The Fosse Way

After four successive draws, this was a Leicester team badly in need of a win before the international break.

Long runs of draws are scary. They’re like balancing on the edge of a cliff, where one wrong move sees your carefully crafted six-game unbeaten streak plummeting into the void of a five-game winless run.

Had results gone a different way, Marti Cifuentes’ side could have ended the day 10th in the Championship. Even relatively early in the season, the Saturday night under the lights at the King Power in a fortnight’s time would have been a seriously high-pressure occasion.

As it was, Leicester were never in any great danger of losing this game, but the possibility of yet another draw hung around until the final few minutes. At which point the Foxes turned the screw and put this poor Swansea team away.

Jordan James is good

The big news ahead of kick off was that the team we thought was a midweek rotation XI actually turns out to be the new first choice side. Ricardo Pereira’s return at right back was the only change from Tuesday night.

Given how many years we’ve spent watching managers who refuse to change anything, even after going months without scoring a goal, Cifuentes’ flexibility and willingness to adapt is a breath of fresh air.

This might be simply a result of him having a shortened pre-season, then a lot of uncertainty throughout August. Or it might be that he’s less dogmatic than his predecessors.

Either way, at least one of the shifts he’s made in the last week is an unmitigitated success. Dropping Jordan James back into a deeper starting position has freed him up to be much more involved and, slightly counterintuitively, made him more of a goal threat.

The one shot that found its way into the back of the net was a brilliant finish, though it came from a set piece that broke down. His corner was cleared, then recycled back out to him on the left edge of the Swansea area. He cut inside a few paces and whipped one into the far corner to give Leicester the lead.

That doesn’t do justice to his threat from open play, where he simply makes good runs into dangerous areas and has a natural eye for goal. He popped up on the edge of the area in the first half to shoot over the bar, then midway through the second he showed a fantastic combination of determination and skill to fashion a chance for himself, then drilled a left-footed shot off the bottom of the post.

James is a different type of player to Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, he doesn’t have quite the same ability to drive forward with the ball, but he looks like the replacement this team has needed for a year. He might also offer more in a defensive sense, as he looks like he can be trusted to play that deeper midfield role without leaving Leicester too open.

KDH got 12 goals and 14 assists two years ago, and you feel that James is going to need to match that goal record at least if this team is going to mount an automatic promotion challenge, because this is not a team blessed with an immense goal threat up front.

In fact, it might be the opposite; we are condemned to watch a collection of anti-forwards roam around forever as punishment for a decade with Jamie Vardy.

Cifuentes seems to have decided over the last week that Patson Daka is the best of a bad bunch up front. He is probably right, as Daka at least offers the team movement and an out-ball that a statuesque Jordan Ayew is unable to.

This helps Leicester vary up attacks, so the defenders have the option to go long into the channels to turn the defence around. Which was obviously part of the plan, as they played that ball at least five times in the first 10 minutes.

The other advantage to Daka is that he naturally stays higher up the pitch than Ayew, so there’s more space for the attacking midfielders to operate behind him.

At this point, you might be howling at the screen in frustration. Because the fact remains that Daka has one goal in 50 games for club and country and none in the last 33. A record so bad that you feel he should be demoted back to Sunday League and forced to work his way back up, like a golfer who loses his card.

You have to make a meal with the ingredients you have, though. On balance, the team looks better with him up front. Whether we can sustain a serious title challenge with no goals from any striker is a different question.

Without any cutting edge up front, Leicester are forced into these sorts of tight games where the margin for error is tiny. Once again, that nearly came back to bite us.

Championship things happen

For all the promising bits of play by James, and the couple of flashy runs from Jeremy Monga that are becoming his trademark, Leicester weren’t particularly threatening for long periods of this game.

For about half an hour either side of half time, Swansea had the upper hand, having spells of possession and forcing the odd half chance. Only once or twice did this spell any sort of genuine danger – Jakub Stolarcyzk was forced into one good save after Luke Thomas got caught out, then Thomas redeemed himself with an excellent block after Jannik Vestergaard gave the ball away on the edge of the box.

The thing is though that there’s an air of weirdness about the Championship (and, admittedly, about Leicester) that’s hard to define and which makes it difficult to ever feel like you’re going to coast to an easy win. We have the Sky-fuelled angle that it’s crazy and exciting and anything can happen. That’s sort of true; most of the league is separated by about five points so far.

Then there’s the chaotic, slightly village side of it. The bit where you know it when you see it. Suddenly you’re playing a team that has a car park instead of a stand behind the goal, or you flick on the highlights to see a Portsmouth defender pull his hamstring chasing back so the other team just takes the ball, runs through and scores.

This is aided by the refereeing, which adds to the whole vibe that anything could happen at a given moment. When you put that alongside the fact Leicester never put teams away, you reach the danger zone.

Swansea were handed a lifeline back into the match when Wout Faes made a perfectly good sliding tackle in his own area(!). In fact, he did doubly well because the ball deflected back off him and behind for a goal kick. After the sort of long pause that usually means a ref is priming themselves to get involved, David Webb pointed to the spot.

Such is the way of the world. It’s either this or VAR, and this is better. Adam Idah stroked home the equaliser, and we were staring at five draws in a row.

Abdul Fatawu is good

What happened instead was a huge credit to the atmosphere Cifuentes is building within the squad, because the team reacted extremely well to the setback. Leicester completely dominated the closing stages and could have won the game by a street in the end.

The immediate riposte came from Abdul Fatawu, who hadn’t done very much up to this point. In almost a mirror-image of James’ strike, he picked up the ball on the right wing, cut inside, and hammered a shot into the far corner to restore Leicester’s lead. Note, in particular, the celebrations, which looked like those of a united team.

A few minutes later he almost scored an even better one. After Swansea gave the ball away in midfield, Fatawu did what Fatawu does; set himself, then immediately shoot from the half way line. With Lawrence Vigoroux in the Swansea goal flailing underneath it, the ball cannoned back off the crossbar. The ‘keeper did at least save well from Daka on the rebound.

Unlike a few days ago against Wrexham, Leicester kept up the pressure rather than sitting on the lead and forced more chances in the final few minutes. Perhaps Cifuentes felt burnt by how poorly his substitutions worked a few days ago, as he only made one change – Aaron Ramsey for Bobby De Cordova Reid – before the final five minutes when the game was effectively over.

Trusting the team on the pitch worked in this instance, another example of the manager’s ability to adapt to the situation.

A moment of pure Championship helped deliver the crucial third goal that allowed everybody to relax. Swansea cleared a Thomas free kick out to the left edge of the area, where one of their own players inexplicably met the ball so sweetly with his knee that he fired a pinpoint cross back into the six yard area. A surprised Vestergaard was waiting to seal the three points.

At that stage Swansea effectively gave up. The crowd at the imaginatively named Swansea.com Stadium began to disappear, and Leicester had the chance to run up the score.

Fortunately for the Swans, ‘ruthless’ is very much not Julian Carranza’s middle name, so they got off lightly. The Argentine completely botched a one on one to make it 4-1, then glitched with the ball in the area, standing around idly as defenders wandered back to stop him doing anything with the rebound.

So the score remained 3-1, which at least reflected Leicester’s dominance in the closing stages even if that makes it seem a more comfortable win than it felt.

In an era where so many matches are on TV, these Saturday afternoon away games feel like the sort of ones that you just need to get in, win, and get out. This was particularly true this weekend, to head off any mumblings of discontent after a series of disappointing results.

Alan Sheehan, the Swansea manager formerly of this parish, was making noises going into this encounter about Leicester being the best team in the division. It certainly doesn’t feel like that at the moment, but no one has separated themselves yet and the goal is to be the best team in May, not October.

What it does feel like, at least, is we finally have a new signing to get excited about.