The Fosse Way

The Hawthorns has been the scene of some great Leicester City moments over the years. That Jamie Vardy goal, that Harry Winks winner, that other Jamie Vardy goal, the fans in those seats in the corner seething wildly right on cue, season after season.

On Friday night we saw another entry into the pantheon. True to form for this Leicester City side, though, it was a slightly tepid, watered down version of what went before.

When Bobby De Cordova Reid contorted himself into position to meet Abdul Fatawu’s deep back-post cross, the resulting effort didn’t curve gloriously into the far corner, it didn’t fly like a thunderbolt past Joshua Griffiths in the Baggies’ goal. Instead it set off on a path towards a West Brom throw, until Nat Phillips managed to divert it into his own net.

Such is the way of Championship life, which sometimes has the air of turning the difficulty down on FIFA. In the Premier League, you blink for a second and Erling Haaland has volleyed one in from 40 yards. In the Championship, Josh Maja is hitting circle instead of square and ballooning shots over the bar from close range.

As a result, it’s difficult to work out if this Leicester team is any good. There are periods that look like progress, followed by periods of alarming regression. Made all the more confusing by the fact it’s not clear if the opposition are any good either.

Glimmers of hope

This game, helpfully, gave us a glimpse at both sides of the coin. The first half was probably Leicester’s best 45 minutes of the season, at least in terms of how they moved the ball.

We saw lots of positive passing, with Jannik Vestergaard in particular firing some direct passes forward into, and sometimes beyond, the front line. Harry Winks had plenty of the ball and dictated the tempo of the game, and there was more intent from Leicester than we sometimes see when the Foxes have a lot of possession.

Ricardo Pereira was playing a sort of free role from right back, coming inside to central midfield like he did under Enzo Maresca, but also getting forward into much more advanced positions. Jordan James is a much more mobile player than anyone else who’s played at #10 so far, and his movement helped create space for other players going forward.

Leicester got Jordan Ayew in behind inside five minutes to shoot wide, and came close to doing so again a couple more times. James had a shot deflected over after good work from Boubakary Soumare(!), while Stephy Mavididi had his best half of the season and caused plenty of problems, including a cross to the back post that was almost turned in by Ricardo.

Despite this largely positive display, there were two problems nagging at Marti Cifuentes’ side.

The first is that they were 1-0 down. Thanks to a goal that began with a lovely flick on the half way line and ended with Leicester defenders diving about to the sound of Benny Hill.

At home, Leicester’s defence has looked reasonably sound. On the road, it’s been a different story. Oxford and Preston both notched twice, while Charlton and West Brom should have done the same.

The defenders themselves are just too inconsistent. They do silly things. Only Vestergaard has an air of calmness to his defending, a calmness that emphatically does not extend to his actual personality, which seems permanently on the brink of an explosion.

Vestergaard himself pushed up to engage and was taken out of the game by a lovely flick around the corner. This is a risk of doing business and you have to accept it to some extent. Instead of covering for this mistake, however, the rest of the defence decided to wildly exacerbate it.

Wout Faes demonstrated the exact opposite of the right way to deal with a striker running at you by flopping to the ground in panic, then Soumare and Luke Thomas went careering into each other instead of, you know, tackling the guy with the ball.

Leicester are never going to have a genuinely good defence with this combination of players. These are the players that we have, though, so we have to make the best of it.

One way to do that would be to score a few goals, which brings us to the second problem.

This team is badly lacking a proper striker. Ayew is a perfectly average player but even at this level he doesn’t have any outstanding qualities. He’s not strong enough to beat defenders physically, he’s not quick enough to run beyond them, and he rarely shows enough raw individual skill to make up for it.

He’s also simply not an out-and-out striker, which means he lacks the sort of movement that puts him in position to give his teammates options and he’s not a threat in the air. This has the knock-on effect of making a lot of Mavididi and Abdul Fatawu’s work go to waste: how valuable is a cross that no one is going to get on the end of?

Leicester have played pretty well, at least in patches, against Sheffield Wednesday, Birmingham, Coventry and now West Brom. Of the five goals they have scored in those games, only one has come from an actual attacker. Defenders have bagged three and the other was an own goal.

Clouds of concern

Marti Cifuentes clearly understands this problem and he has proven himself far more proactive in changing things than most of his recent predecessors. So we saw Julian Carranza come on at half time for James. Unfortunately, what followed was probably the worst 45 minutes of the season.

In reality this particular substitution was a reasonable one that just didn’t work, but it shows one of the other problems with Ayew. He’s almost too average, so the manager is reluctant to take him off. You can always talk yourself into the fact he’s had a reasonable game, or in the magical power of his ability to win the odd free kick.

So it was that James seemed to be sacrificed simply because he was the easiest player to take off rather than because he was the right one. And as soon as he was out of there, Leicester’s attack completely disappeared.

It’s too early to make much of a judgement on Carranza, but it seems clear he’s not an out-and-out striker either. His goal record outside the MLS is dreadful and he has barely got into the penalty area in his brief appearances so far.

His main impact was to jack up the ridicul-o-meter, which soared to dangerous levels as the half went on.

In no particular order we saw:

Carranza booked for being fouled, Carranza get embroiled in a weird spat with Chris Mepham, Carranza dive in the box and get away with it, Jeremy Monga give himself a dead leg and a yellow card by taking a massive swan dive over a defender, Viktor Kristiansen appear wearing a sinister leather chin mask, the ref block a West Brom through ball that would’ve put them in on goal, and Hamza Choudhury get booked on the bench.

While all that was going on, West Brom spurned a series of increasingly gilt-edged chances to bury Leicester. One went into the side netting after Faes and Ayew watched a free kick bounce in the six yard box, then Faes redeemed himself with a terrific block on Maja after another counter.

The best opportunity was Maja’s second, after Jakub Stolarcyzk made a real hash of a simple save and pushed a free kick straight out in front of him – similar to what he did for the first Oxford goal – only for the Sunderland-til-I-die star to repay the favour with a dismal miss.

There was even space for Toby Collyer to miss another great chance in injury time before the equaliser came.

What does it all mean?

The reason to trust Cifuentes to turn these draws into wins is the way he has seemed to understand and react to the problems in front of him. It’s early in his tenure, yet he has shown himself prepared to change things that aren’t working.

On many levels, those changes didn’t work on Friday night, yet one of his substitutes forced the equaliser. It’s a strange quirk, because so many of the goalscorers have been defenders, but four of his subs have scored goals already this season, which obviously doesn’t include this one because it was ultimately classed as an own goal.

Bringing Ricardo and Winks into the team in place of Choudhury and Oliver Skipp also looks like it’s made a difference in the last couple of games. We should trust that he is going to vary up the attack to try to find a solution to the lack of goals.

At the same time, he’s clearly hampered by the squad he has. The late flurry of transfer activity means he at least has more options than he might have done, but it’s a strange old mix of players.

You feel like the ultimate problem remains the same as the last few years, that so many of them have been deemed not good enough for Leicester City before that it’s hard to have a huge amount of hope about them being good enough now.

When you start to list off the players who took part in this game, it’s incredible how many of them were at the club for the first relegation in 2022/23: Ricardo, Vestergaard, Faes, Choudhury, Daka, Thomas, Soumare, Kristiansen.

The last three were binned entirely by Maresca two years ago, while Choudhury and Daka were bit-part players. Add the fact that two of the new faces are Ayew and De Cordova Reid and it doesn’t suggest that this team has a massively high ceiling for improvement.

Maybe this would all be moot if – and it is obviously a big if – Cifuentes can uncover a goal threat amongst the random bits of detritus lying about at Seagrave. The lack of goals is the biggest issue; you can’t get promoted relying on your right back as the main threat, and goals hide a multitude of other sins.

In the fullness of time, maybe this wasn’t a bad result. Just like the draw with Coventry, and drawing with 10 men at Oxford. But sooner or later we are going to need to turn these draws into wins, and it’s not clear who’s going to score the goals to do that.