The Fosse Way

Which moment neatly summed up the current state of Leicester City?

Was it when Jeremy Monga, fresh off the bench, rinsed his full back with his first touch, only to cut the ball back to Boubakary Soumare and watch in horror as his teammate almost missed the ball entirely?

Was it the end of a lovely team move early in the first half, where Jordan Ayew flubbed a shot with the goal at his mercy? Or any number of attacks that ended with Patson Daka missing in some absurd manner?

Was it Luke Thomas, perhaps the weakest player in the entire division, taking a long throw that barely reached the penalty area? Or Harry Winks, a few weeks removed from self-isolating from his own fans, ending the game with the captain’s armband?

Maybe you prefer to look big picture at how far we’ve fallen. In that case, it could be the five minutes various men in gilets spent trying to fix the net at the “MKM Stadium”, only for the ref to just reach up and fix it himself. Or the game being delayed again midway through the second half after Hull subbed the wrong player off.

Whichever one you choose, they all point in the same direction. This was not a good night for Leicester City.

Marti’s madness

This was also not a good night for Marti Cifuentes. As well as the worst performance of his tenure, it was the first time that his decisions started to look like those of a man who doesn’t know what to do. There is a thin line between tinkering and flailing.

These midweek games are tricky, particularly when there are clearly players in the squad who aren’t fit enough to start three games a week. He also remains constrained by the options he has.

With that said, there is a real problem when the changes so drastically weaken the team for any Tuesday night game, if you also aren’t winning the weekend games where you play the strongest XI.

Following up the damp squib of a second half performance against Portsmouth by replacing Ricardo Pereira, Aaron Ramsey, Monga and Julian Carranza with Hamza Choudhury, Soumare, Ayew and Daka felt like a big step backwards. It shuffled Jordan James back into a position he looks less comfortable in, and wiped out Leicester’s creativity.

This was, apparently, both Choudhury and Daka’s 50th league start for Leicester, which is worth mentioning if only because it’s the sort of stat that makes you go “What?” on about 17 different levels.

The players restored to the line-up didn’t deliver a performance for the manager in the way that the random collection of midweek players used to do for Enzo Maresca. In fact, what they served up in the first 45 minutes looked like a Championship version of the worst days of Claude Puel or Brendan Rodgers. Meaningless possession followed by utter catastrophe every time they lost the ball.

Leicester went in at the break 2-0 down. At times it felt like it could have been five, like one of those old school Crystal Palace games where the other team has 20% possession and looks like scoring at will.

This is another problem with making changes that look like defensive moves: Soumare for Ramsey, Ayew for Monga, Choudhury for Ricardo. You better be good defensively. Leicester weren’t. They never are.

Fortunately, in the Championship, you don’t get punished as brutally as in the big league. Even then, Hull hit the post inside the first couple of minutes when they got in behind Choudhury with remarkable ease twice in the space of a few seconds.

Within five minutes, they were 1-0 up. Thomas giving the ball away in midfield and then being caught out of position for the resulting break. The actual goal had an air of classic Leicester tomfoolery about it, as the Hull striker Matt Crooks slipped running onto a cut back, a move that took four blue shirts out of the game and allowed Liam Millar to, of course, score his first goal for a year.

We have seen this weakness in transition before this season, most notably against Preston, who exposed it in brutal fashion. Hull must have been taking notes, as again and again they won the ball back and caught Leicester short-handed at the back. Every time we lost possession you feared the worst.

Soumare lost it in midfield just before the half hour, and one pass cut through the entire back line to put Millar in again, only for him to blaze over after some good recovery work from Wout Faes(!). A couple of minutes later Faes rediscovered himself and lost the ball 60 yards up field, and from the resulting breakaway Jakub Stolarcyzk decided to palm the ball straight back to Hull rather than give up a corner.

The second phase of this attack saw Hull – Hull! Hull City! – waltz past the entire right side of Leicester’s defence like prime Barcelona and put in a cross for an unmarked Joe Gelhardt to tap in at the back post.

The trademark screamer

Cifuentes had to make changes at half time and he did so, bringing Ramsey and Monga on for James and Daka.

This is the second time he’s sacrificed James at half time, and keeping Soumare on instead of him was a baffling decision. Especially as Soumare – one career goal – spent the last third of the game plodding around in an attacking #8 role.

Cifuentes managed to get booked at some point, and we can only assume the ref had simply had enough of the sight of Soumare – again, one career goal, and no, one other goal for Lille B listed on Wikipedia doesn’t count – in the final third.

Despite this, the second half was at least better than the first. Having two genuine wingers on along with Ramsey behind the striker made it much more difficult for Hull to double or triple up on Abdul Fatawu, and he had more influence as a result. Monga had some of his trademark runs, while Ramsey has been very impressive in the games since his suspension.

Movement and a nose for goal are skills that are difficult to quantify but you know them when you see them. Ramsey has both, like James does. With him on, suddenly chances materialised. Fatawu put one brilliant cross on his head that he probably should have done better with, and later on he pounced on an Ayew knock-down to have a shot well blocked in the six yard box.

In between, he pulled a goal back with the latest entrant to what is going to be a tasty goal of the season compilation.

Jannik Vestergaard played the trademark Big Jan Ball, through the lines and direct to the feet of the striker. Ayew did his trademark thing where you aren’t quite sure if he’s holding the ball up or he’s glitched and fallen asleep, then laid it off to Ramsey who stuck it in, brilliantly, off the crossbar with almost no backlift.

Leicester pinned Hull in well for the final stages of the game, though it’s hard to say whether that was as a result of tremendous intensity or the opponent tiring and shutting up shop. It is definitely true that Hull were less dangerous in transition after half time and they were almost made to pay for dropping so deep.

Fatawu went on a brilliant run in the first minute of injury time and cut the ball back to Captain, Leader, Legend Winks 25 yards from goal. His bending effort crashed off the bar and bounced to safety.

By this point, Leicester had a very strange team on the pitch, another example of the way this game felt like it got away from Cifuentes. He was randomly wasting substitutions to bring on Victor Kristiansen – sadly devoid of sexy chin strap – and Caleb Okoli in place of other defenders while Soumare and Ayew lumbered around in undefined attacking positions.

Those sorts of moves also bring back into focus how he is not using the academy as he could be. With Stephy Mavididi and Bobby De Cordova Reid injured, this was the perfect opportunity to promote a younger player into the squad – and not Silko Thomas, who is not one of the Good Ones.

Leicester’s age group teams score a lot of goals, only this week Jake Evans signed a professional contract with the club. Cifuentes is going to eventually have to realise that patience is going to run out very quickly if we are forced to keep watching Soumare, Ayew, and Daka again every week.

Schrodinger’s Leicester

Two things can be true at the same time. This was a very bad result which makes the string of draws before it look a lot worse, and the sky isn’t falling in yet.

Maybe Coventry are the outstanding team in the division, but maybe there just isn’t one this year. The two other relegated sides have started even worse than Leicester, and we are only a couple of points outside the top three. The fixture list never looks that intimidating and there’s an absolute age to go.

There are parts of the Leicester team coming into focus. Winks, James, Fatawu, Ramsey, and Monga are an exciting group and are surely the first-choice five in midfield now. They look capable of producing goals. You can imagine a world in which any one of them are winning awards at the end of the season.

Then there are times where this does look like a good team. Not necessarily a great team, but at least a side that can finish in the top six. Plus there’s the prospect of some younger players eventually getting a game to look forward to.

Against that, obviously, is that things aren’t really improving. This season so far has felt like one long high-wire act, the sort of act where you’re pretty sure you saw that same guy sink 10 pints in the pub earlier on. It might look like he knows what he’s doing to everyone else, but you know how this story ends.

Leicester have shown that they are good enough to create a few moments of magic each week. They can brute force goals out of nowhere, when they get into a rhythm they can look impressive to an outsider.

The problem is that opponents keep realising how fragile this is. There’s a moment where they suddenly notice this is all much easier than they expected. If they play the game and not the name, there’s plenty there for them.

Cifuentes needs to find a way to make this team more resilient. He’s made noises about it and pointed to late goals, but resilience is as much about the ability to grind out results as it is about recovering bad situations. You can’t be this vulnerable defensively if you also can’t score enough goals. That’s not going to work.

At least with the Championship, the wheel keeps turning. There’s always the next game, and the next one, and the next one after that.