The Fosse Way

You remember where you were for the triumphs but you also remember where you were for the calamities. I was walking out to Poolbeg Lighthouse to the east of Dublin on 1st February this year and the waves were crashing over the causeway and the clock on my phone showed 15:01 when I tapped my scores app, barely expecting Leicester City’s final visit to Goodison Park to have kicked off, and saw the number one next to Everton.

I was reminded of that afternoon when the team news came out for Saturday’s game against Coventry because the two centre-backs would be the same pair that Abdoulaye Doucoure waltzed between after 10.18 seconds seven months ago.

And that wasn’t even the worst goal we conceded that day.

Clearly, the Championship is a completely different proposition to the Premier League but this is now the third season in a row that fans would have assumed Jannik Vestergaard and Wout Faes wouldn’t be Leicester’s first-choice centre-backs and the third season in a row, it appears, that we will be proven wrong.

With Marti Cifuentes and his staff unable to switch off Caleb Okoli’s Random Pass Generator, it was time to reunite the two goalscorers from the opening day.

The dropping of Okoli at Championship level is the latest indictment of the 5 permanent signings Leicester have made at centre-back in the past 5 years: Vestergaard, Faes, Okoli, Conor Coady – last seen on the bench at Wrexham – and Harry Souttar. Four of those were signed while the club was in the Premier League. Two of them were signed to replace Wesley Fofana – Vestergaard a week after Fofana was seriously injured in pre-season in August 2021 and Faes a few days after Fofana left for Chelsea a year later.

At some point, Leicester’s recruitment team appear to have decided it was impossible to find a centre-back who could head it, pass it and run, so we’ve ended up cobbling together defences made up of people who can do one or two of those things and hoping that we’ve covered all three in total. 

Okoli is the best athlete of our current options but watching him try to play out from the back this season has been painful. Ben Nelson is the one who hasn’t disgraced himself in a Leicester shirt yet and so becomes the most palatable option for supporters but Cifuentes, for whatever reason, appears to have decided he isn’t ready yet. If Vestergaard is the first name on the teamsheet at centre-back then playing him with Nelson feels risky in terms of pace although not out of the question. 

So team selection has become a game of getting the grain across the river in a boat without leaving it alone with the fox: pick the wrong pairing and 10.18 seconds later the season is in ruins. Eventually you end up where you started. Back in the Championship. And that means Vestergaard and Faes again.

The thing is, as we saw on Saturday, that’s probably fine in this division. With so many players who fans have taken a dislike to and such little ability to move them on, there was always going to be an opportunity for an unforeseen redemption arc this season. Vestergaard’s on his third or fourth now and Faes – who began the campaign by berating his own supporters after scoring, despite it being unclear how many of them were booing him and how many had merely mispronounced his name in celebration – is surely ripe for one too.

Leicester fans have loved and hated both Vestergaard and Faes at various points throughout their time at the club. I think I love and hate both of them at the same time, the natural end product when you can’t differentiate between all the moments that have led us to this point. 

In Vestergaard’s case, the sumptuous passes that help us break the lines but also letting Harry Kane win that aerial duel in the 3-2 defeat to Tottenham in January 2022; towering headers like the one that eventually led to Harry Winks’s late winner at West Brom a couple of years ago but also bringing his dog to the training ground. 

In Faes’s case, it’s more complicated: even as we bore down on the Championship title in April last year, I vividly remember ranting during a home game about how much I detested him. Yet look back at our home results that month and you’ll see we won all four matches, scoring twelve times and conceding just three goals. As with many fans, this was more about his attitude, strolling around and looking complacent. Even if he can still be pretty effective in the second tier while affecting nonchalance.

As Cifuentes pursues a greater connection between the players and the supporters, one issue is that a lot of these players have been relegated twice in three seasons. At least Vestergaard and Faes, unlike Boubakary Soumare and Victor Kristiansen, have played a big part in a promotion during that period too. Even so, the club’s media team aren’t exactly quick to ask for a word from any of these players.

Centre-back is a position for captains, calm heads and cult heroes. Walshes and Wasilewskis. Footballers you can trust because they never give the impression they’re above giving their all. Players you can rely on. Players you can relate to.

That’s rarely been the case with Vestergaard or Faes, who have maintained a distance and been heard from more through interviews with newspapers in their home countries than via the official club channels.

Search “Vestergaard Leicester” on Google and the results are a crazy mishmash of a player on the verge of leaving numerous times, interspersed with talk of loving life at the club and determination to get promoted – all from different years, often with both examples within the same season.

Faes managed to achieve both in the same sentence in one interview last summer, telling a Belgian outlet that asked him about transfer speculation: “It would almost be a luxury problem because I feel very good at Leicester.”

Still, despite all of the ins and outs, the ups and downs and dogs, the return to Vestergaard and Faes on Saturday – plus the return of Ricardo Pereira and Harry Winks to the starting eleven – is the closest Leicester can get at the moment to stability. It looked like an Enzo team in lots of places, after a few weeks of poor performances as players not suited to passing football tried their best to mask their shortcomings. Vestergaard and Faes bossed an attack that had been scoring for fun and helped restrict their shooting to a few half-hearted potshots.

There’s work to do in our own final third but more pieces of the jigsaw are falling slowly into place. Admittedly, it’s helpful that the other two relegated teams are struggling even more than we are to assert our dominance. For now, it seems that where Jannik Vestergaard and Wout Faes are concerned, we must put aside our memories of Premier League performances and our ambitions upon a Premier League return.

The remarkable thing is that neither of them are even out of contract next summer.

Perhaps they’ll never leave.