The Fosse Way

There was a sense of déjà vu as an opposition striker streaked away to score the second goal that condemned Leicester City to defeat at home to a team threatened by relegation to League One.

There were several key differences between this goal and the one Sammie Szmodics scored for Blackburn Rovers in May 2024. This one took place in the 71st minute, not the 94th. The Szmodics goal was met with indifference rather than loud cries for the board and the manager to be sacked. Because Leicester were already champions that day, whereas this defeat – coupled with talk of an impending points deduction – appeared to confirm them as relegation battlers themselves.

Cast your eyes to the near future and a final-day encounter with Blackburn, currently sitting in 21st place, awaits – on the tenth anniversary of the greatest sporting achievement of all time.

For Leicester City supporters, the current social media trend of sharing what life looked like in 2016 tends to spark either a grin or a grimace.

This anniversary of the city’s greatest triumph should be cause for celebration of the achievement. Unfortunately, the stirring pre-match montage which includes so many key moments from that season now feels like a kick in the teeth.

As the current campaign has unravelled, my thoughts have instead turned to the year of our second greatest triumph: 2021.

This time five years ago marked the halfway point of the Premier League season. Leicester had just beaten Chelsea to go top of the table. After the game, the Chelsea manager Frank Lampard said: “They were sharper than us and ran more than us. The bare minimum is to run and sprint and cover ground and too many of our players didn’t do it.”

Although the same team, by then under Thomas Tuchel, were defeated again at Wembley, Leicester’s failure to win the end-of-season return league fixture at Stamford Bridge was enormously costly.

All of which brings us to Saturday 24th January 2026, when Championship side Leicester brought on their two marquee signings of the 2021 summer transfer window to help chase the game against relegation candidates Oxford United.

Patson Daka trotted onto the pitch to a chorus of boos. And when Boubakary Soumare later joined him on the field to take up a rush centre-back role, it allowed a third arrival of the 2021 summer transfer window, Jannik Vestergaard, to accompany Daka up front.

These are bare facts and are merely laid out for posterity. When we’re back in the Champions League in another five years’ time, we’ll laugh about all this.

Sadly, nobody’s laughing now.

This was Oxford’s first visit to Filbert Way and brought back more memories – of an era-defining 1-0 win over the U’s at Filbert Street 35 years ago. That was another poor Leicester team labouring in the bottom half of the second division. When the vital moment arrived, however, they stepped up. There’s a growing concern about whether their modern-day equivalents have any such steel to call upon.

The mood before kickoff had been oddly upbeat with cheap tickets attracting a bumper crowd for a game that should have provided a route back to routine victories. When You’re Smiling was loud and there was a particular buzz about a start for Lutterworth boy Louis Page in midfield.

When Page won a free kick in a dangerous position inside the first minute by pressing the Oxford back line, it felt like a sign of things to come. Unfortunately, those things were Jordan Ayew striking the free kick tamely at the Oxford keeper and Oxford taking the lead two minutes later.

As with many recent goals conceded by Leicester, there were various mistakes. 

They began with Jakub Stolarczyk, whose rapid decline in form and confidence surely now calls for the 39-year-old studio pundit and kids’ goalkeeping coach to be drafted in. Stolarczyk overhit a simple pass to put the ball out of play on the Leicester left. 

A few moments later, a long throw was headed on by Ciaron Brown with none of our three giant defenders in close attendance and Sam Long evaded Page at the back post to turn the ball home.

The mood of the crowd turned in an instant. Leicester, as instructed, continued to play out from the back as if nothing had changed. 

But this is a desperately under-coached team half-heartedly playing a weak version of possession football. The players chosen to fit into this long-term “system”, which has only been effective when an elite coach has had relatively elite players to carry it out, are these days the likes of Stolarczyk and Caleb Okoli. 

We’re right back to the Ward and Amartey era, with a manager’s “philosophy” taking precedence over the ability of the players available and the long-term future of the club. In the short-term, that meant the full Danny Ward treatment for Stolarczyk who was again ironically cheered by the Kop for any safe gathering of the ball.

Shot-shy FC registered a couple more efforts in the remainder of the first half, neither of which troubled Jamie Cumming in the Oxford goal. In fact, the only shot between minutes 22 and 67 came from the left boot of Hamza Choudhury outside the box. That’s half the football match accounted for – and this is a period in which Leicester were a goal down at home in a game they presumably wanted to win.

Marti Cifuentes may not be the main problem here but he’s certainly playing his part. His substitution policy reflects his football: slow and ineffective. He could have been decisive and changed things that clearly weren’t working at half time. Instead, we were treated to the sight of Luke Thomas waiting on the touchline to replace the injured Ben Nelson. 

It took until the 68th minute for Cifuentes to make his first tactical switch. That Jordan Ayew started again, never mind lasted that long, was an instant sackable offence. His tiresome, repetitive post-match comments represented another. Regardless of the issues at board level or squad strength, any normal, financially viable club would have sacked Cifuentes by now and his inability to impact a game is just one of many reasons to pull the trigger.

Regrettably, the momentum of these substitutions was lost immediately. Giddy at the excitement of having their first shot of the second half in the 67th minute, Headloss FC moments later conceded the most ludicrous goal you could imagine. It was scored by a striker whose goal record makes Patson Daka look like Gerd Muller. Well, okay. This was his second goal of the season, so maybe he makes Patson Daka look like Patson Daka.

The first chant to follow the second goal was “Sack the board”. The second was “We want Marti out”. This neatly summarised the situation. Something has to change and if it can’t be the first, we’ll have to settle for the second. 

Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha, who must surely relinquish the name Top for the duration of our stay in the bottom half of the Championship, has clearly got the kind of relationship with Jon Rudkin where results on the pitch will never lead to any accountability off it. 

Even the anti-Rudkin chants have dropped off considerably, presumably more out of fatigue than because of the promise of a change in Rudkin’s role and responsibilities. It’s now been 77 days since Aiyawatt’s interview with no discernible changes having been made to the football operations of the club. 

Lest we forget we are approaching the end of a January transfer window when the team is underperforming and there are significant issues to address. Yet most of us are resigned to little or nothing being done, resigned to the same doom loop that saw nothing done last January either. This is the consequence of bad decision after bad decision by people who are still in post and waiting with anticipation to make more bad decisions every day.

Those of us unhappy with the decline of our football club have almost given up on the concept of a reckoning. Our last chance may come in the approaching week if rumours are true and the long-awaited PSR ruling is finally handed down. 

Things have become so desperate that even the shame of the first points deduction in the club’s 142-year history may be a positive in that it might lead to change, to a more united fight against the threat of relegation, to some kind of siege mentality.

Despite it all, there are still the embers of a passionate support which can be brought to bear.

There were signs of it when Leicester eventually pulled a goal back, Fatawu curling into the top corner following some rare pressure. But really, the scoreline could have been worse given Oxford had seen a goal harshly disallowed in the first half for a soft foul on Stolarczyk.

Following Fatawu’s strike, there were still 13 minutes left to play including injury time. Even the advent of Jannik Vestergaard, Centre-Forward couldn’t muster a meaningful chance for an equaliser.

The current set of players might feel aggrieved at losing some of the points they’ve gained due to historic financial issues but this first game without the injured Jordan James shows how much his goalscoring prowess has bailed the rest of them out. A few more weeks without him could be hugely damaging.

There were wild scenes of celebration in the Oxford end on their first visit to our city since 1993. We lost that day too, in a season that would end with promotion at Wembley.

We wait to see where this season takes us, and who’s left by the time it finally ends.