It’s fascinating to see how the media and wider football fanbase chooses to expect Leicester City to still be the Leicester sides of years past before continued mismanagement led us all the way down. The same folks that didn’t see last year’s relegation coming think we’re magically fixed, somehow.
I purposely disengaged for a few weeks to try and protect my sanity so I don’t proclaim to have seen every league prediction but the lowest I’ve seen us in any table is fourth, courtesy of the Opta supercomputer. Those non-Leicester fans watching us in the opening few minutes of this game must have been scratching their heads while we scrabbled to not concede.
This time ten years ago we were opening our season as the reigning Premier League champions. Notts County were in League Two, but only three years ago they’d dropped to non-league. That’s the beauty, or pain if you’re a Leicester fan, of being a football fan. We’re now a level playing field. Most of those same league predictions also had Notts County in one of the four relegation spots.
The real season got underway with no signs of bolstering our defensive line, a captain who’s looking for the exit, one actual striker in the whole squad and spoiler alert, he didn’t start. What could possibly go wrong for Russell Martin’s men? But hey, at least Stephy Mavididi and Wout Faes were nowhere near the squad.
Those playing the which goalkeeper would be number one game who successfully guessed that Alex McCarthy wasn’t joining just to bring ‘experience’ were right. He made his league debut alongside other new recruits Wes Burns and Liam Cullen. Our other new recruits were all on the bench aside from the injured Conor Chaplin. A bench spot for Admir Bristric consigned us all to another miserable game of Bobby De Cordova-Reid as the lone ‘striker’.
For those whose excitement, hope, or both are rooted in seeing some of our academy talents prosper this year, you were at least rewarded with the trio of Jayden Joseph, Will Alves, Sammy Braybrooke starting and the three linked up beautifully for our goal.
The game could have gone entirely differently after McCarthy and De Cordova-Reid (no, we don’t know why he was so far back either) decided to mess around from a goal-kick just 6 minutes in. But you’ve seen this script before, 69% possession, 562 completed passes but only two shots on target. No big chances, in comparison to Notts County’s six. There weren’t many positives for Leicester, but the academy trio provided the most hope.
The kids stand out
He didn’t quite make it to the full 90 minutes played, but in the first half at least, Will Alves was the bright spark for Leicester. He was enjoying a lot of success down the left wing as well as cutting inside and every good attacking move involved him.
Having given up on trying to feed our ‘striker’, Alves was unlucky not to score a long-range effort that had the goalkeeper reaching and ultimately was just over and wide. It would have been a deserving goal for his efforts in trying to get our attack going and in injecting some pace and momentum.
Alves had a quieter second half, perhaps still getting back up to full resilience after some tough years but had his moments again. Braybrooke also shone in his, working to get us forward and offsetting some of the poor passing on show from Oliver Skipp who struggled for the most part.
The three youngsters who started offered up the more convincing overall performances, and it was no surprise that they were involved in the goal. Alves started the move before a neat pass to Braybrooke who saw JJ 3.0’s run. The 20-year-old finished the move impressively. After being the victim of a fairly rough challenge in the first half, it was good to see him come out unscathed.
Even more impressive is Joseph’s ability to look good in a defensive line that was, for the most part, atrocious. He came across as one of the more composed ones and wasn’t to blame for the moments of chaos and the majority of chances we gave up.
There was something in the way that the youngsters presented themselves, it’s hard not to think that they all look like they care a little more than their supposed senior counterparts. They certainly outperformed the more senior players in what has become a recurring theme for us now.
You might not win anything with kids, but you’ll certainly spend a lot less time raging at inadequate, overpaid players. Which brings us on to the less than positive takeaways.
Begging for an actual striker
If you were going to criticise Alves for anything today, it might be how many times he tried to pass it to or set up De Cordova-Reid only to see him miss it, tap it with no power or fall over. The chances Alves was helping to create could have been capitalised on with an actual striker, which is the joint-biggest problem for Martin’s side. We’ll get to to the other one.
Our wingers were making moves and getting balls into the box. But without an actual striker in there, it’s little surprise that we had so few shots or chances. The best chance that De Cordova-Reid had was entirely wasted, falling while trying to hit it resulting in a tame shot straight at the goalkeeper. Wes Burns showed some promise on the other wing, but also put his eggs in the BDCR basket following a good run, only to see the striker again hit the ball tamely allowing the defender time to charge in and clear the ball away.
Too often he dropped so deep he was playing the role of the man for Alex McCarthy to pass out to, which didn’t appear to make much sense. In previous games, perhaps we’d have said at least he worked hard and committed well, but even that didn’t seem to be the case here. When he was eventually substituted, it was for Hamza Choudhury before we finally got Admir Bristric on.
It’s hard to draw many conclusions from the Bristric cameo we got, though he at least won a header because take out the centre backs and this is a very small team. When we did attempt a long goal-kick before getting Bristric on the pitch, it felt pointless. Hopefully with another week of training in the squad, our (League One) answer to Edin Dzeko will be ready for a start against Burton. Because we’re just setting ourselves up to fail by playing De Cordova-Reid up top again and again.
This isn’t just a pile-in on BDCR though. It’s more the saxophones getting louder and louder on the squad issues and having any faith in the hierarchy to address them in a timely manner. While the early transfer business got rid of a few of the problem children and stupid wages, there’s lots still to be done.
Easier said than done in some cases. Luke Thomas and Hamza Choudhury should be on the cull list, but we kept extending their contracts and they’re hardly going to be in high demand. Bobby falls into this camp, but it’s hard to think he should be anything but a back-up squad player.
Mavididi and Faes are hopefully on the way out. Cue their squad omission, but we’ve rejected bids because we have numbers in mind to try and recoup some of the money we’ve wasted on them both in fee and wages. Yes, we got one striker in, but Martin admitted that with the likes of the Nelson injury and who might leave, we have bigger issues to focus on than a striker. Though this seems short-sighted, were our new Bosnian man to get injured and/or suspended.
This is years of poor decisions and now with financial limitations peppered in.
FROZEN IN TIME
The ‘0 days since…’ meme is rife for use on Leicester City in recent years. This season’s iteration is going to be ‘0 days since a stupid goal conceded’ and I expect to append ‘from passing out from the back’ onto it more than we’d like. We made it longer than in the Northampton game before almost achieving this meme (5 minutes this time!), but that’s twice we’ve lucked out. Something suggests a clanger is coming, and soon.
Instead, we were treated to a different comedy goal. One in which a number of professional footballers should know, and do, better. It started with a header that hit the post from Emile Acquah. Alex McCarthy didn’t move or react at all to that or to the loose ball. That’s ok, we have centre backs for that, right?
Wrong. Harry Souttar stood still with his hand in the arm making no efforts to get to the ball or stop any of the County men around him. Perhaps forgetting that he actually isn’t in a different team, one playing in a league where there’s VAR and that playing to the whistle is the bare minimum.
He’s the worst offender but Okoli and Choudhury were also statues. The only player making any attempt to keep a goal out was Harry Howell, but otherwise Conor Grant was left basically unopposed and easily converted the chance from six yards out to level the game.
An embarrassing goal and you have to feel it’s not the worst we’re capable of based on the chances we gave up today. Because we’re going to keep on playing out from the back despite not having players capable of doing it, or certainly not doing it well. We’re going to rely on Caleb Okoli to keep making horrifying passes across his own goal and watching Luke Thomas get wrestled off balls and fumble every decision.
If you didn’t watch this game and were using Flashscore to try and get a feel for how the game went, assume that it’s crossed over to AI hallucination territory because it has Thomas down as our outstanding player. While a few of us hoped this would be a level for Thomas to excel at, based on this performance, that was a dream.
Our new number one didn’t do much to alleviate the concerns Southampton fans had about him either, the speed at which he reacted to everything was glacially slow, you’d be tempted to accuse him of arrogance if you didn’t know his age. He was incredibly fortunate to only be picking the ball out of his own net once.
Everybody knows what style of football you’re getting from a Russell Martin team. You don’t have to love it, but it’s glaringly obvious that without some more moves in the transfer window, we don’t have the squad to play it. Not successfully anyway.
How the rest of our season could go will hinge on two things, one is the recruitment which Martin has minimal control over. However, it is in his gift to stop playing the same old faces and go bolder with his selections. A home crowd will be much less forgiving if we’re served up this line-up again.
