When it’s hard to know where to start, sometimes it’s better to start with the end: Marti Cifuentes leading his players over to the corner of the Kop and the East Stand to be met with a volley of verbal abuse and raised middle fingers – from those who bothered to stay until the end of yet another desperate excuse for a performance from this abject Leicester City team.
If that’s the right word for this randomly-assembled collection of individuals who earn money for playing football. It doesn’t feel like a team. It feels like a mess. The current situation is bringing back memories of the late 80s and the mid-2000s, previous times in my Leicester City-supporting life when this club resided in the bottom half of the second division.
To be fair to those players, they were on peanuts in relative terms. This lot are earning megabucks to play poorly, get booed off and either stay in the team next week or be replaced by someone who isn’t any better. Six different Leicester City managers have now selected Boubakary Soumare in a starting lineup.
If the team news was uninspiring then the bench looked like a police lineup. A rogue’s gallery. A who’s who of the worst signings and contract renewals Leicester have made in recent years. Well, some of the worst.
Fittingly after a pre-match downpour, they went onto the bench two by two. Please welcome down the £20million-plus flops! (Patson Daka, Oliver Skipp), the half-paced “experience”! (Jordan Ayew, Bobby Decordova-Reid), the failed Academy players still ticking along on lovely contracts! (Hamza Choudhury, Luke Thomas), Wout Faes! (Wout Faes). There was also Good Experience In The Dressing Room (Asmir Begovic) and Academy Player Selected At Random To Represent The Academy In Which Marti Cifuentes Is A Big Believer (Silko Thomas).
So we kind of needed the eleven on the pitch to do the business without having to resort to the bench.
This was another problem, which leads us to believe we might not have enough good players.
You feel for Jordan James, parachuted into this slow-motion catastrophe and still managing to look like an adequate Championship midfielder. You feel for Abdul Fatawu, who is at least both talented and trying hard even if he’s off-form and maybe trying too hard. And maybe you feel for Ricardo Pereira, who is still playing in the Premier League in a parallel universe where he never got seriously injured. Stolarczyk too, perhaps? But not many others. Their back stories are too tortured now.
When Cifuentes was urged to turn to the bench by one fan in SK1 who yelled: “Get him off!”, it was tempting to ask: “Which one?”
And when Cifuentes eventually did turn to the bench, one fan muttered that “Thomas is at sixes and sevens since he came on”, it was again tempting to ask: “Which one?”
This is an adjustment period for Leicester fans and, without wanting to end up like your average Notts Forest fan for much of the past three decades, it’s taking some time to adapt to our new reality. How many Blackburn players had you heard of before kick-off? Be honest (this sort of observation is never popular but it doesn’t make it any less true).
Of course, you’d take most of them now. And you wish you’d never heard of most of our players.
Blackburn are the kind of club that some Leicester fans were whispering ominously about many years ago when we were riding high in the top flight and competing in Europe on a semi-regular basis. The example of what lay ahead if things all went wrong.
The other non-big club to have won the Premier League, Blackburn haven’t been back in the big time since 2012. Despite rolling us over, they still feel a long way from it. And we now feel as far from featuring on Match of the Day as we have since we were in League One (once).
The team that condemned us to third tier football, Stoke, were the other club our fans regularly used to say we couldn’t let ourselves turn into. We’d swap places with them now in a heartbeat.
We’ve got Stoke at home later this month. They won 5-1 this weekend to go third. These are the teams we fear now. A team we beat 5-0 on their own patch as recently as *checks notes* last year. Such is Leicester’s decline within a decline. Playing in the Championship two seasons ago felt bad after what we’d witnessed in the preceding years. But this is much, much worse.
To quantify how much worse – Leicester made it one win in nine, still no home wins since August, two goals in the past four home games and – our personal favourite stat attack – one goal in 56 (fifty-six) games for club and country for Patson Daka with another exercise in futility.
If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry. And this was a spectacular effort at tragi-comedy from our glorious assembled cast. Stephy Mavididi standing offside and nodding in a Jannik Vestergaard header that might have gone in anyway. Soumare setting up Eidur Gudjohnsen’s son beautifully to put Blackburn in front. Julian Carranza’s best contribution of the afternoon being to leave the ball alone for Mavididi to pull off the miss of the season.
It was a great dummy from Carranza, the one time he was in the right place being the one time he decided not to touch the ball anyway. For all that Leicester were wretched in this game, they did actually put the ball into some good areas where a run-of-the-mill Championship striker would have positioned himself.
Carranza doesn’t look like a professional footballer, let alone an average second division striker. Whether the depth of his scouting report went any further than “once scored at the San Siro” is dubious. His positioning may be merely poor but his pace and strength more than make down for that. It’s hard to remember a less mobile player under the age of 30 or the height of six foot two or the weight of a small elephant or whatever excuses strikers can have for not being able to outpace generic Championship centre-backs.
The elephant in this room is that this team, this squad and this approach to football is a result of decisions made by Leicester City Football Club. By people who are still employed to make decisions at Leicester City Football Club. When you are Director of Football, how far down can the direction go until you start to think maybe you should think about resigning your position? But why would you, when you are getting paid huge amounts despite results being horrific for a sustained period of time?
And why should any of the myriad players in this first-choice eleven who fit into the same overpaid, undertalented category do any different either? If you can cope with thousands of people howling at your ineptitude week in week out, then you can pick up the pay packet at the end of the month and go back to your mansion in the countryside relieved that at least you don’t have to pay £50 to watch yourself play football.
This was a new low in an era of lows. Because as bad as last season was, we were conceding goals to players you’d heard of and losing every week in front of a global audience rather than being another sad footnote adrift in the wastelands of the EFL.
This is no better than when I first started shuffling into Filbert Street, watching us lose 1-0 at home to Port Vale. And that would be fine as that’s what can happen in football – if it wasn’t for the unlicensed crypto casino sponsor, the extortionate ticket and shirt prices, the same dross filling out the squad for years on end and, above all, the feeling that we’re the inconvenience here rather than the lifeblood of the club.
We are supporters, in name at least, but there are several players who have fundamentally lost the support of the home crowd through their own weighty back catalogue of mistakes or an inability to make it look like they’re putting in any effort.
If there were enough other players in the squad to ensure we didn’t have to play any of these no-hopers then you could blame Marti Cifuentes more. But the bench was a reminder, if any were needed, that this squad and this situation is why we need change higher up than Cifuentes and accountability for the decline.
Blackburn added a second goal, again through Eidur Gudjohnsen’s son, and saw out the game comfortably. They should have won by more and good luck to them. That’s now the third time in a row a Blackburn team has come to the King Power and outplayed us to win.
Meanwhile, we are left to ponder whether Wout Faes could play at left-back, Bobby Decordova-Reid is our new number ten and Filbert Fox is the answer up front.
The good news is: only two days to wait until we find out.
The Fosse Way 
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