The Fosse Way

Marie Kondo, for those unfamiliar with her work, is a world-renowned expert in tidying, organising and decluttering. 

I invoke her name not as a suggested new director of football at Leicester City ahead of the January transfer window, although she may have some of the skills required. 

Instead, Marie Kondo springs to mind because she suggests a method for decluttering which involves holding an object in your hand and asking yourself quietly: “Does this spark joy?”

I found myself, while standing in the upper reaches of SK1 towards the end of this Boxing Day defeat against Watford, metaphorically holding Leicester City Football Club in my hand and asking myself whether they spark joy.

They’re capable of the odd moment, as in games against Derby and Ipswich recently. Abdul Fatawu’s goal from downtown hoodwinked many of us into thinking this team was getting its mojo back. Loftus Road laid that theory to waste even before Watford set fire to it here.

Of course there’s a recognition that football is cyclical and that this is merely a fallow period where joy is concerned, that things will get better eventually.

But boy is this team a tough sell at present. Even players who were previously incredibly popular are now struggling to keep the crowd onside.

Fans’ frustration turned to anger as Leicester, chasing a late equaliser, continually attacked down what should be a strong right flank at Championship level, the ball repeatedly shifted out to either Ricardo Pereira or Abdul Fatawu, only for it to be given away time and time again. When even Ricardo and Fatawu are getting jeered, you fear for the reaction to a Luke Thomas mistake.

After the final whistle, loud derision accompanied almost every player’s walk round the perimeter of the pitch, with only Jordan James and Ben Nelson awarded applause in place of booing.

The afternoon had not started in this negative vein. It was noticeable that there were no boos for any of the players when the starting eleven was announced, something of a novelty these days. Perhaps supporters were full of festive cheer, or perhaps they were recalling the victory over Ipswich last time out on Filbert Way more than the dismal 4-1 reverse that followed in the capital.

It might simply have been that we were playing Watford. It would be fine. We always beat Watford.

Unfortunately, the latest Leicester City side to be tasked with beating Watford possesses a less-than-winning combination of creating no good chances and making terrible individual errors at the back. So now we are the kind of club that lose to Watford again.

This was only the 4th time Watford have beaten us at home in the last 28 attempts, a period stretching back to 1987. The most recent time had been in 2013, when Nathaniel Chalobah scored for the Hornets and Harry Kane got Leicester’s consolation. Some things change: Harry Kane is now setting records for Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga. Some things don’t: Chalobah scored against us on the opening day of this season too.

The early signs were ominous even taking Leicester’s 7th minute lead into account. Because we had barely strung two passes together before Jordan James found the corner of the net with a low angled drive from the edge of the area. It wasn’t even a half chance, but Leicester wouldn’t create a better one all game.

When one of equal quality arrived 15 minutes later, it was a late Christmas present from Watford goalkeeper Egil Selvik. He had looked uncomfortable all half, flapping at crosses and slicing clearances. Happily for him, his worst clearance of all went straight to Stephy Mavididi who is currently enduring the least prolific spell of his career. Mavididi couldn’t add to his two goals so far this season, Selvik able to push his placed shot wide.

There were a couple of speculative long-range shots later in the half from Jordan Ayew and Bobby Decordova-Reid, a strike partnership whose pressing isn’t quite reaching the heights of the famous Barcelona teams referenced by Marti Cifuentes in the summer.

At this point, the game could have gone either way. Both teams were as bad as each other as the interval approached. Each were guilty of misplacing simple passes or repeatedly creaming the ball straight out of play. As a Championship game, it was a great advert for the Premier League.

But with its most dangerous shooting done for the day, this joyless team turned its attention to making the inevitable catastrophic mistakes that would ensure defeat, a collapse that had been foreshadowed by the Jenga pieces set up outside the Family Stand prior to kickoff.

The leveller came slap bang in the middle of The Worst Time to Concede: 1-0 up and looking reasonably comfortable in the 45th minute. Caleb Okoli, who at least one person employed by Leicester City decided would be a good person to pay an eight-figure fee for to play in the Premier League, had already been giving the ball away constantly like it was the aim of the game.

Moments before the half time whistle, Okoli ceded possession once more and the excellent Imran Louza laid the ball off for Othmane Maamma to curl past Jakub Stolarczyk with the outside of his boot.

So suddenly we had boos at half time in place of the anticipated soft thud of gloved hands. That’s the other thing about this game. It was bloody freezing, which didn’t spark any joy either.

It is worth registering a note of positivity at this point for the performance of Ben Nelson, who stepped into the Vestergaard role with a certain degree of assurance. He wasn’t perfect, but we shouldn’t expect him to be at this stage of his career. 

In any normal club, Nelson’s more senior colleagues would be the reliable ones whose steady displays would enable him to learn on the job. Unfortunately, our senior players are all either decrepit, disinterested or simply not very good.

As one voice cried out from the Kop: “who are the leaders in this team?” Shrugs all round.

Leicester had already given Mattie Pollock several sights of goal from set pieces in the first half so it was unsurprising that he scored the winner. Louza, predictably the best player on the pitch by a country mile, was given a country acre of space to deliver a wickedly inswinging cross and Pollock rose to nod into the empty net with Stolarczyk arriving too late to swipe at thin air.

Lest we forget, Leicester possess a goalkeeper who was signed recently and has never played for the club. Stolarczyk, meanwhile, revived memories of the infamous Kalac-level afternoon suffered by Danny Ward one year and one week ago, not by conceding as many disastrous goals but when receiving ironic cheers from the Kop every time he safely gathered the ball. 

Stolarczyk may be well past youth at 25 but if this is the kind of encouragement we give our Academy graduates with only one full season’s worth of games behind them, no wonder the club is a mess. Beggars can’t be choosers and this felt like a time when we actually should channel our inner happy clapper and “get behind [one of] the lads”.

In response to trailing, very little happened. This is where Marti Cifuentes looks particularly weak and ineffective. It’s hard to know which is more lethargic: the geriatric Ayew-Reid axis up front or Cifuentes’s sloth-like substitution policy. There were no changes at QPR with the side 4-0 down at half time and no changes here until the 69th minute with the game so clearly slipping from his side’s grasp.

He may not rate the players on the bench, but at some point you have to ask what is the point of a football club that signs players and doesn’t play them. The blame for the Julian Carranza situation surely lays with the recruitment team rather than with Cifuentes but following so soon after the Woyo Coulibaly situation, it might not be unreasonable to see someone somewhere held, to use Cifuentes’s favourite word, accountable.

At least the question of just how bad Carranza must look in training fulfils the function of shifting the focus from Jordan Ayew’s continued presence in the team.

Ayew usually works fairly hard. He has a song. He’s probably a nice person. I am completely fed up of watching him represent my football club. That may be my fault for having been born at such a time that I would spend some of my 20s and all of my 30s watching our greatest striker of all time score a variety of sensational goals against the best clubs in the country, and thus have little interest in watching Jordan Ayew trying to win free kicks against Watford centre-halves, but here we are.

If the club was better run, it would have been able to replace its greatest striker of all time with someone who wasn’t Jordan Ayew, or the ornamental Carranza, or a player who scores two goals in a calendar year and then celebrates by doing a backflip and landing on his neck.

A big part of the reason we’re not interesting to watch is because we don’t create any chances. A big part of the reason we don’t create any chances is Jordan Ayew is our striker. 

A few times in the second half, Fatawu fired the ball in Ayew’s general direction. They were the kind of passes Jamie Vardy used to turn into good ones by battling with his marker and using his pace to get away. This is not something Jordan Ayew is capable of, which is not Jordan Ayew’s fault, but again: someone thought it would be a good idea to sign him.

Leicester’s entire second half threat consisted of Abdul Fatawu cutting inside and shooting off target from 35 yards. Or, in one case, 75. These attempts carried an air of sadness with them. They felt, in all honesty, a bit pathetic. The only consolation was that Louza skied a golden chance to score a third Watford goal on the break.

Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that anything will change in the short-term if we can’t afford to sack Cifuentes and we can’t afford to replace any of the players.

There are some fans who remain content with all this. A few of them still gather pitchside to applaud the players on their tragic lap of the playing surface. But as the empty seats and emptying stands show, there are many more who have started to find more preferable things to do.

If falling into the bottom half of the Championship isn’t enough to rouse the club into some kind of decisive action, then will a drop in attendances eventually wake the powers-that-be from their slumber?

If you decide the object in your hand does not spark joy, Marie Kondo’s advice is to discard it. Most of us will never be able to walk away from Leicester City for good, but plenty are taking a break from a pastime that isn’t offering much at the moment.