The Fosse Way

Some wins are bigger than others. This was a win that felt like it could have huge implications for the rest of the season.

Would Marti Cifuentes have survived defeat to a team who had accumulated zero points from eight games at home prior to this weekend?

We will never know. What we do know is that once Norwich took the lead, with just twenty minutes to go, this trip to East Anglia became a massively pressurised situation. If it wasn’t win or bust, it was win or very nearly bust.

Throughout the whole season so far there has been a sort of twin reality. One, which you find in various WhatsApp groups and forums and sometimes in the comments, is that the players don’t care and aren’t trying. The second, slightly inconvenient version of events is the fact the players do sort of look like they are trying, and the celebrations that greet wins suggest that this is a group who are doing more than going through the motions.

What is real is that, trying or not, these players have no business being 17th in the table, where they would have been had the game finished after 70 minutes.

Fortunately, of course, games are not 70 minutes long. And the team that played those crucial last 20 minutes reacted extremely well to a difficult situation. We don’t need to pretend Norwich are a good side, but it’s very easy to imagine a world where Leicester panicked when they found themselves in that position.

That has happened again and again in both recent relegation seasons. It also happened against Millwall a fortnight ago, when Cifuentes made a sequence of baffling substitutions and effectively neutered his team’s chances of getting back into the game. This was an easier opponent but a more difficult situation, because of the reality that he may have been sacked if they didn’t score. And both the manager and players handled the end of the game superbly.

Cifuentes deserves a lot of credit for not overdoing the changes this time. He had four subs available at 1-0 down and chose to only use two of them. He left Jeremy Monga and Julian Carranza on the bench, choosing to trust those already on the pitch to turn things around. Previously, he has tried to throw the kitchen sink at getting back into it, so you end up with a chaotic mess of a team getting in each other’s way.

The two changes he did make were to introduce Stephy Mavididi and Bobby De Cordova Reid. Neither player is all that popular, but they made a huge difference. Mavididi doesn’t get much credit for how hard he works, and his pressing and tracking back allowed Leicester to sustain pressure at the end of the game and keep Norwich penned in. He also provided balance to the attack, which up until his arrival had essentially had no left side to it at all.

The real difference-maker though was De Cordova Reid, who is one of the few players at the club who doesn’t appear to be allergic to the goal. As soon as he came on you could see how much the team needs someone to offer creativity in the middle of the park. Jordan James in that central attacking role provides a lot of running, particularly into the channels, but he doesn’t have the vision or the passing range to pick defences apart. De Cordova Reid does, and much more than Jordan Ayew he looks like the stereotypical aging Premier League player who can contribute at this level.

His most immediate impact was to equalise. Within about a minute of coming on, he was lurking on the edge of the area to chest down a Patson Daka header and calmly hammer it into the far corner. From that moment on the game felt there for the taking, as Norwich had no plan to do anything other than cling on for a 1-0 victory.

Leicester did an excellent job of punishing them. Even before the substitutions, they had reacted very well to going behind. Abdul Fatawu had a shot well saved, then James got in on the goalkeeper but he let the chance slip away with a pretty average finish, Daka had a turn and shot blocked in the box.

At 1-1 the chances continued to come. The most glaring of which fell to Fatawu after some lovely build-up play that saw James come inside from the left and pass square to De Cordova Reid, who played a brilliant through ball behind the Norwich defence. It was a perfect chance for Fatawu, arriving in off the right on his left foot, and he made a total mess of it, putting it tamely over the bar.

Fortunately, he redeemed himself a few minutes later as he played a crucial part in the winning goal. De Cordova Reid was heavily involved again, playing a nice give and go with Fatawu down the right, for the latter to put in a superb cross onto James’ head. This was one of those supremely satisfying headers, the midfielder arriving late into the box and rising unmarked to nod the ball home.

At this point, blue shirts went tearing off in all directions. Some went with James, many others ran straight to Fatawu to give him credit for the assist. It was not the reaction of a disunited team.

Leicester saw the game out without incident after that, and the final whistle was greeted with a combination of joy and relief, as you might expect.

We may never know whether this turnaround actually did save Cifuentes’ job, whether the club is fully behind him, or whether the head honcho is so asleep at the wheel he doesn’t know what division we’re in. Either way, we were in desperate need of a result like this. It was probably better to win by going behind and then turning on the jets than via a scrappy 1-0.

Middlesbrough in the week looked set to be like that for a long time, and it was the sort of performance that offered no suggestion that things might get better. For all that results are the most important thing, you also need a story to believe in. You need to be able to look at the current situation and imagine ways in which this team could turn into one that threatens the promotion race in March and April.

Parts of this performance did offer some hope that there might be a decent attacking unit emerging out of deep hibernation. James and Fatawu combined well throughout the game, creating overloads down the right wing that Norwich struggled to cope with. Fatawu had a number of shots cutting in off the right, usually facilitated by James overlapping to drag defenders away. James himself had one excellent run that ended with him cutting it back into a glorious position, where zero Leicester City players had thought to place themselves.

Patson Daka also played well, at least in relative terms. He showed again why he is by far the best option up front, even if he never scores again. His mobility meant he almost caught the ‘keeper in possession twice, he had his touch in this game so the link-up play was reasonably good, and he gets into areas that the striker should be. Neither Jordan Ayew nor Julian Carranza seem to do that, which makes it difficult to create anything for anyone.

The fact he can’t score is obviously a problem, one that reared its head once in the first half. James had got in down the right again and put a fantastic cross into a dangerous area, where a striker of Daka’s size really should have buried the header. Instead he glanced it harmlessly wide. Beggars can’t be choosers, though, so he should get plenty more opportunities to stretch his goalless run.

When you add Aaron Ramsey and some Monga or Mavididi to the James-Fatawu-Daka axis, there’s the semblance of an attack that could do something. Especially if De Cordova Reid can contribute as well. There are at least a group of players who might score. Plus Daka.

There are a lot of ifs, buts, and maybes there. Which is why it’s hard to know which parts of the team to trust. It’s fair to point out that this was a pretty dreadful opponent, stuck towards the bottom of the table, and Leicester spent a very long time looking like a side of equivalent standard. For a long time we had about as many close-ups of Delia Smith (two) as touches in the Norwich box.

Some of the football towards the end of this game was very good, yet vast swathes of the match, just like all of the recent games, were terrible. Norwich, with – again – zero points at home this season, were on top for long stretches of the first half and the first 15 minutes or so of the second.

As much as there were promising moments of attacking play, there was no consistent pressure until Leicester were a goal down. It feels like Cifuentes has reacted to a poor run of form by getting more and more cautious, but he’s not being rewarded with defensive stability. Or, at least, Leicester give away so many sloppy goals that you can’t trust them to keep it tight for 90 minutes and you always need to score twice to win.

The goal Norwich scored was the sort of incredibly easy goal that the Foxes are good at conceding. Give the ball away out of nowhere and suddenly some bloke on a team who’ve barely scored for months is popping it in the bottom corner. Asmir Begovic was also called upon to make several good saves, one crucial one came right after Norwich had taken the lead, as Jannik Vestergaard lost a footrace to Oscar Schwartau that seemed to make time go backwards.

Whether a total inconsistency of selection at the back is the chicken or the egg of the current defensive woes is in the eye of the beholder. But on Saturday the shuffling of the back line, which saw Ricardo Pereira start at left back and Okoli at right back, and looked more like a line-up randomiser than a coherent plan. It’s nine games without a clean sheet now.

In fairness to Cifuentes, he’s not being helped by the seemingly endless run of injuries to players you actually want to see on the pitch. Following on from Ramsey’s hamstring a couple of weeks ago and Jakub Stolarczyk in midweek, this time it was Ben Nelson who was stretchered off in the first half after landing awkwardly on his ankle. His departure saw a total reshuffle of the back line; Ricardo swapping sides, Okoli going into the middle, and Vestergaard moving from right to left centre back as Luke Thomas came in on the left. Okoli later had to be replaced with a concussion, as the world keeps dragging Leicester City back to the equilibrium of having Vestergaard and Wout Faes at the heart of defence.

These are problems that look like they’re here to stay for a while. 15 games is long enough to trust that the evidence in front of us is real.

The massive impact of this result, though, is that it gives Cifuentes longer to work on them. The international break loomed as a possible point to make a change, instead it’s now two weeks to reset and look to build on a good result.

Leicester are only four points off the playoff spots, which sounds an awful lot better than sitting 16th or 17th in the table would have done. Stoke will be a very difficult visitor to the King Power in a fortnight’s time, now it’s a huge opportunity to catapult the Foxes back into the promotion mix.