When Asmir Begovic kicked the ball straight to Hull’s Liam Millar recently, he didn’t just destroy any chance of us staying up. He detonated two beliefs which dominate Leicester City Football Club: that experience is king and that playing like Manchester City is, quite literally, the way forward.
Here was a 39-year-old keeper making the kind of balls-up that would embarrass an under-9 keeper. Taking an unnecessary risk at a vital stage of a vital match is exactly what experience is meant to insure against.
During this horrible season, we missed three penalties. The culprits? Jordan Ayew (34), Bobby De Cordova-Reid (33) and Patson Daka (27). So much for the wastefulness of youth.
But placing faith in experience isn’t even close to the most serious delusion afflicting our football club right now. That accolade falls to the seemingly eternal determination to play like Manchester City. But without access to the kind of money and talent that the Citizens have.
Those resources are vital to their success. Pep-ball demands more of players. And when those players are the best money can buy, it’s a viable strategy to ask more of them.
But in the hands of the mediocre and mundane, possession football can look like a Fiat 500 driver trying to park a Formula One car at Morrisons. Which is pretty much what we’ve been watching for the past few seasons.
Enzoball = Pepball = Success
Famously, Enzo Maresca’s primary joining instruction from the Leicester City hierarchy was to get the team to play like Manchester City.
The Italian, and his loquacious representative on earth Guillem Balague, were all too happy to expand on the advantages of the Pep-ball philosophy.
Retain possession and the opposition can’t score. Even better, they tire themselves out trying to wrest back the ball. Inverted full backs create an extra man in midfield. Endlessly recycling the ball when the way to goal is blocked breeds opposition fatigue. Which leads to mistakes.
And of course, playing out from the back (and across it), keeps possession assured, drags the opposition forward, leaving space to exploit behind.
Like many an ideology it all sounds so deliciously obvious and simple.
The style delusion
The delusion is that opponents will be so blinded by your stylish superiority, they will have no choice but to be taken in.
One tactics guru once purred that Jannik Vestergaard rolling the ball under his foot was an essential ingredient of Enzo’s success at Leicester – part of teasing opponents into pressing forwards leaving space beyond them.
But why not let the Dane have the ball 70 yards out, from where no goal will ever be scored? Why not watch him kid himself he’s controlling the game and take a breather? Then wait for a misplaced pass in the backline and literally walk the ball into the net. Sound familiar?
That inverted full back certainly offers an extra pass option in central midfield, but it also means – wait for it – there’s no full back! One wing is abandoned and left open to counterattack.
Constant recycling of attacking possession loses the support of fans, as minutes of unthreatening possession drag by.
Pep-ball is the ultimate triumph of style over substance. One which has managers scratching their heads when shown the possession stats. How did we lose that?
Back to Brendan
“In the first half I wasn’t happy at all,” Brendan Rodgers told BBC Radio Leicester In April 2021, after we’d beaten West Bromwich Albion 3-0. “We weren’t precise enough with our passing. In the second half we controlled the game.”
So frustrated was he with that first half performance that the usually unflustered Irishman kicked over a row of water bottles.
Yet here’s the thing. After 36 minutes of that imprecise passing, Leicester were 3-0 up. And after a half time rollicking for the players, and 45 minutes of controlled passing, we were still 3-0 up.
Rodgers also became obsessed with players “taking the ball in tight areas” (i.e. playing and receiving highly risky passes in their own half to entice opponents into over-committing).
Kelechi Iheanacho would score a couple of goals to win a game and Rodgers would show his gratitude post-match by emphasising the Nigerian’s need to improve his game “out of possession.” Who cares about goals?
Long-form profile interviews would invariably observe that Rodgers was considered a candidate to succeed Pep Guardiola. He’d taken the Manchester City pill.
Enzo Maresca had his own, less dramatic, water bottle moment.
He refused to accept that Leicester’s 5-0 demolition of Southampton was the team’s best performance of the season. This was a dominant, attacking and season-turning victory – a rarity among the plethora of narrow, efficient wins which won us the Championship.
It took place after a player meeting organised by Jamie Vardy. Could it be that they decided, for one night only, they’d abandon the straitjacket of Enzo-ball?
An ode to joylessness
Playing the Manchester City way involves a huge amount of team discipline. The pitch is covered with invisible boxes which specific players are required to control.
One of the squad complaints that emerged about Steve Cooper was that unlike Enzo, he didn’t tell the players where they should be and what they should do in any given situation.
When briefly enthused by Maresca, similar murmurings emerged from Chelsea. Players there marvelled at his attention to detail – citing his insistence that passes should not just be aimed at a teammate, but at a specific foot, even a specific part of the foot of a teammate.
But such iron-clad instruction can produce sterile football and kill the individual risk-taking that is the joy of the sport.
Watch Harvey Barnes in one of his many man-of-the match performances for West Brom. He was everywhere. Right wing, left wing, central. He’d burst from his own half and inevitably set up a goalscoring chance.
By the time he left Leicester, he’d become robotic. Repeating the same few movements, from the same part of the pitch, time and time again.
I remember a thrilling dribble once taking him right to the six-yard box. Finding his shooting lanes blocked by opponents, he promptly turned around and dribbled back to his starting point, before playing a harmless pass back to our left back.
Harry “Sideways”
The player that most embodies style-over-substance football is the one Spurs fans still call Harry “Sideways.” One recently told me: “Winks had a sky-high pass completion rate because he never passed the ball forwards.”
Yet Enzo deemed him central to implementing his style of football and demanded we sign him. He’s often described as “our most technically gifted player.”
Pressed on what this opaque formulation means, Winks’s cheerleaders will normally mention the metronome. He’s someone who regulates the footballing tune, they say. He sets the rhythm of the game.
But crucially, metronomes produce no music of their own. Musicians have to do that. In his 100 appearances for our club Harry “Sideways” has just nine goal involvements. In musical terms that’s the sound of silence.
An obsession with “Man City” football creates this upside-down world in which coaches care less about results and more about their team conforming to whiteboard routines. Where players are venerated despite having little effect on the outcome of actual matches.
Defenders are signed on their ability to “play through the lines”, rather than on their ability to defend. Goalkeepers who pass and control with their feet are more highly prized than those whose skillset is essentially keeping goal.
Full backs need to be supplementary midfielders who can cover two positions at once. And being a striker is as much about leading the press as scoring a goal or two.
But are such multi-skilled players to be found in football’s bargain basement?
Meanwhile, possession football coaches behave like members of a cult – never doubting their methods, continuing even as the defeats pile up.
New coach, same style?
Alarmingly, among the favourites to be the next Leicester manager is Russell Martin, one of these modern coaches who come with a very modern philosophy.
His style first caught the eye when, in 2021, his Milton Keynes Dons team strung together a record 56 passes before scoring against Gillingham.
What is rarely mentioned is that MK Dons lost the game 3-2 and finished 13th in League One that season. And since then his teams have largely been famous for the huge number of goals they concede.
Which chimes with Gary Rowett’s recent comment that his Leicester side seemed more interested in scoring the “perfect goal” than in securing three points.
So will a second successive relegation finally shake the club out of its style delusion?
A few weeks before the end of the season, Jordan Blackwell published a piece on Leicestershire Live indicating that the club would not retain Rowett even if he kept us in the Championship.
The thrust of the piece was that our new Sporting Director, James McCarron, after five years in the Manchester City set-up would want to appoint a manager who favoured possession football.
Blackwell isn’t prone to idle speculation and the piece, while undiplomatically timed, carried the ring of truth.
Meanwhile, West Bromwich Albion are preparing for another season in the Championship after looking odds-on for relegation under two managers with a philosophy. Their third, a club insider with no managerial experience, switched the formation to 4-4-2.
His team racked up 18 points in 11 games and secured survival. And there’s not a Baggie in the land who cares about his possession stats.
Manchester City no longer seem invincible and as Big Strong Leicester Boys podcaster Jordan Halford observed recently: “Even Man City don’t play like Man City these days.”
And for us? We prepare to drive our Formula One car on another shopping trip. But not to Morrisons. We’re off to Lidl.
The Fosse Way 