The Fosse Way

Booed when his name is read out, booed after making mistakes, ironically cheered off the pitch when substituted, Boubakary Soumare’s hotly-anticipated redemption arc has – from a negative starting point – instead taken another downturn. As we reach pantomime season, Soumare is one of several Leicester City players who have slipped into the role of panto villain.

When the ball reached Soumare in the Leicester City penalty area on Saturday lunchtime, he could be forgiven for expecting a cry of “He’s behind you”.

No such help was forthcoming and the narrative was set. With no goalscorers at the other end of the pitch, these days the first defensive mistake is effectively a condemnation to defeat.

It was the same last season, when the sheer volume of mistakes and defeats first saw Leicester City’s home crowd turn on their players before the game had even started.

Marti Cifuentes has preached unity and, like a lot of things he’s said, it sounds good until you see how he’s trying to put it into practice. Saturday’s selection of Soumare brought back memories of Ruud van Nistelrooy casually selecting Danny Ward to face Wolves and then watching as our season quickly went up in flames.

There are subtle differences, of course, but the common thread was a manager’s inability to see just how much a player’s history can affect this crowd, the relationship between supporters and squad fragile following so much failure.

What is to be done? It’s true that big moments at both ends of the pitch could have put a different complexion on the current situation. If Stephy Mavididi had scored against Coventry. If Stephy Mavididi hadn’t tried to score in the first half against Blackburn. If Stephy Mavididi had scored in the second half against Blackburn.

Well, at least he’s getting in the positions.

It’s often felt that mistakes at one end and misses at the other aren’t things that managers can account for and fans shouldn’t read too much into. Sooner or later though, Leicester will have to cut them out in the absence of any great superiority – tight games magnify these mistakes and misses.

Mavididi’s two glorious spurned chances in front of the Kop stand out so much because our strikers haven’t even missed any sitters, let alone scored any goals.

It’s left to Cifuentes to find the right starting eleven but when you start 1-0 down in every game because it seems your left-back will be responsible for conceding a goal every game no matter which one you pick, it makes things tricky.

The fans’ clamour for young players has reached a crescendo at an ill-fitting point given that Louis Page and Jake Evans are both at the Under 17 World Cup. The call is instead for Olabade Aluko and Ben Nelson. We would at least find out if they’re capable of playing football without making a catastrophic error leading to a goal at least once every game. And if they’re not, we’re no worse off while they gain experience.

Yesterday saw the emergence of a Cifuentes quote in response to this clamour: 

“It’s always healthy to find this balance between not having a large squad because, in my opinion, that (having too many players) basically kills the opportunities for the academy players. I have a feeling that there are some young players that are knocking on the door and I want to give them more space. It’s something we need to consider.”

Good idea pal, maybe have a word with the manager.

In the meantime, the idea that senior players must be accommodated at all costs is killing this club.

Clearly in the case of Soumare, Cifuentes sees a six-foot-plus midfielder with unquestionable physical strength and no aptitude for goalscoring or creativity – and sees the kind of solid defensive midfielder this squad has lacked ever since Wilfred Ndidi went off the boil. It’s one of many clear gaps in the squad and the young players coming through aren’t close to filling it. But Soumare has long since lost the crowd and to accommodate him by moving Jordan James was simply wrong.

We begin to think: we’re the ones watching this every week but are we wrong?

At the weekend, a Leicester fan calling 606 to make some excellent points was met with the bizarre scenario whereby Chris Sutton read out the names of players on the bench for Saturday’s game as though they should be more involved, not less.

“I looked at the Leicester squad who were beaten [by] Blackburn and you see Ayew, Oliver Skipp, Patson Daka sitting on the bench. Decordova-Reid, Luke Thomas, Choudhury, Faes, Begovic. It’s amazing that for a Championship team… clearly they’re underperforming.”

Sutton has a lot of clubs to pretend to know something about so it’s not a huge surprise he’s overrating these players and gaslighting fans that they’ve ever achieved anything for us. But those inside the club have no such excuse. They’ve been watching the same stale performances as we have.

So fans feel misled by Cifuentes, who is coming across as weak with his refusal to freeze out senior players with a history of letting the team down.

Cifuentes was always going to be compared to Enzo Maresca. He hasn’t got anywhere near the same resources that Maresca had but the squad still has shadows of the one that went up in May last year – and the football feels like a watered-down version of Enzoball.

Would Maresca have blindly kept playing underperforming players without turning to youth? Would he have refrained from freezing players out if they weren’t doing what he wanted them to do – or weren’t capable of it in the first place? We know the answer to that, both from his time at Leicester and Chelsea.

Maresca was not afraid of dressing room disharmony for the greater good. He knew it was better for any problems to happen in the dressing room and in the media than on the pitch or in the stands. He made – and makes – difficult decisions and comes across as an elite manager as a result. 

In contrast, Cifuentes, at the moment anyway, doesn’t and he’s already approaching a crossroads in his relatively young managerial career. Show he’s capable of big decisions at a big club or quickly fade back into the margins.

It is important to acknowledge that there are Leicester fans who don’t think our young players are ready, that things won’t improve should they be selected. Perhaps so. But with a quarter of the season gone, there hasn’t been enough evidence that promotion would be any likelier by carrying on as we are. And the mysterious points deduction still looms, making supporters look down the league table rather than up in any case.

More youngsters? Three at the back? Two up front? Tonight is the time to at least try something different. Oh no it isn’t? Oh yes it is.