As you roam around Hyrule in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you often gather up food and other ingredients that combine to produce meals.
When you’ve collected enough apples and herbs and monster parts, you settle down by the campfire and toss them into the pot, at which point the ingredients sizzle together into something useful.
Occasionally, however, you go through this rigamarole and try to combine ingredients that don’t go together. You might lob in a radish and an eyeball, or try to sprinkle a bit of seasoning on some lizard guts. Attempting this results in something called “dubious food”.
At Deepdale on Saturday afternoon, Leicester City served up a prime example of dubious food. A bunch of theoretically useful ingredients combined to produce a horrific splodge of a performance that made everyone involved feel a bit sick.
Martí Cifuentes had not really been introduced to the real Leicester before this. He has been enjoying a sort of fake normalcy. There was a pre-season tour and a bunch of friendlies that appeared on the calendar at suspiciously short notice the day he arrived, a nice comfy opening day game at home, he even got to sign a player like a real club might do.
Reality tried to peek out during the first half last weekend, then showed a bit more skin as his charges contrived to lose to a League One team in the cup. But nothing can have prepared Martí for this trip back up north, when suddenly The Real Leicester City was looming up at him, the words ‘HA HA’ emblazoned on its forehead.
Whether this was the worst Leicester performance in recent memory is a difficult question to answer. Probably not, thanks to the fact Jeremy Monga exists.
For a brief, 15 minute period, he took over the game. What had been a completely dismal performance was suddenly enlivened. He tormented his full back, wriggling through impossible spaces, and launched a move that saw Abdul Fatawu brilliantly denied by Daniel Iversen in goal for Preston.
A minute or so later, he received the ball again and decided to cut inside. He left one defender on the floor and then drilled the ball past Iversen at the near post for his first professional goal, becoming the youngest ever Championship goalscorer – breaking Jude Bellingham’s record – in the process.
For whatever else this game produced, it did produce this truly memorable moment. Monga is ridiculously good for a 16 year old. Across the first three games of the season he has proven himself a legitimate threat at this level, against players far more experienced and physically developed.
The problem for Monga and for Leicester is everyone else he has to share a pitch with.
For a long time now, Leicester City have been incredibly easy to play against. If you prepare a bit and execute a simple game plan, you will win.
So it was that Preston did not need a particularly smart or sophisticated approach to win this game. They turned up with a fairly simple idea: kick the ball behind Leicester’s defenders, then run past them and score.
Inside the first ten minutes this bore fruit. A straight pass up the line took Luke Thomas out of the game and prompted Jakub Stolarcyzk to come careening out of his area with delusions of grandeur. Alfie Devine knocked it past him and finished well from a tight angle to put Preston ahead.
So the pattern was set. Preston would sit back, largely untroubled by Leicester’s possession, then break by playing balls quickly into the channels. This plan exploited both the lack of pace and sheer incompetence of Thomas, Jannik Vestergaard, and James Justin continuously throughout the game.
A few minutes after taking the lead, another ball into the right channel turned the defence around, and Devine squared to an unmarked Milutin Osmajić, who promptly blew his first chance of the afternoon with an enormous air shot.
This happened again and again. It’s a cliché to say that Preston ‘wanted it more’, and to some extent their success relied on the fact that Osmajić was just faster than Leicester’s back line, but the number of times they beat blue shirts to the ball was embarrassing.
Two of the most egregious examples came in the second half. Leicester simply could not cope with the most basic of forward lines: one big guy, one fast guy. An Iversen goal kick blew Leicester’s defence apart, was flicked on by Michael Smith (the Big Lad) and resulted in Thomas clumsily fouling Osmajić (the Fast Lad) on the edge of the area. The resulting free kick went mercifully wide.
Next, Justin completely failed to deal with a bouncing ball and was outmuscled by Thierry Small, who put a cross on a plate for Osmajić again, who missed again. Immediately afterwards, Justin put virtually the same ball out for a corner under no pressure.
The fact Justin not only played this game but captained the side, despite strong rumours linking him with a move to Leeds, neatly sums up the problem facing Cifuentes, and the one that has faced every manager since Brendan Rodgers started demanding a squad refresh.
Too many of the squad are not fully committed to the cause, or are coasting on big money. And the lack of transfer activity means they are usually rewarded for this with a nailed-on place in the starting XI.
Justin has played poorly for over a year, may well be on the brink of leaving the club, and is somehow captain. Not only that, but Cifuentes’ tactics allow him incredible freedom. At various points in the first half he appeared almost up front, roaming around the left side of Preston’s penalty area.
Maybe that would work if Justin was Ricardo Pereira, and maybe the plan is designed for him. But he isn’t. So his mid-game wanderings serve to leave the defence exposed while offering no real attacking threat, and ensuring Fatawu has no support whatsoever when defenders double up against him.
Elsewhere, Harry Winks threw a strop – again – by disappearing down the tunnel at full time rather than applauding the fans with the rest of the team. Yet he pretty much has to start each game because Oliver Skipp has been dismal and there are no other options.
On Saturday morning, news broke from some heavy-hitting sources – most notably David Ornstein of the Athletic – that Bilal El Khannouss is firmly in Crystal Palace’s sights. He started regardless, was utterly anonymous for 45 minutes, and was hooked at half time. It’s a mess.
Cifuentes needs to start making tough decisions. It might not be realistic for him to suddenly throw in every academy product, but the same players keep doing the same things and this is not going to suddenly change.
He has at least been proactive in his substitutes, and that was again the case here. Patson Daka came on for El Khannouss at the break, then Monga and another fan favourite, Wout Faes, were introduced before the hour.
These changes helped – Jordan Ayew had been so immobile in the #9 role that there was a danger he was going to leave a dent in the centre of the pitch about 35 yards from Preston’s goal – but they also inadvertently led to the winner.
Like against Sheffield Wednesday last weekend, Cifuentes has no interest in settling for the draw, and Faes showed intent in pressing incredibly high to try to win the ball back on the edge of Preston’s box. Eventually the ball broke to Winks who, rather than playing Monga in, lost it in a melee of players.
As Preston broke down, it quickly became apparent Leicester had totally overcommitted. The last line of defence in the vacant right channel was Boubakary Soumare. A few seconds later, Osmajić put an excellent Small cross past Stolarcyzk to restore the lead.
There was still time even after that for the Montenegrin to miss another chance, after – you guessed it – a long ball in behind Vestergaard set him clear on the goalkeeper. Stolarcyzk denied him, but it was too late to redeem his earlier mistake.
Sometimes the right approach is to take a step back and write off a bad performance as just that and nothing more. In a 46 game season, you are going to lose occasionally.
This, on the other hand, was one of those results that needs to produce a reaction. The problem is not so much that it was a terrible performance – which it was – but that it was the same sort of terrible performance as we keep seeing from this group of players.
We have tried changing the manager, changing the combination of players, we’ve even changed divisions to make it easier. And it’s still the same. The only person who has managed to get a tune out of the squad in the last four years is Enzo Maresca.
Maresca may simply be a brilliant motivator, but he also benefitted from the fact he bought well and strengthened key, specific positions in his team. Cifuentes has not had that opportunity and this sort of display is going to keep happening until he does.
It’s worth pausing on how much worse the team is than the one Maresca put together. Almost two years ago, Leicester beat Cardiff 2-1 at the King Power. Compare the side then to the one this weekend, and the difference is stark.
If we exclude Wanya Marcal, who would subsequently be replaced by Fatawu, then we have swapped Mads Hermansen, Ricardo, Calum Doyle, Wilfred Ndidi, Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, and Kelechi Iheanacho for Stolarcyzk, Justin, Thomas, Soumare, El-Khannouss, and Ayew, downgrades across the board.
Ricardo may come back, but the others won’t. The benefit to this defeat is it’s happened so early in the season that there is still time to rectify the problems in the squad.
The manager at least had the air of a man who understands this. After the game, he spoke about being “very aware of the task I’ve got in my hands” and, rather more intriguingly, how he understands “the dynamic of the team” at the moment.
He also reiterated his commitment to building a team we all want to see. The real question is whether the rest of the club shares that commitment, and how they’re going to help him achieve it.
The Fosse Way 
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