A defeat to Ipswich reserves and a goalless draw at MK Dons is not a combination of results that suggest the Leicester City tanker is turning around. Au contraire, Blackadder, a brighter future is upon us. Or it might be. If no one messes it all up. Which they might.
In the short term, at least, last Saturday’s defeat to Burton Albion has eliminated the suspended Oliver Skipp and the “injured” Caleb Okoli from contention. With the result that the two teams Russell Martin has selected since have been packed with new, younger faces.
It is difficult to ask Leicester City supporters – of which there were almost 6,000 in Milton Keynes – to be patient. Five years of needless decline is enough to erode the trust of all but the most loyal King Power acolytes. Patience and trust has to be earned, and it can no longer be earned by words alone.
The only way for Martin to rebuild the relationship between the team and the fans, and win them over to his style and methods is to be brave in his decisions. To take the risk of picking raw talents in the knowledge that sometimes he is going to be burnt by the lack of experience and ultimately, by the fact they may not have enough quality to take Leicester back up.
How he treats those senior players who remain at the club beyond Tuesday’s transfer deadline will be the first real test of his mettle. Because for all the failings of the last couple of games, there is the potential of an exciting Leicester City side in the group that took the short journey to Milton Keynes.
Let’s Pretend We’ve Scored a Goal
We may as well deal with the elephant in the room first. Which is, of course, that Leicester neither won this game nor managed to score a goal. If you so choose, you can look at this as yet another example of our brave boys having 75% possession and struggling to create clear-cut chances.
The reality is though that Leicester created more than enough chances to win this game and, on another day, would have won it quite comfortably. Shots are a pretty brute force assessment of performance but we are at least having more of them in this brief post-Skipoli era: 22 against Ipswich on Tuesday night, another 24 today.
These numbers reflect more intent, more vertical passing trying to break the lines. Replacing Skipp and Okoli with Louis Page and (indirectly) Christian McFarlane has made a difference. Page is a properly creative midfielder, capable of spraying the ball around from a deeper central role. Meanwhile shifting the centre backs around so that Harry Souttar is on the right side and partnered with Luke Thomas has dramatically improved the range of passing from deeper positions.
Souttar in particular had an excellent game, stepping up into the Milton Keynes half to dominate aerially and allow Leicester to constantly win the ball back high up the pitch, then playing passes into or even beyond the forward line. These direct balls created three good chances; a snap shot for Sammy Braybrooke, an opportunity for Conor Chaplin to play in Jayden Joseph, and a superb, gilt-edged opportunity for Leicester to take the lead.
Unfortunately, this latter chance fell to Bobby De Cordova Reid, who spent the first 32 minutes of the game once again masquerading as a striker, with predictable consequences. He ran onto the ball, and shanked a half volley wide of the left upright.
Such is the way of the world with the make-up of the squad. When Chaplin went off injured, Martin rectified the mistake by introducing Admir Bristric, but the horse had bolted. Bristric had some half chances – one nice turn and shot that was deflected over in particular – and he has shown flashes of good link-up play. Overall, though, he looks raw, and he can’t carry the goalscoring burden on his own. At times, he was pushed off the ball too easily and didn’t anticipate the play well enough. Had he done, he would certainly have scored from a Harry Howell knock-down in injury time.
It’s obvious to everyone that Leicester have to find another striker in the next couple of days. De Cordova Reid is not a serious option, and we need more physicality leading the line, even if only as the elusive “Plan B”. Towards the end it felt like it was worth shoving Souttar up front again in another Steve Walsh tribute act.
With some exciting wide options now, there has to be some kind of outlet for their dynamic, skillful running. Wes Burns had a poor game here, but offers the threat of crosses from the right, while all the other options can cut in and put in balls to the back post, or drive past their man and cut the ball back. You could see the potential of those moves, just you always felt like the danger was theoretical rather than actual.
One thing the team did well, at least, was to maintain pressure for long stretches of the second half. By pinning MK Dons back and then pushing up to the half way line, every clearance went to Souttar, who could restart the attack. This had the added benefit of making the football quite fun to watch, and if they can recreate this at home games with that extra cutting edge, the crowd will get behind them.
Turning Over the Page
The other notable aspect of this game was the performance of some of the younger players. Joseph was good again, offering support in attack and bailing the defence out with his pace a couple of times. Ideally, a right back with a decent shot on him wouldn’t be your most dangerous attacking weapon, but it is a surprisingly effective threat when you play this way.
Joseph ended up having four shots, one of which hit the bar. If Leicester can move the ball quick enough to keep teeing him up on the edge of the area he can realistically get a handful of bangers this season.
Of more pressing concern, however, is Page. Leicester have absolutely no business selling him before the deadline. Whatever money someone might be offering now, you feel like they will offer a lot more next summer. It’s hard to see how Leicester could find a replacement that offers anything like his range of passing in that deeper role without spending more money than we can afford.
His ability to be available in the middle of the park, then either bring the ball forward or spread it wide is unmatched in the current squad. Especially when you combine it with his physicality, which means he can hold players off under pressure, there’s no one else like him.
Add to this the fact he’s part of an academy that is haemorrhaging players and the blow to losing him would be immense. It’s an area where you wonder if the fans could make more of an impact: the Everton crowd campaigned so vociferously for them not to sell Harrison Armstrong, their latest academy graduate, during Saturday’s trip to Bournemouth that the club immediately backed down.
Issues like this might be more effective ways of putting pressure on the leadership than the general anti-Rudkin or anti-board chants. Coming out of this window having lost an entire generation of young talent and replaced them with Chaplin, Burns, and Brighton’s youth team on loan would be a calamity.
On the Other Hand
As this is Leicester City, despite various positive signs, there were of course assorted moments of madness that reminded you how fragile this whole thing is. They should have won this game, yet almost got sucker-punched twice in injury time.
One of the challenges of being a favourite in every game is that the onus is on you to win. Given the winless start, that felt even more acute on Saturday and is only going to feel even more so the longer we go without one.
The pressure of the situation is going to be a real problem if and when Leicester go behind, particularly at home, and it rears its head late in games that are level, like this one. A loss would have been catastrophic given the pattern of the game, but by throwing bodies forward trying to win it meant the last few minutes descended into end-to-end chaos.
Leicester were fortunate that MK Dons blew their two opportunities with two pretty tame efforts, one header over the bar and one shot straight at Jakub Stolarczyk for their only shot on target.
There is also an overall air of precariousness about the whole thing because going behind is a doomsday scenario. The goalkeeper is one part of this, a man prone to acts of total stupidity which do not lend themselves to a team that needs the defence to avoid dropping them in a hole at all costs.
Five minutes in, Stolarczyk dealt with a long ball into the right back channel by flying out of his goal and failing to get there, only to be bailed out by the MK Dons attack failing to work a shot into his open net. At any moment he’s liable to wildly swing at a corner, or flop to the floor. We are studiously avoiding too much talk about the goalkeeper situation as there are plenty of other places to direct our concern and/or ire, suffice to say the manager swapping them two games into the season suggests a teensy bit of a problem.
Then there are other sloppy mistakes, like Burns inexplicably hitting a 60 yard, cross-field ball from right wing into his side’s vacant left back spot to prompt an MK Dons attack. Plus the lack of experience towards the end, leaving themselves too open to counter attacks.
Some of these things can be fixed, but it will be a lot easier to do so with a couple of wins under our belts. Until then, this air of threat and anxiety will remain. Had one of those late Leicester chances gone in, it would have felt like the season had begun in earnest. Had one of the MK Dons breakaways gone in, there would have been a mutiny in the away end and Martin would have been under severe pressure.
Such is football. But this is a club badly in need of a few weeks of calm. There were enough signs here to believe that we could get that with this group of players. It just relies on a similar act of calm in the boardroom over the next couple of days.
Can they simultaneously remove the vestiges of the old regime that could still poison the season? Your Skipps, Okolis, Mavididis, Faes-s? Can they keep the few prospects that promise a better future? Your Pages, your Hutchinsons? And can they sign literally any functioning human striker to give this team a cutting edge?
Place your bets.
