It has been a hundred years since a club entered the FA Cup at the first-round stage having won the competition as recently as Leicester City have. Oxford City’s MGroup Stadium may only be 50 miles from Wembley, but figuratively we may as well have played this game on the moon given how far we are from that stage.
Despite the chasm between the MGroup Stadium on a Friday night in November and the FA Cup Final, one player achieved the unlikely feat of starting in both. That is, of course, Luke Thomas, a man permanently just off whatever level you are playing at.
Imagine, for a moment, a genie had come to you in the aftermath of our famous triumph and offered you a glimpse into the future. When you peer into the lamp, what you see is Luke Thomas being rinsed by a non-league winger.
‘Wow’, you might think to yourself, ‘a shame to see Luke’s career fall off like that. Strange for the genie to show me this though, what does this have to do with established Premier League team Leicester City?’.
Then the picture comes into clearer focus and you realise what shirt Thomas is still wearing.
We have to move on from the past but it is going to take a long time to escape it. The fact the fall has happened so quickly that it is possible for one player to have played in the cup final and still be around, like some tragic reversal of the one-club man who makes it from League Two to the Premier League, shows how raw the whole thing is.
Just Like Watching Walsall
Leicester ultimately avoided the giant, cartoonish narrative banana skin that this game offered up. Though the prospect of the latest and greatest entrant to this season’s Worst Result in the Club’s History competition hung around a lot longer than it should.
There were stretches when various humiliating scenarios presented themselves, from Zac McEachran – alumni of the Vardy Academy and not even second-best player in his family – to Fernando Forestieri looming out of memories you had long suppressed.
The fact that these were dispatched to another timeline was largely thanks to the efforts of players we don’t own and who Russell Martin has no interest in playing. In the corridors of power, perhaps they’re considering whether to simply insert Brighton U21s into the second round and cut out the middleman.
These types of games are a no-win scenario for the bigger team. The only way to look even vaguely impressive is to stuff your opponent, and that doesn’t often happen. What you’re looking for is a professional run out; deal with the plastic pitch, the hordes of students, and the fact the stadium was ‘darker than they’ll be used to’, according to footballing sage, Martin Keown.
At the same time, danger lurks when the performance feeds into every stereotype you already believed. A dreadful League Cup display against Walsall more or less finished Steve Cooper by highlighting his ridiculous team selections and painfully boring approach.
This wasn’t as bad as that, though there are parallels. For starters, the fact that three of the starting XI that day also started this game – Thomas, who would probably survive nuclear Armageddon to slot in at left back in an irradiated Leicester City outfit, Caleb Okoli and Bobby De Cordova Reid. Then there is the fact that some of the worst aspects of Martin’s tactics were on display here.
The tactical approach feels like it should be irrelevant when you’re up against a bunch of semi-pros, four tiers below you in the pyramid. Leicester started the game with three players who played in the Premier League two years ago, multiple internationals, plenty of Championship pros and a young star being chased by Champions League sides. And yet!
Martin delivered a knockout blow for the importance of tactics by beginning the game with a set-up so apocalyptically bad that this group had about two shots in the first half and spent chunks of it being outplayed by a team mired in the National League North. At one stage he was having to desperately instruct his players to calm down as they reeled in the wake of Oxford’s equaliser.
To be a fly on the wall in the tactics truck would be an enlightening experience. There is the simple organisational stuff – three centre backs against a bunch of plumbers feels like too many centre backs – along with the personnel. Leicester spent swathes of the first 45 minutes passing slowly around midfield, each central defender quite literally passing responsibility onto the next.
Keown and Sam Matterface do not present the most invigorating listening experience, but they did offer comfort in the way they sounded appalled by some of Leicester’s play before the break. Keown’s “here we go, going backwards again” as the Foxes went from the edge of the Oxford box back into our own half was a particular highlight. As was his perplexed observation that “Leicester have given the ball away a lot”.
If there’s one thing everyone knows about these sorts of games, it’s that you want players who can run at defenders and take people on. Your opponents are probably going to be organised and physically strong, they are not going to be able to cope in 1v1s against professional footballers of a much higher standard. Slow, sideways passing is not the way to break them down.
Martin instead chose to start the game with approximately zero players with any ability to go past their man. We were treated to a wing back duo of Thomas and Bobby De Cordova-Reid, the sort of thing that should be submitted to a war crimes tribunal, and perhaps the slowest starting XI ever fielded in the hallowed history of the FA Cup.
By the time he rectified his mistake by bringing on Harry Howell for Okoli at half time, Leicester had taken the lead but had then contrived to give it away again by conceding direct from a corner.
At least he acted quickly, though it begs the question of what he was thinking beforehand. Because Howell effectively won the game on his own from then on. Oxford City had no answer to his direct running – obviously! He’s owned by a Premier League club! They’re part timers! – and he set up the next two goals for Emil Riis and Kamari Doyle. As soon as Tommy Watson came on, another player with the ability to run, he scored and finished things off.
In between, there was a period where it felt like true disaster was lurking, ready to strike. Leicester gave up another goal with yet more calamitous defending, both Thomas and John Lundstram giving the ball away before Josh Ashby burst through the centre back pairing like Frank Lampard in his prime.
The Prospect of Peril
And this is where we get to the nub of the problem. You’re never safe. This team fundamentally, deep at its core, cannot defend. Even a side from the sixth tier of English football was able to create a handful of chances, and Leicester looked likely to hand them a goal at any given moment. Playing out from the back is laced with danger at the best of times, it’s an act of insanity when the players are simply not good enough to do it.
Even a team at Oxford City’s level is able to run about near your defenders in the hope that they will randomly give them the ball in front of goal. The closest we came was Franco Ravizzoli hacking a backpass straight up in the air like a number eleven swinging across the line, but such a mistake felt imminent the entire game. Rarely has a player ever given off such a raw, almost evolutionary ick as Ravizzoli. Seeing him on the pitch is like how it must feel to be a turtle emerging from its shell and looking up to see a mysterious flying creature diving towards you: you don’t really understand what’s going on but you know it definitely isn’t good.
The secondary, related problem is when your forward players are too rubbish to take advantage when you do play through the press. At one stage, Leicester did indeed pull off the perfect bit of Martin-ball: lured Oxford City in by passing around defence, sprung the ball into midfield beautifully, and stormed forward on the break with half the opponents out of the game. Then the ball went out to De Cordova Reid and it bounced off him, so he had to turn and play it back to the defenders.
Martin has defended his continued inclusion of De Cordova Reid on the grounds of his “versatility”. So it was that our man played right wing-back and left wing-back and was absolutely rubbish in both. Which we suppose means that Martin was right, although it does raise the interesting philosophical question of whether it’s better to be rubbish in one position or all of them.
More seriously, De Cordova Reid is wasting a space in the squad. One that could be used by a whole host of other attacking options. This was an opportunity to give any number of younger players some time on the pitch that was wasted, for what? To what end?
We shouldn’t be waxing too lyrical about putting Oxford City to the sword, but Howell showed that he offers a directness that Leicester lack. While Admir Bristric is on a long-term contract and needs to be involved. Nobody wants or needs to see any more of Bobby.
Cutting Bait
In the end Leicester should have won this by more. Because obviously they should’ve done. It’s a part-time team four divisions below them. As Oxford tired, more opportunities presented themselves. Howell certainly should have had a goal for himself, and Leicester could have run up the score in the final few minutes.
The fact they avoided the ignominy of a penalty shootout, which briefly looked a plausible outcome, or something worse, means that this game probably won’t have the impact that Walsall did two years ago. But there is a lot to think about heading into the international break.
Is the back three really is the best option for this group of players given that they can’t defend regardless of how many defenders are on the pitch? What are Leicester going to do with all these loan players who seem to be here exclusively for meaningless cup games? When are they going to finally cut bait on players like Okoli – taken off twice at half time in the last four games – and De Cordova Reid?
There’s not a lot of hope that Martin will address any of these questions, given what he’s said and done so far. But maybe there were some wake-up calls here that will mean changes when we return at Huddersfield in a fortnight’s time. For now, we stagger on.
