Meet you back here afterwards?
It used to be safe to arrange to meet someone outside the away end after a Leicester City home game. For those of us who forgot that hasn’t been the case for some time, watching Oxford United fans streaming out of the King Power Stadium in disbelief at one of their greatest league results this century was an unnecessary postscript to another demoralising afternoon.
This is only the 12th time we’ve played Oxford at home in a league match. Thanks to Abdul Fatawu’s consolation in last season’s 2-1 defeat, we’d never lost by more than one goal – until yesterday.
Now they join the ranks of teams who have beaten us by at least three goals since the departure of Enzo Maresca in the summer of 2024 alongside Manchester United (twice), Newcastle United (twice), Wolverhampton Wanderers (twice), Everton, Brentford, Southampton and Queen’s Park Rangers.
The names on that list are getting decreasingly reputable. At least when it was Manchester United they’d spent more than £6million assembling their team.
Yet how times have changed at Leicester, who only paid a fee for 4 of the 16 players who participated in this latest catastrophe. Of those 4, one – Wes Burns – was reported to have cost a nominal fee of around £75,000. Two – the strikers Emil Riis and Admir Bristric – arrived for low seven-figure fees.
That leaves Harry Souttar, who can’t have thought he’d be turning out for Leicester City in League One when he was playing in the World Cup this summer any more than when he signed for £15million plus add-ons three and a half years ago.
Souttar looks like someone’s dad who’s been invited to have a kickabout at the best of times but he’s really leaning into the impression this season, lumbering around in a half-arsed fashion while the kids dribble around him. A half-drunk can of lager wouldn’t look out of place in his hand.
Anyway, despite daydreaming through another game like he’s wishing he’d hidden in Hamza Choudhury’s hair for the trip to Sheffield, he’s the captain.
When the second Oxford goal went in yesterday, the players did their familiar routine of standing around vaguely near each other with their hands on their hips. There was no rallying of the troops. There was no change of plan. There were just a lot of new faces experiencing the same deluge of fury from the stands that the likes of Jannik Vestergaard, Harry Winks and Jordan Ayew have moved on from.
Blaming children
By full time, the players in blue facing the wrath of the few home fans to remain in the stands included Olabade Aluko, Jayden Joseph, Louis Page, Sammy Braybrooke and three of Brighton’s Under 21 team.
If these youngsters were caught in the crossfire of fans’ fury with Russell Martin, this game will probably be remembered as much for Martin’s post-match interview as for the conveyor belt of counter-attacking Oxford goals.
Where most fans are seeing a vacuum of positive contributions from the experienced members of the team – no leadership, no physicality, no impact – Martin swung completely the other way and blamed a lack of experience for the collapse.
If you’re advising a teenager in Leicester’s academy about their future right now, no wonder Manchester City looks inviting. Sure, Leicester might give you minutes. Then you’ll find yourself surrounded by mediocre veterans, booed if you make a mistake and thrown under the bus by the manager.
The contrast between the two players in the number ten and right winger positions for each club couldn’t have been more stark. One pair accumulated a goal and three assists between them. Neither of the other duo lasted an hour.
No prizes for guessing that was the Leicester men. This club’s quest to shoehorn “experienced” players into the team in attacking positions continued with the selection of Bobby De Cordova-Reid and Wes Burns, who were both abject.
In the same positions, Oxford fielded Kai Andrews, a 20-year-old on loan from Coventry, and Mo Missanga, an 18-year-old who hasn’t even got a Wikipedia page at the time of writing. That will surely change very soon after a stellar display.
Missanga laid on the first goal of the afternoon by making a simple run in behind loanee left-back Christian McFarlane and crossing low for Mark Harris, who miskicked before bundling the ball in with his elbow.
It would be simple to blame McFarlane, whose decision to push out to press nobody while leaving Missanga behind him was admittedly inexplicable. But this is another one that can be laid at the door of the “Chief Football Officer”, given that we’re currently trying to play Russell Martin’s style of football with a left-back whose grand total of senior first-team appearances prior to joining the club was eight games for New York City in the summer of 2024.
The senior left-back is playing centre-back. He is also Luke Thomas, who, on more than one occasion yesterday, attempted to prevent an Oxford goal with some impromptu breakdancing.
Thomas laid into McFarlane after the second goal. Again, you could see the mistake. McFarlane seemed to be trying to catch a man offside who wasn’t being presented with the ball. Leicester conceded a similar goal not only in the first half but in the first home league game of the season against Burton: a simple ball down the wing followed by a low cross for an attacker who had run free of the two centre-backs. It’s the ultimate “how has that happened?” goal.
Competent teams don’t ever concede goals like this, let alone three times in the first three home league games of the season.
Say “energy” again, I double dare you…
Goals like that make it very hard to argue with Leicester’s current plight. The third and fourth were no better. This situation is fully deserved for so many reasons, even when the officiating seems slightly bizarre.
It’s also impossible to evaluate a game like this solely on its own merits without looking at the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is a floppy-haired man in baggy trousers who appears to have made a bet with his mates to get the word “energy” into his post-match interviews as many times as possible.
The latest episode of OPA x Russell Martin after the game included a promise from Martin that this won’t happen again. Yet this always looks a possibility when League One players are asked to play like Barcelona. It happened to Oxford at Huddersfield on Tuesday, when they enjoyed 62% possession but didn’t enjoy conceding 26 shots, 9 big chances and 3 goals.
Ahead of yesterday’s game between two possession-centric sides, we waited to see which team would play the Leicester 5 role and which team would play the Southampton 0 role. In the end, Russell Martin played the Russell Martin role.
It was a reminder for those of us who tried to see Tuesday as a reset that the real chance for a reset came last summer. Now, having signed his mates, the club are all in on a manager who looks increasingly like yesterday’s man and many fans are left hoping that a takeover means a swift switch in the dugout.
The central issue is that this league demands intensity and, on the evidence so far, Martin’s style is completely incompatible with that need. Instead, it breeds the kind of complacency that has dogged the club for years. In that sense, Russell Martin is, sadly, a perfect fit for Leicester City.
On the rare occasions when Martin isn’t talking about energy, he makes numerous references to running and fighting. But the enduring images from this game belied the natural end product of his approach: Luke Thomas advancing slowly up the pitch while telegraphing the pass he was always going to make; full-backs hastily retreating when turned around by passes in behind the high defensive line; midfielders constantly asked to play wall passes back to defenders instead of turning into space.
This summer, Leicester could have taken a new direction. The fact is that they ignored the chance to align with the crowd and they doubled down on a style that few teams are persisting with. Crucially, they don’t even appear to have signed the players to play it. The proof of the pudding will be long-term but a performance and a result like this shouldn’t even be a possibility, let alone a familiar sight.
Martin’s post-match comments were concerning but the way forward in the short-term is clear, even accounting for an unwanted style of play. De Cordova-Reid, Burns and the “tonight Matthew, Luke Thomas will be Lisandro Martinez” experiment have got to go.
We have to pray the promising early signs of true leadership and responsibility shown by Warren O’Hora and John Lundstram in their opening interviews are reflected on the pitch as soon as possible. Emil Riis looked capable up front if given more energetic support. Maybe Franco Ravizzoli will prove himself to be more than just the new Fran Vieites.
And one poor game doesn’t make Louis Page or Sammy Braybrooke anything less than terrifically exciting young players handed very difficult roles. They deserve better from those around them. The pressure should be on the experienced players, not the young ones.
During Leicester City’s only previous season in the third tier of English football, they lost one home game. We’re five games into September and the 2026 edition has already doubled that tally thanks to the two worst league defeats in the club’s history.
While Tuesday’s victory gave hope that this team could put a run together, Saturday evening became a familiar exercise in finding something to take our minds off football.
Next Saturday, Leicester City travel to Stockport County, two days before the tenth anniversary of the club’s first Champions League game.
