The Fosse Way

Portsmouth, Hull, Millwall. A trilogy to stand alongside the Godfather and the Lord of the Rings as one of the great pillars of cinematic entertainment.

The three opponents Leicester have played over the last seven days are the Championship in its purest form. So much about these games feels like taking a trip to your local village fete after spending a decade at Disneyland.

All three have rolled up with squads of players you’ve never heard of. All three feel like reality slapping you across the face. And all three have taken points off the mighty Leicester City.

All these unknown players, amassed at vastly less expense than our own merry band, keep playing us off the park.

Winning the first quarter

Marti Cifuentes reacted to Tuesday night’s debacle by picking a side that looks more or less like his first choice XI: back came Ricardo Pereira, Aaron Ramsey, and Jeremy Monga, while Caleb Okoli came in for Wout Faes for some extra physicality in defence.

For the first 15 minutes it looked like we really were going to get a reaction to the midweek disappointment. The combination of Ramsey, Monga, Jordan James, and Abdul Fatawu caused plenty of problems with their movement, with Ramsey in particular looking a genuine threat.

He had the first – of very few – shots on target, and linked up with Fatawu to put in a brilliant cross from the right into the exact spot a competent Leicester City striker would have been, all in the first 10 minutes. Fatawu himself had a shot blocked and then a half-chance a few minutes later, only to make a mess of a dropping ball at the back post from a recycled corner.

At which point, Leicester went to sleep for the rest of the game.

Yikes, part I

Millwall, for all their good start to the season, are essentially a generic Championship outfit. They have two massive centre backs, a target man up front, one quality winger and they’re going to get stuck into you.

This is not materially different to Preston or Hull, both of whom have beaten Leicester with the same approach, which was to just kick the ball down their right wing over and over again until they scored.

After Leicester’s bright start, Millwall started to assert themselves on the game. The flip-side of Leicester’s nippy, mobile midfield is that lacks any kind of physical strength. They gradually got forced back, conceding set pieces and throw ins that broke up the game and allowed Millwall to take control.

This has been a pattern for a long time now, where when they’re under pressure Leicester seem to completely lose the ability to break out of it. We might lack physicality but we should be able to beat you on the ground. Yet the passing is too slow and cautious, and with nothing up front there’s no out-ball to get the team up the pitch.

Jordan Ayew had won the striker tombola for this game, and all he offers is the ability to win a free kick to ease the pressure. With a lenient referee, even this didn’t work, so the team was pinned back. Like a good senior pro, showing leadership to those around him, Ayew began to lose his head. As did Ricardo, who managed to get booked for dissent.

Every single attack during this first half came down Leicester’s left hand side. If you were being generous, you’d say that this is where Millwall’s best player – Femi Azeez – was playing, and Monga doesn’t provide as much support to his full back as someone like Stephy Mavididi does.

We are not going to be generous. Teams keep doing this because Luke Thomas is dreadful. He has been having a terrible season so far, where he’s seamlessly stepped up into the James Justin role of somehow being at fault for every goal Leicester concede, yet this was the nadir.

Azeez spent 61 minutes destroying Leicester’s left back, at which point he had to be taken off for his own protection. Azeez’s playing style resembles that of a less explosive Abdul Fatawu, but he didn’t need to be explosive here. He kept running at Thomas, exploiting his positioning to get in behind, and totally dominating him in every aspect of the game.

The goal that turned out to be the winner was one of the worst goals you are ever going to concede at this level. On the stroke of half time, Thomas gave a masterclass in how not to defend a long ball. He got isolated against Azeez, let it bounce, got caught the wrong side, and then wasn’t strong enough to recover as the Millwall man took it down and knocked it over Jakub Stolarczyk.

Things deteriorated rapidly in the second half. In the final reckoning, Millwall had eight shots and Azeez took six of them, he scored the only goal, and he nicked the ball off Thomas in the lead up to winning the penalty – given away by Harry Winks with a foul that seemed to happen in slow motion and then saved by Stolarcyzk.

Even that doesn’t fully hammer home how much of a blender he put Thomas in. Some of his teammates were visibly frustrated: Winks had a furious reaction to the goal, arms waving in rage as he asked what on earth was going on. Cifuentes really did have no choice other than to take Thomas off, but the manager’s decision-making went off the rails at that point as well.

Yikes, part II

It’s starting to feel like Cifuentes is being swallowed up by the morass of a playing squad he inherited. Rather than becoming more sure of his best team and the players he trusts as the season goes on, the opposite is true.

The only glimmers of hope are the new faces. Ramsey and James have only played a couple of games together, yet Leicester look alarmingly reliant on them to offer any attacking threat at all. James kept chugging on to the end, producing one opportunity very late on with a lung-busting run up the right wing and putting a cross on Patson Daka’s head, with predictable results.

Ramsey, by that stage, was long gone. A minute into the second half Leicester were breaking forward in numbers when his hamstring went, putting him out of action for the rest of the game and, presumably, the foreseeable future.

Without him in the number 10 role, the team couldn’t threaten Millwall’s back line at all. Julian Carranza, Ramsey’s replacement, produced an acrobatic bicycle kick that went over the bar, while Ayew lumbered a shot wide of the far post from distance. That was it.

It’s easy to criticise a manager’s substitutions after the fact. Cifuentes was dealt a difficult hand with Ramsey’s injury and Thomas’s incompetence, and clearly you have to take risks when you’re chasing the game. That said, the team Leicester had on the pitch at the end reeked of blind panic.

Wout Faes replaced Thomas at left back and then went into a back three. Silko Thomas replaced Monga and played left wing, then swapped to the right. Fatawu swapped from right to left for no obvious reason. Stephy Mavididi played an undefined central role, one that put him in the exact same place as Carranza.

There is no chance Leicester have ever practiced with that group of players playing those positions. If you were being extremely kind, you might describe it as a 3-4-3. In reality it was more like three defenders, Winks and James in midfield, and then a messy splodge of people looking confused in front of them.

With Leicester’s current forward line, the only chance we have to score goals is to either score from distance or get it to feet in the box and hope for the best. With Fatawu playing as a conventional winger and James having to drift wide to provide any sort of width, the two biggest threats to do this were given no opportunity to influence the game at the end.

Where next?

Cifuentes has a huge week of preparation ahead of him. Seven days to try to reset before Blackburn at the King Power on Saturday, which kicks off another flurry of matches before the international break.

The positive to the last few games is that it should have finally brought some things home to him. You can’t trust the vast majority of this squad, they are saddled with years of failure. They going to bring you down, like they took down Brendan Rodgers and Dean Smith and Steve Cooper and Ruud van Nistelrooy.

If he’s going to succeed at Leicester, the only way it’s going to happen is by being the man responsible for bringing through a great generation of academy players. Building a team on youth buys you time because even in the difficult times you can see a better long term future.

In the Premier League, it might have been a reasonable argument to say that you can’t pick the kids. It’s much harder to make the same argument now. There’s less pressure, the league isn’t as good, and the established heads have messed it all up.

Blackburn will be a big test of how much Cifuentes has taken this to heart. With Thomas having made himself almost unpickable and Ramsey injured, there are two vacancies in the team.

Are you going to pick Victor Kristiansen and Boubakary Soumare? Or are you going to pick Olabade Aluko and Louis Page, both of whom started an U21 win on Saturday? Jake Evans played as well, Chris Popov scored. Something none of the first team strikers are doing.

This feels like an inflection point, for manager and club. Something has to give now. Leicester cannot normalise being mid-table in the Championship, it’s a long way back from there. Either we take a brave step into the next generation, or we keep putting that off and reap the consequences.

One bad week can happen. Follow this with another one then the manager is in trouble. The Foxes are now eight points from second place and eight points from the relegation zone. Which one is it going to be, Marti?