Leicester City (R) 2 Hull City 2: A thoroughly deserved relegation

Relegation. A humiliating relegation. A shameful and, above all, thoroughly deserved relegation, brought about by a pitiful decline in results during the second half of the season, years of financial mismanagement culminating in a first-ever points deduction and a culture of complacency which has been allowed to envelop and strangle Leicester City Football Club.

This morning, my thoughts are with the staff at the club who aren’t paid hundreds of thousands of pounds. Who may now lose their jobs. Who can’t retire. Who can’t walk into a similar job elsewhere. Many of whom will be hurting twice over as Leicester City fans themselves. Many of whom will have seen this coming from the inside. Who we hope now to hear from where possible, to help more supporters understand what has gone wrong and why.

Our voice is important now. Ahead of the game, volunteers handed out flyers to advertise the Foxes Trust’s end-of-season survey. Every Leicester City fan should complete it, even if you begin to tire of ticking “Strongly disagree”, “Very bad” or “Zero”. This is our chance to tell the decision-makers at our football club how we feel about the way they have managed this thing we love.

Meanwhile, the club’s own communication channels have been advertising a charity match to mark the ten-year anniversary of Leicester City’s Premier League title win. This match is so momentous our first team have been training for it all season, playing with all the intensity of a testimonial, culminating in a kickabout at Portsmouth at the weekend which truly led them to the precipice.

There was still delusional talk from goalkeeper Asmir Begovic of winning all three final games. This was met with derision from supporters, who have been targeted for criticism at daring to protest against poor performance on and off the pitch. But we’ve seen teams battle successfully against relegation so we know the effort required. We’ve barely seen a shred of the desperation and fight shown by Leicester teams of bygone years in similar situations.

After months of supporter apathy, anger has crept back in that even when faced with potential oblivion for this once proud football club, the response from players, coaching staff and ownership has been unforgivably half-hearted.

As a result, there were calls from some fans to turn up and support the team. There were calls from others to turn up and abuse the team. And there were calls from yet more supporters to stay home in protest – with anyone not doing one of those three distinct things seen as some kind of war criminal.

If that sums up the way this football club’s decline has splintered its previously united support into various factions, it was just the start on yet another chaotic evening on Filbert Way.

About last night

For this must-win game, Gary Rowett dropped Harry Winks to the bench – either because Leicester’s results have been better when Winks hasn’t been in the team, because he repeatedly told a fan to fuck off while boarding the team coach at Portsmouth on Saturday or a combination of the two.

Mavididi took his tub of popcorn to the sidelines as well, which meant recalls to the starting lineup for Divine Mukasa and the newly-crowned Championship Young Player of the Season Jordan James.

And Leicester started reasonably well, with Patson Daka lobbing an effort onto the roof of net in the 4th minute and a succession of corners threatening to secure a precious lead.

Then the 39-year-old goalkeeper, who spends half his week leading goalkeeping clinics or appearing as a television pundit, swung a lazy boot at a backpass and gifted the opening goal to Hull’s Liam Millar.

That lack of care was on display throughout the team, as it has been throughout the season, in Ricardo’s misplaced pass to end a promising move, Jordan James’s corner straight into the goalkeeper’s hands when we’d forced an overload of bodies at the near post and practically everything either Mukasa or Abdul Fatawu did.

There followed a procession of chances for Hull, punctuated by Harry Winks warming up and clapping the fans while most of them chanted about him being a wanker.

The team didn’t look like a team. It was massively disjointed with both full-backs looking exhausted and no meaningful link-up play between the four attacking players. When eventually it did click five minutes before half time with an impressive passing move, Patson Daka slid in and his shot predictably went wide.

Winks, who remains under contract for another 12 months, continued to be booed throughout his half-time warmup. The first chance of the second half fell to the opening goalscorer Millar, who lifted the ball over the bar after counter-attacking when Daka failed to control an arrowed Jannik Vestergaard pass.

Mukasa then wasted a fine chance which seemed to signal a disappointing night in front of goal for the home side. Within five minutes, they’d scored twice to lead. First, Fatawu engineered contact and dived to win a penalty which was professionally converted by James.

Shortly afterwards, Daka did well to provide Bobby Decordova-Reid with the opportunity to cross and Luke Thomas flew forward from left-back to meet the ball on the volley. Although a limited player, Thomas clearly cares about the club and his celebration was a reminder that not every player in this largely dislikeable squad will feel apathetic about this relegation.

Enter Winks, smiling on the touchline as he was substituted on to a cacophony of jeers, to provide a perfect summary of this surreal and broken football club.

The lead lasted less than ten minutes, Oli McBurnie left free to equalise just after the hour mark and Hull quickly wasted two good chances to go back ahead.

Rowett responded by bringing on Mavididi and the lesser-spotted Aaron Ramsey for Decordova-Reid and Oliver Skipp. Ramsey subsequently wasted three glorious chances to prolong the agony while Daka hit the post from an excellent Mukasa cross.

And for a few minutes in this period, Leicester looked genuinely dangerous. That this happened with the ball pinging around in midfield like a pinball, in stark contrast to the control the owners appear to have demanded from his team for the past few years, was fitting.

Much like when Southampton were destroyed 5-0 on the counter attack two years ago, Leicester have often looked better when approaching games differently to the way Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha and Jon Rudkin want the team to play.

Then the whistle went, and it was over.

Bang and blame

Yes, this football club has been in League One before. But given the money spent to create whatever this is, that final whistle represented a new low for Leicester City.

The current set of players are bearing the brunt of the criticism at present, told they’re not fit to wear the shirt and castigated in the media for their mental weakness and lack of effort. But these are accusations Leicester fans were using about damaging defeats many years ago. The players and manager have changed. The feeling around the club has not.

This season has lurched from 45-minute performances under Marti Cifuentes to a total inability to win under Rowett. At no point have Leicester played well, even when appearing to be perennially three points off the play-offs during the autumn.

At this time of desolation, many supporters have been drawn back to the celebration of Leicester’s greatest triumph.

When the lap of honour made its way to the south east corner of the stadium, the man lifting the Premier League trophy above his head was not the man who had masterminded the success from the dugout.

Nor was it the PFA Footballer of the Year, the striker who had completed the fairytale rise from non-league or the future World Cup winner who had bossed pitches up and down the country.

It wasn’t even the chairman who had helped build the culture that existed at that time.

It was Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha.

And that’s a neat metaphor, something thrust into his hands that had been achieved by the hard work and intelligence of others. The only surprise is that he didn’t drop it.

In that moment, something in the pit of my stomach told me: this isn’t right. I was, like tens of thousands of others, there to acclaim my heroes. It was a wrong note among the concerto and I quickly buried my feelings, determined to enjoy the day.

Five years later, one of those hands that held the trophy was clenched in an emotional celebration of the club’s first FA Cup win. The following year, it was shaken by numerous hands of Leicester fans in Eindhoven. I would have shaken it myself had I not been a few hundred yards away, oblivious to it all. Not out of deference but with a sense of joy.

As we are learning now, you have to cherish the moments of following your team to other countries and seeing the same faces you saw on terraces in Hereford, Peterborough and Yeovil. At Wembley and in Eindhoven, there was a feeling among many Leicester fans that Aiyawatt was, as the song about his father goes, one of us.

But he’s proven otherwise, an absent owner whose cluelessness has led to the ultimate price being paid by many of the club’s staff. Aiyawatt had been through a terrible, life-defining tragedy, which must have taken an emotional toll none of us could truly understand, but he was still inheriting a business which he had to run with care and a clear head.

As the club has unravelled over the past few years, it has become increasingly clear that Leicester City’s success had been built by some singularly brilliant minds and strong personalities. By the time Aiyawatt gave a long-awaited interview about the club’s situation, it had long been obvious he didn’t fit into either of those categories. What was meant to be a reassuring attempt at openness became a meme, “we promote next season” delivered with a chuckle in place of any kind of strategy to lift Leicester City out of the mire.

Those brilliant minds and strong personalities had all drifted away one by one. We were left in the stands looking down at the stragglers at the end of the night, sitting on the dancefloor as the lights go up.

For years, Leicester’s hierarchy have masked bad decision-making and lazy practices with big wages and free cans of Chang. Where other clubs have bought and sold savvily, Leicester were left with a squad of leftovers: all the failed signings of previous years piling up into one misshapen mess and expected to perform. A succession of managers have been blamed rather than the root cause identified and moved on.

Instead of co-operating with the authorities over mounting issues with financial compliance, the club chose to go on the run, citing loopholes and lodging appeals. When the then financial director said the club needed to sell players, instead we bought more. It’s all finally caught up with them and there is no easy way out now.

If the best time for Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha and Jon Rudkin to leave Leicester City in more competent hands came and went several years ago, their exit now feels more like a ticking timebomb.

In reality, Srivaddhanaprabha and Rudkin are Leicester City until they or we prove otherwise. The players deserve some responsibility, but that’s nothing compared to the share we must give to Top ‘n’ Jon. They were handed a club with a strong identity on a plate by Nigel Pearson, Claudio Ranieri, Jamie Vardy and others, and they’ve turned something special into absolutely nothing.

They sum up the complacency, the laziness, the neglect that has led us to this point. They have permitted the “this’ll do” approach to absolutely everything on and off the pitch and the “we’ll be fine” mentality that has pervaded for years. They are responsible for signing dreadful players on gigantic wages. They show no sign of understanding, acknowledging and owning their mistakes. There is no evidence they possess the tools to bring this club back to what we know it can be.

Welcome to Leicester City, where the cost of failing is a promotion, even when every season seems to end in relegation.