Welcome to the King Power house of horrors, where your dreams go to die. You won’t have fun, you can’t relax, and those free doughnuts are laced with anthrax.
This is a cruel place, even rose-tinted nostalgia won’t save you here. So it is that one of the most universally-beloved players in Leicester City history has now overseen a hat-trick of grizzly defeats in the space of ten days. A run that has culminated in this, a defeat to rank alongside Tottenham Hotspur in the great book of recent City disasters.
It will be lost to history that the evening of Tuesday, February 10th saw the best 45 minutes of the season. A performance full of all the things we have been crying out for: attacking intent, hard work, quality in the final third.
Everything about that period now belongs in a different world. Whatever sense you may have had, around 8.30pm, that Andy King had captured something and freed his players up, had vanished with the wind an hour later.
Divine Mukasa striding around the pitch with a Bellingham-esque combination of presence and skill, Abdul Fatawu scoring the most powerful toe poke in football history, looking up the aggregate score from Southampton’s recent visits to the KP to use as post match banter (10-0 in 2.5 games at that stage), Patson Daka quite literally scoring a goal. All gone. The first 83 minutes were rendered irrelevant by the final seven. So how was the play, Mrs Lincoln?
Those last few minutes are difficult to explain in any logical way. Comebacks like this have a life and a momentum of their own. Like a Test match batting collapse, they take place in the minds of the participants and the atmosphere of the crowd. As soon as Southampton scored their second goal, the outcome of this game was beyond doubt. The specific tactical approach and even the identities of the players themselves were secondary to the force driving us towards a pre-determined destination.
That is obviously not to absolve those involved. Every collapse has an inciting incident. For those of us watching over the winter, the moment when Harry Brook follows half an hour of carefully locking and bolting the windows by shooting a howitzer through the front door and scrawling “we have gone on holiday” across the brickwork.
Leicester’s moment was Luke Thomas needlessly shoving Kuryu Matsuki in the back by the corner flag in the 81st minute. At that stage, his team were 3-1 up and had largely weathered the Southampton storm. From then on Leicester conceded three goals and could easily have let in five.
On one level, you have to hold him accountable for what followed. It is a universal rule that you must not give away soft free kicks late on. Everybody understands those situations are fraught with danger, as a desperate team can load more and more bodies into your box. Thomas is not a young player any more, he has played 150 first team games, yet he displayed the naivety of a teenager and then, even worse, did it again a few minutes later. The first foul led to Jack Stephens scoring, the second led to Jack Stephens missing a sitter from five yards out.
At the same time, that he is even there to make these mistakes reflects the systemic failings that are the root cause of results like this. Luke Thomas should not be Leicester’s left back. He has been a liability all season and deemed surplus to requirements multiple times over recent years. Yet he was awarded a long term contract extension a few months ago and has played more minutes than every other player bar Fatawu in this campaign. Partly as a direct result of the fact the only left backs Leicester have signed in the last five years are Victor Kristiansen and Ryan Bertrand.
Go through the team and you see this sort of thing again and again.
Ricardo Pereira, who you can now ink in for at least one dreadful error per game, long past his best and playing more than ever. Caleb Okoli, whose red card at Charlton destroyed his team’s chances of getting anything from the game, restored to the starting XI immediately without consequence. Harry Winks, banished twice, restored twice without any sign of contrition. Daka, 150 games up front for Leicester City, is two behind Matt Elliott in career goals for the club. Jordan Ayew, who at his current rate would need another 100 appearances to catch them.
In normal circumstances, you could pin the blame on the manager. He is ultimately the person responsible for putting them in the team. It was the manager who chose to replace Leicester’s front three with Ayew, Jamaal Lascelles, and Silko Thomas in the closing stages. The manager who took the half time team talk, which took a group of energetic, exciting charges and turned them into 11 pumpkins.
Can you really blame this manager, though?
King has only been a coach in any capacity for a little over a year. He only joined the first team staff last February. There is so little infrastructure around him that the club had to get Adam Sadler in as a freelancer just to have enough people to put the cones out. He has been handed a team suddenly in the midst of a relegation fight, given some leftovers from the bargain basement bin, and left to get on with it until…some point in the future.
It is implausible to hold King responsible for an unprofessional, imbalanced and unfit squad that’s mentally shot. In a way his presence on the sideline has exposed those around him even more. He carries no baggage, he isn’t in this for himself, he is unambiguously wanting the best for the club and trying to help out. Even he has been completely let down by senior players – Okoli at Charlton, De Cordova Reid at Birmingham – in the same way that previous managers have been. Here is yet another person on the sideline trying to wave his team forward as they unilaterally camp deep in their own half.
Where Asmir Begovic gave the classic Leicester City absurdism angle in his post-match interview – “a game of two halves, we collapsed a little bit” – King spoke the angry truth that people want to hear:
Obviously, the feeling I have at the moment is sheer anger towards the performance. It will take a bit of time to process, I have to watch it back, see what happened but, yeah, passive and not good enough.
Probably a lack of character, a lack of leadership, stuff we have said about before and it has been almost a pattern throughout the season where you do some good bits in good spells and then we almost have a spell of the game where we just go under.
On a personal level, it must have been a dark night of the soul for King. He’s on record as doing his coaching badges with the ultimate ambition of managing Leicester City, and this is the hand he has been dealt. It is difficult to imagine a three game stretch worse than what has happened to him.
You suspect he felt the same mixture of shock and anger that most people of a blue persuasion watching felt in the aftermath of the final whistle. An hour ago, there was hope, and now this is our reality. He, and we, need help, something to stabilise the club for a few months to save it from going under completely.
There has been radio silence on the new manager front since Marti Cifuentes was sacked over a fortnight ago. Leicester can’t afford to waste any more time, the bottom three beckons this weekend. This road leads to League One.
The Fosse Way 