The Fosse Way

One step forward, two steps back is the story of this Leicester City season. After consecutive wins – and the reintegration of the owner into public life – had quieted some of the drama around the club, our boys delivered a 45 minutes so disastrous that Marti Cifuentes was scrambling for the white flag at half time.

Ahead of the game, this felt like a good test of how seriously to take Leicester’s mini-recovery. Those recent wins had taken put us on the brink of the playoffs, but every team in the league is on the brink of the playoffs. You can imagine West Brom fans, languishing in 17th, pepping themselves up with the argument that they’re only 5 points from the playoff spots.

Southampton though represented a real test. Since sacking Will Still, their results have started to match up to what the underlying numbers suggest about their quality. They were 4th in the Championship on expected goal difference before kick off, and they’d won three games on the bounce under Tonda Eckert.

There is also a difference between Southampton and the other top half teams we’ve played so far. A lot of good teams in this league are effective in a fairly limited way, an observation that usually riles up their supporters in the comments section. This is not (always) meant in a disparaging way: teams have different resources and are at different stages of their cycle.

As a result, this felt more of an examination than playing Stoke at home. There has felt like a ceiling on the worst case scenario in most games. We can lose to anyone, but it’ll probably be a relentless grind to a 1-0 defeat. This game was not like that. Southampton have greater quality across the team than virtually everyone else we have played and it turned out there was no ceiling on how bad it could get.

There was a period of time where it felt genuinely possible that we could get hit with the 9-0 hammer. Their two wingers, Leo Scienza and Tom Fellows, completely tore Leicester apart. Each of them was in acres of space every time they received the ball, and for about 10 minutes either side of half time the Foxes were in a state of mental collapse.

Between Bade Aluko’s red card in the 33rd minute, and Bobby De Cordova Reid replacing Jordan James in the 57th, Southampton had 10 shots, eight of which came from inside the box, one of which went in. They only had eight other shots across the other 70 minutes.

Of course, that red card is the major caveat to all this. Would Leicester have fallen apart in the same way with 11 men? Probably not, as they were a little unfortunate to be two goals down when it happened. Though it’s possible a thrashing was on the cards either way; every change in possession looked like an existential threat even with a full complement of players.

There’s also an element of this being a perfect storm for Leicester. Midweek rounds can be a little odd – there was an avalanche of goals across the division on Tuesday night – the first Southampton goal came from a soft free kick and was marginally offside, Gavin Bazunu made the first save of his career to deny Jordan James an instant equaliser, and Cifuentes was without his goalkeeper, all his left backs, Caleb Okoli, and effectively Ricardo Pereira, who is apparently physically incapable of playing twice a week.

All of which meant that there are plenty of excuses to be made if you want to make them. The back four who started the game were the only back four it was possible to pick. It is worth wondering if they had ever practiced together as a unit; how many training sessions did Leicester have between playing on Saturday afternoon and a Tuesday night away game? That is no way to go into one of the tougher games of the season.

This is one of those situations that, in the moment, you can’t do much about. The frustrating part is that there have been opportunities to give Aluko minutes and time with the first team before now. Neither he, nor the manager, needed to be in a situation like this.

All the times we complain about wasting bench spots and playing time on the likes of Victor Kristiansen, this is why. Aluko could have had five or six appearances off the bench by now. Kristiansen started at home to Blackburn and played half the game at home to Wrexham, two places that would have made for far easier inductions than away at Southampton.

If the senior centre backs at the heart of the defence were grizzled old hands, professionally competent enough to lead young players through a game, perhaps this would have been less of a problem. In reality, you can write your own punchline here.

Aluko’s mistake is obviously the banner headline. His second yellow was an extremely poor decision, born of inexperience and an element of panic as he was caught out by a nice interchange that got Fellows the wrong side of him. But it’s the two centre backs who hurt Leicester the most.

There was a point in this match at which Scienza danced into the box, cut in off the left wing, and came agonisingly close to scoring while Jannik Vestergaard slide tackled Wout Faes just off to the side. The result was well beyond doubt at that stage, and all it brought was a sense of disappointment that we had been denied the visual icing to a disasterclass cake.

All three of Southampton’s goals were entirely avoidable. Last season we made regular cutting, insightful, and generally amusing remarks about how the most dangerous place on the pitch was between James Justin and Faes. Now that has apparently evolved into just wherever Faes happens to be.

Our Belgian boy was the culprit for both set piece goals, which were about as simple as you are ever likely to see. Ryan Manning put two good crosses in, which shows the value of a competent set piece taker, and Taylor Harwood-Bellis walked past Faes to head them in. There’s an element of ‘you had one job’ to man-marking at dead ball situations. Do not let your guy walk past you and head the ball in. Alas.

Vestergaard, meanwhile, at least had the good sense to hide his mistake in the middle of an excellent Southampton breakaway move, so everyone would be too distracted by the scintillating football to notice. His decision to surge forward to try to win the ball back ended with him standing next to a bemused Harry Winks 30 yards from the opposition goal, and Southampton in a 3v1 breakaway against Faes, which may be akin to planting explosives in your own basement.

Such is the nature of football that you can look at that second goal as both high quality attacking play and shambolic defending. From a Leicester perspective, not only was Vestergaard’s decision-making terrible, but these are the sorts of goals that feel like a team-wide, organisational failure.

Abdul Fatawu was weak in losing the ball and then lay on the ground. Jordan James was busy appealing for a free kick instead of tracking back. The midfield in general lacks recovery speed – the Winks, James, Oliver Skipp trio are to some extent variants of the same person with the skill slider moved around – so the defence was left woefully short-handed given this was a fairly normal period of play.

There have been a lot of goals conceded in transition already this season. The lack of pace in defence makes them vulnerable to quick switches of play, and Cifuentes hasn’t come up with a way to protect against it.

Enzo Maresca would usually have three centre backs – the left back tucking in – as well as Winks and Ricardo behind the ball. They were still caught out occasionally, but not routinely like this team is. Cifuentes, like Steve Cooper, seems caught in a kind of Enzoball-lite, where he can’t impose his own ideas and so he’s stuck trying to recreate the moves of someone more talented than him.

This ambivalence, the caveats to this game, and the inconsistent results in general leave us in nowhere land with the manager. It’s perfectly reasonable to argue this was a bit of a fluke, the real collapse happened only after the red card, and Leicester were well in the game until then. We remain only a couple of points out of 6th.

At the same time, lots about this defeat don’t reflect well on him. Leicester had beaten Southampton four times in a row before this, and only one of those games was remotely close. Under Maresca, we looked vastly superior, we were the team who ruthlessly exploited a naïve opponent to destroy them on the counter attack.

This week those roles were reversed. Southampton looked better prepared. They got their key attacking players into dangerous areas with regularity, their wingers kept isolating our defenders in 1v1 situations. This was 3-0 going on 6-0, and his decision to try to get out of dodge without too much damage only worked because Southampton missed their chances and then declared after an hour.

Then there’s the fact that Southampton are a poster child for the impact changing managers can have. Under Still, the vibes were terrible and they were drifting in the bottom half. Since replacing him with Tonda Eckert, they’ve won four in a row and surged above Leicester.

The difference between the two clubs is that even under Still, Southampton’s underlying performances were pretty good. Leicester’s underlying stats are awful: 17th in the league according to expected goal difference before this game (18th afterwards). The defensive numbers, implausibly, are worse than the attacking ones.

Maybe this is not a team that can surge anywhere. Everyone knows the issues with the squad, and these are only exacerbated by the sort of injuries and suspensions that affected this game.

At the same time, is a drab mid-table team really the best we can expect? Is there really no way to organise this group into something that is interesting or exciting to watch? The job of a manager is to improve and get the best out of the tools at his disposal, not to deliver the absolute bare minimum they are capable of.

His job is also to manage the squad to avoid being in the sort of situation we were staring at half an hour into this game. That means introducing younger players before you’re backed into a corner and have no other choice, it means organising the team so that it isn’t so vulnerable to individual mistakes.

Despite a couple of good results before this, Sheffield United at the weekend now feels like a huge game again. Anything other than a win will pile the pressure on.