The jig is up, stick a fork in us, we are done and any other similar idioms you’d like to add. It’s not a surprise and there hasn’t even been some jeopardy.
This whole season, much like the men’s team, has felt like watching a victim in a slasher movie being chased by the embodiment of relegation. There’s potential for excitement there but only if the victim can look like they might escape alive. We’ve been dead on arrival since the start of the season and the lack of tension has been the true horror of it all.
Leicester have long been one of, if not the, cheapest squads in the league but we’ve managed to stay up in previous years. However, with billionaire-backed London City Lionesses coming up from the WSL 2 the theory was that they would squeeze one of the lesser-funded ‘legacy’ teams out of the league. While this is what will happen, we won’t be going into a relegation play-off because of the Lionesses, it will be our own downfall, miles short of 11th place.
There’s been a lack of quality, a lack of ideas and more than anything a lack of goals. A team that scores 10 goals in 19 games does not take this league seriously. In January when it was clear we needed more up top, Rick Passmoor was given Alisha Lehmann who scored two goals in two years in Italy, for Juventus and Como and 38-year-old Rachael Williams. The former offers some star power and social media presence and the latter offers invaluable experience. Neither was ever going to be a real source of goals.
A lot is made of the gulf between WSL 1 and 2, but it’s looking likely that we will be facing Charlton, Crystal Palace or Birmingham in the relegation play-off. Birmingham and Charlton both got to the quarter-finals of the FA Cup this season and Palace beat us 3-0 in the League Cup. I wouldn’t bet on us beating any one of these sides. We’d need to score more than one goal to win, as we don’t do clean sheets anymore.
Against London City, Leicester were under pressure from the start and it never let up. It looked like a very flat back five with three midfielders there to clog up the middle and Shannon O’Brien dropping in from the front line when defending. It was stodgy stuff, even more so than our usual play and it certainly provided a contrast to London City’s fluid play.
London City have loads of players that someone with a passing interest in women’s football would know. How famous someone is certainly isn’t a measure of quality, but to line up against Nikita Parris, Freya Godfrey and Grace Geyoro in the incredibly quaint surroundings of Bromley’s Hayes Lane shows where the money is here.
We play our home games to semi-decent crowds in our men’s stadium but we have no-one of this sort of quality or potential on the pitch. This is the old ‘legacy’ club being replaced by the highly monied upstart writ large. This match is an encapsulation of our entire season.
We clung on for 30 minutes until O’Brien found herself with the ball at her feet after some sloppy passing between London City’s back line. She had some work to do, ably dummying past an onrushing defender before keeping her cool to tuck the ball away. But make no mistake, this was a gift more than something we worked hard for.
This seemed to just inspire London City to go and put some of their chances away as they scored two minutes later with a Lucia Corrales goal that looked a lot like a cross. Olivia Clark could maybe have done better in goal and London City seemed to sniff this out as they took a pot shot from distance not long after as she was off her line. Back to square one for Leicester and it felt like it was all going to slip from here. An Issy Goodwin header from a free kick delivered into the box put us in at half time 2-1 down and normal service was resumed.
Into the second half, Williams was replaced with Noemie Mouchon and Chantelle Swaby came off injured early on and we replaced her with Lehmann. A defender for an attacker was a positive move and putting some legs up top between the two of them and pushing for a goal was the only realistic move if we were going to get anything. But like all calculated risks in life, Leicester were immediately punished, swiftly and severely a minute later with a goal from Malou Rylov.
From this one hour mark, we surprisingly almost finished losing 3-1, not a good result but not a battering. But then in the 87th and 89th minute, Geyoro and Godfrey added another two goals to take this into drubbing territory and with that the game and the season were pretty much done, despite both being foregone conclusions.
I write music reviews as well and sometimes I give something a bad review and I take a little bit of joy in writing them. There’s is joy in spicing up a take down of music that you feel is boring or pretentious.
But watching a team I would like to win struggle to produce anything of note week by week is tough and I take no joy in their failures at all. The saving grace here is that we might score some goals and win some games in WSL 2, but it’s just as likely we’ll end up sat mid-table after losing some of our better players.
The landscape of women’s football is dramatically changing and Leicester City need to find their place within it.
The Fosse Way 