Rarely can any manager have experienced a result as embarrassing as this. Marti Cifuentes paid half of his own release clause to get out of Loftus Road a few months ago, such was the lure of managing the most dismal Leicester City side of recent memory. On his first return, his former club were out of sight by half time and in danger of turning this into a historic humiliation for much of the second half.
If going in at the break three goals down once a year is unfortunate, doing it seven times in a year feels like negligence. Cifuentes is not responsible for the crimes of his managerial ancestors, but he does have the dubious honour of overseeing three half time deficits of at least three goals in the last four weeks.
Even that, implausibly, is underselling how bad Leicester’s first half was. We didn’t concede three, we conceded four. It’s the first time Leicester have gone in at the break 4-0 down for four years.
As befits a club that holds Scrooge & Marley up as visionary people managers, that experience was also a festive treat. On Boxing Day 2021, Leicester found themselves 4-0 down after 25 minutes. That day, though, they were playing Manchester City. The previous time before that was against Manchester United.
This wasn’t Manchester City. It wasn’t even Manchester United. It was Queens Park Rangers running rampant. For years there have been people willing to defend almost anything this team serves up on the basis that things used to be worse, or because to expect anything better is an example of modern, entitled fandom.
As Leicester have slipped from losing in Europe to losing in the Premier League to losing in the Championship, the refrain that this is all just an unavoidable fact of life has remained the same. One wonders how many more teams need to embarrass this club before those people, and the ones in charge, face reality.
The final scoreline may ‘only’ read 4-1 but make no mistake, this was the worst result since Paulo Sousa took his team to Fratton Park in 2010. QPR could easily have finished with six or seven themselves, while Leicester failed to have a single shot of note until they were literally handed a penalty out of nowhere with the game long gone. They didn’t even hit the target with that.
Who exactly to blame for this debacle is up to you, as there’s plenty to go around. First in the dock may well be me, as whenever I’m put on match report duty this team delivers a performance laced with idiot juice. Preston, Millwall, Hull, Southampton, Sheffield United, Bristol City. All me. Sorry.
Aside from yours truly, the next most popular culprits are the players. There is no hiding from the fact they were a disaster almost to a man in this game. Beyond some brief, largely pointless efforts from the returning Jeremy Monga and Aaron Ramsey, and Silko Thomas doing quite a nice job of scoring into an open goal, there was nothing resembling a positive display from anyone.
Not to be mean to Silko, but if you see Silko Thomas before the 88th minute, something has gone horribly wrong. If you see Silko Thomas playing as the lone striker for half an hour of a professional football match, either a meteor has hit the training ground or we are 4-0 down. Silko Thomas is a positionless footballer. His main ability seems to be that he can run around more than whichever waste of space he comes on for, usually as part of a desperate scheme to try to avoid an even worse disaster than is currently unfolding. The fact we are seeing so much of him is a damning indictment of everyone else.
Along with the individual errors and general lack of competence that spreads through the team like wildfire, the larger problem is the way in which there seems to be no game awareness. Again and again Leicester play the sort of match the opposition want to play. Despite the vast experience in the team – Ricardo Pereira, Jannik Vestergaard, Bobby De Cordova Reid, Jordan Ayew have hundreds of games between them, and even the likes of Luke Thomas, Oliver Skipp, and Stephy Mavididi have played plenty – they never seem to be in charge.
Conceding after two minutes is clearly not an ideal start. Nor is it a death sentence. Worse teams than Leicester have been knocked back early, before working their way back into the game. Instead this team seemed to be in a complete daze for the remaining 88 minutes, at no point did they manage to reset themselves. QPR were able to play their own game by sitting back in a pretty basic 4-4-2 shape without the ball and then causing havoc from wide areas when they got their foot on it. Leicester, inevitably, had more possession and got obliterated in every stat that matters. Plus la change.
The lack of genuine leaders is one reason this keeps happening and has been a serious problem for a long time. Now it’s starting to look like players are getting injected with a leadership repressing agent as soon as they arrive. Even those who might be leaders elsewhere find their powers deserting them as soon as they pull on that leftover training ground shirt masquerading as our away kit.
A classic example of this came in the aftermath of QPR’s third goal, which is quite the sentence to write in itself. Jordan Ayew called the team together into a huddle and proceeded to passionately lay down the law. ‘Why don’t you stop them crossing it?’, he might have raged.
Within a minute of breaking the huddle, he’d got in an argument with a QPR defender and got himself booked. His teammates responded to this rallying cry by conceding a ludicrous fourth goal before half time to ensure they had no chance whatsoever of getting back into the game. Early in the second half, Ayew was in vague danger of being sent off and had to be substituted. Quite the intervention.
Well before the scoreline got away from Leicester, the rhythm of the game had done. Rangers weren’t particularly niggly, yet half the team seemed to be constantly furious with something or other, whether it was Ayew or De Cordova Reid whinging, or Mavididi petulantly warring with the right back, Amadou Mbengwe. As a result, they failed to concentrate on the game and got dragged down into a messy battle of long throws and set pieces.
Leicester aren’t good at battles. In this classic Championship environment, Abdul Fatawu disappeared, negated by a bit of ropey grass on the near side touchline, while Ricardo completely caved in under pressure and put in probably his worst ever performance in a Leicester shirt. Ben Nelson looked a mile from the cool, modern centre back we saw last week, and the entire midfield was anonymous. The only one who looked like he did enjoy it was Hamza Choudhury, who came on far too late to make any difference but did at least put in a couple of Hamza special lunging tackles.
QPR, on the other hand, were utterly ruthless. The only bits of football that broke out in the first half were played by the hooped shirts, as they terrorised Leicester down both wings, while Vestergaard and Ben Nelson couldn’t handle either of their central strikers.
Cifuentes made a comment after the game about the fact that QPR scored with four of their five chances in the first half and so we were a bit unlucky. You might be able to look at the goals in isolation and argue that the first and fourth had some element of fortune, but this ignores the many, many chances they had in the second half. As well the fact they one chance they didn’t score before the break was an open goal from about one yard out. It also ignores the fact that we had zero chance of scoring ourselves. We didn’t even give ourselves the chance to get lucky.
The difficulty with Cifuentes is that there’s only so many times you can hear the same platitudes and the same sort of problems seem to be there regardless of who fills the shirts. Set the ‘days since the last time the manager described a half as unacceptable’ board back to zero. Here we are again.
A couple of weeks ago he reacted to being 3-0 down at half time for the second time in a week by moving decisively against Wout Faes, Harry Winks, and Boubakary Soumare, none of whom have played since. Now his newly modelled team has suffered an even worse reversal.
They conceded an early goal again, the midfield looked just as exposed out of possession as it did in those games against Sheffield United and Southampton when Winks was in the middle. Going forward, the stat sheet has awarded Leicester just two shots on target, but don’t let that deceive you; one was a Ricardo flick-on and the other was a rebound from a penalty, the truth is they created nothing from open play again and barely ventured into QPR’s third while the game was alive.
These issues are not one-offs, they are the same issues that have been cropping up routinely all season. For all that picking up seven points from the last nine has offered the manager a life raft, there was a lot of luck in those wins. Peek at the expected goals numbers and Leicester lost all three. The season-long xG has Leicester 17th, on a par with Oxford United. This team has relied on an unsustainable number of long range goals to even be in mid-table.
Of course, the fundamental problems go deeper than the manager and the players. The dismal way they have treated their staff this week is a reflection of a culture that is absolutely rotten and a financial situation that is evidently getting worse. Those financial issues and continuously poor recruitment – a meteor might really have to hit the training ground for Julian Carranza to get a game – clearly limit the realistic outcomes for this side.
Even despite those restraints, we should expect better than this. Even with these players and this leadership, a game like this is unacceptably bad. It’s long past time people were held accountable for their failures. That should start with Cifuentes. It shouldn’t stop with him.
The Fosse Way 
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