempts to overplay things by hammering the ball 80 yards up field with feeling.
As much as expected of Nelson, he’s played very little football to this point. 17 games for Oxford is the most he’s ever played in a season. He needs to be managed properly, which might mean more time alongside Vestergaard and less with Choudhury and Faes either side of him and Soumare in front.
Faes, to be fair, was largely fine. Choudhury, Soumare, and Stolarczyk, on the other hand, were all at fault at various points. Either in terms of giving the ball away in dreadful areas, which twice almost resulted in the ‘keeper being lobbed, not chasing back properly, or not closing down, which allowed Cameron Ashia to score Huddersfield’s second equaliser. Choudhury gave away a penalty with an incredibly stupid foul to boot.
We saw some of these sorts of antics in the last couple of friendlies against Koln and Fiorentina. They were punished in the first game and less so in the second, but this is something to watch. There are simultaneously too many defenders – three right backs, plus Vestergaard and Victor Kristiansen weren’t even in the squad – and not enough good ones.
The feeling after this defeat is different to previous cup exits. Cifuentes is still in the honeymoon period, and most people accept that penalties are a bit weird.
A year ago, Leicester actually beat Walsall on penalties but the team selection and performance was so dismal it put Steve Cooper on his path towards the end game.
This wasn’t like that. The new manager is clearly still learning about his players, he missed a chunk of pre-season and in many ways this was like an extra friendly. He approached it in the right way, by picking a team to win the game while also giving younger players a chance.
The problem he’s facing is that there are just so many players at the club who need to go. There has been so little turnover in recent years that these games are like a marker of a decline, where a few years ago this was basically an entirely second or even third-choice XI, now half of the players are in the first team.
Whether that is actually possible is an open question. There are few signs of any new faces coming in, but this must surely have brought home how certain areas of the team are in desperate need of reinforcements.
No one will remember much about this game in a few weeks time. If we lose too many players before the end of August, though, then it might be a harbinger of some challenging times ahead.
The Fosse Way 
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