The Roman stoic, Seneca, is said to have greeted each New Year by bathing in ice water. This cleansing ritual offered the opportunity to literally wash away the old and build resilience for the year ahead.
Leicester City, by contrast, began 2026 by diving headfirst into the same dirty water they spent last year swimming in. Rather than a cleansing, they swallowed half of it and made themselves even sicker than they were before.
Instead of a bold new beginning, this encounter was more like staying in bed to watch the greatest hits of the year that was, headache pounding behind your eyeballs. Oh, that’s them conceding someone’s first goal for the club! Tom Cannon scoring within minutes of kick off, was that this year or last? One shot from inside the box in the entire game, love that one.
The one tell that this match did indeed happen in ’26 rather than ’25 was the lack of a Julian Carranza-shaped cardboard cut out glued to the substitute’s bench. Over the festive period it appears that Jon Rudkin has managed to prise him off and ship him to Mexico. He will live on in our hearts alongside Molla Wague and Sergio Hellings in the transfers hall of fame.
With Carranza departed, Patson Daka only just back from an AFCON campaign that seems to have gone about as well as his club career, and Jordan Ayew both old and rubbish, Marti Cifuentes made one dramatic gesture towards a new world order by handing Silko Thomas his full debut for the club up front. Out with the old, in with the new.
We will get to the many reasons why Cifuentes is teetering on the brink, but the previous paragraph may as well serve as the case for his defence. That is an appalling list of forward options to be choosing from. It’s like giving you the choice of driving to work in a burnt out shell of a car or taking a taxi where the driver had 15 pints before he turned on the ignition.
On the one hand, starting Silko Thomas was fair enough given that he can at least run about more than Ayew. On the other, this is a man who started 20 times in League One last season and didn’t score a single goal.
No surprise, then, that Leicester’s attack was non-existent once again. In some ways, you could analyse this game by simply saying that Sheffield United looked an extraordinarily superior team for the entire 90 minutes and disappearing off to do better things.
To dive into things in a little more detail; until Jordan James scored a meaningless deflected goal in the last minute, the only realistic prospect of Leicester scoring was for Abdul Fatawu to bang another one in from the half way line. They had two touches in Sheffield United’s box in the first half and one shot, a wild Fatawu effort from 35 yards.
In the final reckoning Leicester managed six shots in total from an average distance of 28 yards out. The Blades had four of their shots from inside six yards, which seems better.
Part of this lack of threat is down to the paucity of forward options. Strikers don’t only score goals, they offer an outlet to the rest of the team. It’s both ironic and inevitable that Cannon has played well twice against Leicester, but he showed the value of having someone who can just do normal striker things. He chased down lost causes and won set pieces, he put pressure on the defenders to force them to clear it long so Sheffield United could recycle the ball and keep Leicester pinned in. He scored.
It’s pretty obvious that a new option up front is the single most important target in January. For all the flaws elsewhere in the squad, if the only thing they do is bring in a generic, bang average striker with a bit of mobility it would represent a massive improvement. If this feels quite a long way from having the greatest striker in the club’s history six months ago…well, we’re not in Kansas any more.
To pin everything on individual personnel would be a mistake, though. This is a team without a philosophy. Cifuentes was supposed to bring a blend of attacking football and pragmatism, instead he’s fallen into the trap every manager without a clear identity falls into, where you end up sacrificing the attack to try to protect a rubbish defence and end up with a team that can’t do either.
Whatever we had at the start of the season, now there is no coherent approach whatsoever. It’s not only that Leicester never have any shots, it’s that they barely get into the opposition half for long stretches of the game. The only time there is anything close to consistent pressure is when they’re staring down the barrel at two or three goals down and even then we might be treated to a shot or two at most.
If you were desperately scouring for positives then you could point to a little bit of something resembling attacking football for a few minutes when Jeremy Monga and Louis Page came on. Page receiving the ball and opening up his body to get the ball out wide was considerably better than anything else we saw from the midfield. But this is grasping at straws. The total output of this effort was a Ben Nelson shot over the bar from 20 yards and a Fatawu effort from 30. You could do literally nothing and have no other players on the pitch and the end result would be a Fatawu effort from 30 yards.
This is part of the reason frustration is reaching boiling point. This isn’t an enjoyable team to watch. Not only because it’s losing, but because there’s hardly anything to get excited about. Once again there was blue on blue crime in the stands. The rivalry between those who think we should have the occasional shot and those who steadfastly believe that being mindlessly boring to watch and also being walloped every week is a brilliant strategy continues to grow.
The horrible mess extends across the entire team both with and without the ball. If Cifuentes had installed a solid defensive structure then at least we’d have something to cling to. Instead, this was the 19th consecutive game without a clean sheet, by far the worst record in the division, and Leicester’s worst record at this level since 1947.
There are clearly personnel issues affecting the defence as well, but defending is much more about coaching and organisational skill as it is purely about ability. Leicester look utterly inept at the back on both an individual and collective level, regardless of which combination of defensive players get picked. Even when players who look pretty good come in, it makes no difference. We’re happy that Nelson is playing and he looks a good player, Oliver Skipp has been better than Harry Winks. Doesn’t matter. That’s now 20 goals conceded in the last 9 games.
The ones they conceded in this game were disastrous, whether it was Japhet Tanganga strolling from the edge of the box to about 10 yards out and heading in a corner under no pressure, or Luke Thomas being absolutely humiliated by Andre Brooks in the build up to the second, or Thomas failing to follow the runner in behind for the third. It’s not just Thomas’ fault; neither Stephy Mavididi nor Monga covered themselves in glory for the goals down that side. This is a collective, systemic failure.
The underlying expected goal numbers emphasise just how bad that failure is. On expected goal difference, Leicester are now in the bottom three. The fact we are clinging on in mid table is more to do with the fact that Jordan James has been on a hot streak – he has 8 goals from 2.5xG so far – than any remotely good football to hang your hat on.
Even worse for Cifuentes is the way in which a lot of these terrible defeats highlight his role in particular. He bought his way out of QPR, only for his successor to do better than he was and run up the score in the first half on his return. Southampton essentially found some guy loitering around the training ground to replace Will Still, after realising their summer move wasn’t working, and promptly ran up the score against us in the first half as well.
Then there is Sheffield United, who also acted proactively to replace a failed summer managerial appointment. They turned back to Chris Wilder, who Leicester spoke to and could have appointed themselves this season. Wilder has had his team 3-0 up against Cifuentes twice in a month, and done so with the air of a man who is barely even trying. Would anyone choose Cifuentes over Wilder now?
The argument for keeping Cifuentes is becoming less about the fact that he is actually good at his job and more about the idea that a lot of the problems are out of his hands. This is true, but multiple things can be true at the same time: a lot of the problems are out of his hands, someone else could do a better job.
Leicester need to act sooner rather than later. The points we’re dropping now could be extremely valuable once May comes around. Already a 10-point deduction would plunge us level with the relegation zone. This resembles the Premier League relegation year when they left it too late to change the manager. A similar failing this year could have even more disastrous consequences.
The Fosse Way 
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