Aston Villa were one of the only teams in anywhere near as poor form as us. They had a surprising draw against Man City in their last game, but they’d lost the 5 previous games before then. It was never going to be easy to win here, and that’s exactly what we didn’t do. After a good first half, it all fell apart, leaving us with a 2-1 loss and very little hope for the end of the season. For those who mostly follow the men’s team, this will all seem very familiar.
But before the horror really hit, we were excellent, and there was genuine enthusiasm in the ground. As we have done recently, we looked set up to go out there and win a game. It looked mostly like a 4-4-2 with Alisha Lehmann and Missy Goodwin up top. They were both free to roam out to the wings and collect the ball, and Hannah Cain on the right of midfield caused a lot of issues for Villa alongside these two. Asmita Ale was moved back out to the left of defence and replaced by Chantelle Swaby in the centre after struggling there in the last game, especially. With Leitzig back in goal as well, this is probably our best possible defence, and it provided us with the half a chance we need to actually win a game.
The first ten minutes was just plain good football. The game was very open and back and forth, while we still looked solid in defence. Julie Thibaud made a few good tackles early on after Villa kept finding some luck on our right-hand side. Between Thibaud and Ashleigh Neville, they tightened it up and helped banish the memories of Sarah Mayling getting rinsed every few minutes on our right in the last game. There was even a decent free kick from Sam Tierney about 10 minutes in. It was one of those ones you often see centre halves take, where it’s 30 yards out and straight in front of the goal, and they just leather it as hard as possible. The sound of it was beautiful and echoed through the ground, and was the kind of thing that gives a crowd a little bit of pep.
As Villa looked good down their left, we looked good down ours initially. Lehmann and Goodwin were both drifting outside from their nominally central positions and picking up the ball. It’s a good example of how we attacked with intent throughout the first half. Villa got away on the break, and it was confidently dealt with by Swaby, who reacted early and snuffed out the danger. It felt like the most cohesive display we’d seen from Leicester in a while. We took risks and attacked, leaving us a little open in defence and then we dealt with the attacks. It seems a strange thing to point out, but it felt genuinely novel to see football that goes both ways.
Our attacks were mostly long and quick balls out of defence into midfield that got flicked out wide. One of these gave Lehmann the ball in the left half space, and she just ran and ran with no one able to get near her. Goodwin overlapped out on the left, and Lehmann slid a through ball out to her, but it had too much on it and ran out for nothing. The interplay between Goodwin and Lehmann, with Ale’s recovery pace in the left back position, looked good and it felt as if we were going to score a goal, it’s coming from that side.
Lehmann was able to stay high up the pitch and receive quick balls from the midfield, but when she needed to hold the ball up rather than drive forward, she didn’t tend to produce the same results her direct running does. After half an hour, we had a third of the possession, but we looked like the most dangerous team by a mile. Despite this, or because of this, the need to score a goal grew larger and larger every moment to the point it felt like Godzilla had risen up out of Soar and cast a shadow over the King Power. We have not scored more than one goal in a WSL game all season. If we were going to win, we had to score first.
That shadow presumably got to the players, as it felt like things started to die down a bit heading towards half-time. Thankfully, this applied to both sides, and Villa looked as toothless as us. We had a defence playing with confidence, you could hear every little instruction that Passmoor was shouting out, and the King Power sounded as good as I’ve heard it for a women’s game. Out of the miasma, Hanson got onto the end of a long through ball and overran slightly, leaving her with a tight angle and a shot into the side netting. It was a stark reminder of how slim the margin of our good vibes is in this moment.
But then, barely seconds later, Leicester were up the other end, with Cain rushing down the right and squaring the ball back to an unmarked Lehmann. She took a second to set herself and tucked it away easily into the bottom left corner of the goal. A 319-minute drought was over, and I’ve felt every minute of those.
We were 1-0 up, and I had this weird feeling of ‘What do we do now?’ We’ve not scored 2 in a WSL game all season, and we’ve not had a clean sheet in a very long time either. This was such an alien situation that there is simply no data on what the best choice is here. But it seemed like Passmoor had made up his mind, we were set to push for another goal to close out the half, and we kept pushing down our right, through Hannah Cain and getting the ball into the box, and we looked consistently dangerous. Just before half-time, Ale made a sensible ‘professional foul’ that gave away a free kick in a decent position. It’s the sort of gamble that turns a high-percentage breakaway into a lower percentage free kick and is usually worth the price of a yellow card, and this came to nothing.
At half time, Ebony Salmon was brought on by Natalia Arroyo at half time in a pretty sensible attacking substitution. We came out for the second half in the lead, but within a minute, a Villa corner was swung in, and Tierney just never got a grip of her marker, and Patten scored from a corner. We were right back to square one, but we still had the little boost of having scored a goal. How we bounced back from conceding felt vital, and we seemed scattered for a few minutes. A Villa break ended up at the feet of Hanson again, who had a decent shot from just outside the box. It felt like Leicester’s good vibes had been leached away, like having a great time on the dancefloor at 1am and then instantly ending up in a stranger’s kitchen as the sun rises and the birds start to sing.
You might notice that there’s not an awful lot left of this article, because there really isn’t a lot else that Leicester were a part of from here. We saw some good individual performances across the pitch, with Lehmann and O’Brien looking very lively. But ultimately, we had 45 minutes with barely an attack as Villa pushed for the winner. It all felt familiarly inevitable and the job was done in the 84th minute when Kirsty Hanson, who’d been a thorn in Leicester’s side the whole game, was on the end of another fast break from Villa and she put it away with relative ease.
As it stands, there are 5 games left of the season, and all of the teams above us seem to be turning their form around. West Ham are one spot above us in 11th with a 3 point cushion. We have a game in hand, but that game is against European champions Arsenal. If you were looking to lose some money, I’d say put a bet on Leicester to stay up. Last week, I wrote about nails in a coffin, and this week it feels like we’re being lowered into a grave with a random WSL 2 team standing off at the edge of the cemetery in a long leather jacket and sunglasses.
The Fosse Way 