Pele chimes in
“The more difficult the victory, the greater the happiness in winning”. Not my words, the words of Pele. But they feel apt in the wake of a 3-0 home win over a team bottom of the third division.
As with the 4-0 success at Bromley last week, there was a clear discrepancy between the resources available to Leicester City and Wigan Athletic. Unlike at Bromley, the entertainment value was pretty low.
Fans voted with their feet for this one, empty patches of seats dotted throughout the stadium creating a lunar atmosphere on the first Tuesday night after the clocks went back. But we’ll come to that later.
Before kick-off, the focus was on a seat left empty for a very different reason. This game took place on the 8th anniversary of the helicopter crash that killed Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, Kaveporn Punpare, Nusara Suknamai, Eric Swaffer and Izabela Roza Lechowicz. Whatever your feelings about King Power, Vichai’s son Aiyawatt or the direction of the club since Vichai’s death, this is always an important occasion to recognise and the club and supporters do it well.
Russell Martin replaced the suspended John Lundstram with full debutant Will Smallbone, while Sammy Braybrooke was benched to accommodate Conor Chaplin. Martin kept faith with Caleb Okoli, who had provided the main talking point at Luton with his brainfreeze leading to the home side’s opening goal.
The game began with little to report other than the three yellow cards dished out in the first ten minutes – Smallbone’s sandwiched by bookings for Reggie Walsh and Jeremiah Chilokoa-Mullen as Wigan attempted to put their foot in.
The signing of Emil Riis has already transformed Leicester from a team that scored 5 goals in their first 6 games to one with a striker who has 7 in 9. Keep Riis fit and Leicester will certainly make the play-offs at the least. He’s more than a handful at this level and provides a focal point for the attack that’s been missing in Leicester’s slide through the divisions.
Riis had just hit the bar with a shot that diverted off both defender and goalkeeper when he scored his opening goal of the evening. Okoli competed well to flick on a corner at the near post and another deflection took the ball to the back post where Riis tapped it into the net.
It all had the feel of a routine home win, yet that isn’t Russell Martin’s MO. There will always be something to make you question whether we’re getting the best out of having this many players who are clearly accomplished at League One level.
Because in the five minutes after Leicester took the lead, Wigan wasted two glorious chances to hit straight back. First, Scott Hogan was sent clear of the defence and Alex McCarthy was forced into a save with his feet. Shortly afterwards, Dara Costelloe perhaps showed why he’s a striker with 5 goals in 57 games for Wigan by dragging a shot wide when it looked easier to pass the ball into a largely unguarded net.
Leicester managed to see out the rest of the first half without any similar scares, while not threatening too much at the other end. A series of blocked shots edged the xG up incrementally but the main positive was an excellent driving run from Louis Page which injected some much-needed pace into the game.
Wing-back chat
One brief concern arrived at the start of the second half when Conor Chaplin played a blind pass straight to an opponent which led to a glimpse of goal for Hogan. Okoli got back well to block.
There was an assumption when Chaplin signed that he would be effective in League One. There were an awful lot of fans pointing to his 26 goals for Ipswich when they were promoted from this division in 2022/23 as evidence he would be too good for it. Restricted by injury, Chaplin hasn’t got going yet but there’s already a bit of pressure on him to perform given that Leicester have been stockpiling players in his position.
There were plenty of moments in this game when Leicester’s lack of pace was stark. If Chaplin or the even slower Kamari Doyle got the ball just inside the Wigan half, the options were often either to try a through ball for Riis or to go backwards.
Taking Braybrooke out of the side removed that spark we saw at Bromley. Where most teams would have pace supporting the lone striker or bursting forward from wing-back, Leicester had Chaplin, Doyle, Luke Thomas and Will Alves. It was enough to beat Wigan but it looked like a problem waiting to happen against a better team.
Alves is by far the quickest of that quartet but his best asset is his close control rather than breakneck speed. Nonetheless, he was again one of the best players on the pitch and has taken well to a surprising wing-back role. It will be interesting to see what happens when Jayden Joseph returns from injury. Both should be among the first names on the team sheet.
Ten minutes into the second half, Alves played two excellent crosses in from the right. Riis couldn’t direct the first one goalwards from an awkward height. The second was claimed by Joe Whitworth in the Wigan goal.
It’s refreshing to see dangerous deliveries from out wide, given that we’ve spent recent years watching inverted wingers and even inverted full-backs who haven’t been able to make space on the outside and whip crosses into the box. There have been plenty of question marks over Alves’s best position. Wherever he plays, he tends to be one of the most exciting players on the pitch.
The same has rarely been said of the other wing-back, but maybe Alves helped influence Luke Thomas. A couple of minutes prior to Alves’s pair of crosses, Thomas managed to take a situation in which the crowd was urging him to shoot from outside the box and play a dangerous backward pass which Alves had to retrieve with two Wigan players pressing.
The next impact made by the home side was the second goal and it was crafted by a delicious Thomas cross for Riis to touch home at the near post.
After the game, Martin’s comments about Thomas drew some incredulity from supporters.
“Luke is one of the most resilient and intelligent footballers I have ever met… I love Luke. His assist was so good and he was playing a different position. He is so important to us.”
For those of us who have spent most of the past five years patiently waiting for Leicester to sign a consistently competent left-back, these are strange comments. They have to be viewed in the context of playing for a Russell Martin team in League One rather than the catalogue of errors Thomas has made over a number of years. Even so, eyebrows deserved to be raised.
If you didn’t see the game and wonder what Martin meant when he said Thomas played in a different position, then it’s our solemn duty to inform you that Luke Thomas played the final ten minutes of this game in central midfield.
Yet that isn’t as bad as it sounds, because it created the opportunity for the best cameo of the season so far: teenage Finnish giant Ilari Kangasniemi slotting in at left wing-back and channelling his inner Dan Burn to rampage up and down the pitch causing chaos.
He should have been played through by fellow sub Bobby De Cordova-Reid for a chance on goal. He almost won a penalty, shortly before Souttar did and De Cordova-Reid made it 3-0. Essentially, Kangasniemi provided more entertainment in ten minutes than almost everybody else did in the preceding eighty.
The big picture
As the players set off on a slow sweep of the pitch to applaud the home support, the gaps in the stands that greeted them told their own story.
It’s hard not to think back to Rob Tanner’s article for The Athletic last week following Leicester fans on the coaches to Bromley. Brilliantly titled “Win or lose, we’re all miserable now”, it was an accidentally hilarious masterpiece that shone a light on the divide in the fanbase.
In fact, Linda Ginnetta may have provided some insight into all those empty seats when she said “ten years ago we were in Copenhagen but I think the problem is some fans are still there”.
The common thread running through the retention of Jon Rudkin, the appointment of Russell Martin and the views of those on the bus to Bromley is an attitude towards a section of the fanbase that veers between disregard and contempt.
Another supporter quoted in The Athletic’s article said: “Some of us remember it being worse. It isn’t as bad as it was under David Pleat.” Of course, it is objectively worse being mid-table in the third division than it was being towards the bottom of the second division. But if you’ve already decided what happens on the pitch will never dictate your attendance, are you the kind of supporter a club should be wanting to appeal to, or someone they can take for granted while others drift away?
How do Leicester retrieve those fans who are drifting away before it’s too late? This is an important question. In the absence of more exciting football or footballers, or a manager far more fans can identify with, wins will help and there will be a bigger attendance on Saturday.
But we shouldn’t pretend winning is the only thing that matters for a club way below its natural place in the football pyramid. It’s okay to have standards. It’s okay to admit that, for a lot of fans, this is a holding pattern, that it’s not going to be exciting until we win against the kind of opponents we should be playing. Until it’s difficult again and we still prevail, in the way most of us – not Rudkin, or King Power, or those on the bus to Bromley – see Leicester City’s true identity.
