Well that was fun, wasn’t it? After spirited away performances at Stoke and Middlesbrough there was a lot of promise for Gary Rowett’s first home game in charge against Norwich.
The talk ahead of the game was ‘Back the team, not the regime’. I’ll save talk about King Power for another day and look more at the team.
The starting XI saw Abdul Fatawu back and Bobby De Cordova-Reid switched to the left wing. An impressive display against Middlesbrough saw Divine Mukasa kept as the Number 10. The other change saw Jakub Stolarczyk ushered in at the last minute to cover after Asmir Begovic suffered an ankle injury in the warm up.
Rowett’s pre-match team talk saw Leicester start on the front foot with the highlight being a Harry Winks strike from the edge of the box nearly fooling Norwich shot stopper Vladan Kovačević.
And then… that was about it.
Like a balloon being slightly deflated, Leicester started falling back to type that the King Power faithful have seen all season.
Norwich grew into the game and had clearly done their homework as they targeted our right flank, so much so that Luke Thomas had to come over at one stage and help out Ricardo.
The game remained deadlocked at half time and an appearance of Jordan James warming up in a bib got a rapturous applause from those still in the stands. Chants of “Watch him play on a Saturday…” brought back memories of his winner at Carrow Road in the reverse fixture. Was this a sign that the Rowett era had begun in earnest? Unfortunately by the time he came on after 76 minutes we were already 1-0 down, soon becoming 2-0 two minutes later.
And that’s how it finished – different manager, same ol’ result.
What made the result harder to swallow was that all the results around us went our way but we couldn’t grasp the advantage. Blackburn, Portsmouth and West Brom all lost with the latter coming against Oxford who have now appeared in Leicester’s rear-view mirror with a two-point gap between us.
We now have 11 games left to try and salvage Championship survival. You have to go back to the 2021/22 season since the last time you didn’t need 50 points in the Championship to stay up. This means we need at least 16 points from the remaining games.
Those games are:
Ipswich Town (A), Bristol City (H), QPR (H), Watford (A), Preston North End (H), Sheffield Wednesday (A) Swansea City (H), Portsmouth (A), Hull City (H) and Blackburn Rovers (A).
Realistically we need five wins and a draw from those 11 games. Rowett identified in the Norwich post-game interview that the pressure is off during away games. That means focusing on the away ‘six-pointers’ against fellow strugglers Sheffield Wednesday, Portsmouth and Blackburn. With Ipswich pushing for automatic promotion, Watford may be an opportunity for an away smash and grab. That leaves the home fixtures of Bristol City, QPR, Preston, Swansea and Hull. Hull are in the playoffs whilst the rest are mid-table fodder.
So how are we going to turn this around and get the wins we need? It sounds simple but putting the ball in the back of the net.
Statistics show that 10% of Championship games finish 1-0 while 7% finish 0-1 so scoring more than two a game is vital. In order for us to do that the strikers need to start pulling their weight. Patson Daka and Jordan Ayew have scored a combined total of six league goals, averaging nearly a goal every six games. Daka’s pace gives him the advantage over Ayew but he needs additional support.
A change of system is needed to stop Daka being isolated up top and I would go for a 4-1-4-1 system of Daka leading the line with Silko Thomas just behind him.
Jordan James would be beside him working box-to-box with Mavididi and Fatawu on the wings. Winks would sit in front of the defence to complete the midfield. In-game management would come by bringing on Mukasa for Silko in the second half.
Width is needed to use Fatawu as the outball while Daka needs to stay outside of the D on corners to be a threat for the counter-attack.
This counter-attack needs to be used smartly away at Ipswich.
The Stoke and Middlesbrough games showed that there is potential in the squad – it’s now up to Rowett to get the best out of them, use a system that works to their strengths and be flexible during in-game management.
The days of spring are now upon us and time will tell whether they’ll be Darling Buds of May.
The Fosse Way 