Augsburg 1 Leicester City 0: Bad news from Bavaria
Leicester’s penultimate pre-season encounter ended in defeat in Bavaria. With barely a sniff of a goal in successive friendlies and just two weeks to go until the big kick off, are we pulling in to Panic Station?
Pre-season friendlies on hot, sunny Saturdays in the height of summer. The futility of life.
Before we foray into the match itself, it’s worth taking a second to talk about what spending a couple of hours of your valuable lifespan to watch Leicester City v Augsburg online is actually like.
In recent years, as we know, Leicester friendlies have been available on YouTube and the official site. They’ve been easy to watch and, of course, free.
As we also know, this time around the club has decided to slap a £10 charge on them, so they’re now exclusively available through the Foxes Hub.
There are a great many obvious problems with this, not the least of which is whether the bad PR can possibly be worth the slim pickings this must be generating. One wonders how many people paid £10 for actual league games last season, never mind for a friendly on a sunny Saturday in August.
What hasn’t been talked about as much is what you get for that £10, beyond the football itself. There have been a lot of comparisons to the cost of watching other teams in pre-season (spoiler: normally not £10 a game). Slightly missed in all that is what you actually get after you cough up the money.
We cannot emphasise enough that the experience of watching Foxes Hub itself is just rubbish. The coverage is appalling. Whatever every other club is doing, it cannot be this. The big six are off sunning themselves in America with ESPN coverage that keeps getting clipped for clickbait socials. They aren’t dishing up whatever the hell this is. And we’re not even talking about the football yet.
It’s one thing to charge money to watch a friendly, but the absolute least you would expect is some kind of professional presentation in return.
Instead, we get dealt half-hearted incompetence. Here’s Matt Elliott live from an underground bunker with great big bags under his eyes. The commentary’s out of sync, they’re endlessly getting players’ names wrong, they sound suspiciously like they’ve been left at home and had to fork up a tenner to get a stream themselves. The feed flickers every few minutes. Gerry Taggart’s been coughing into the mic for an hour and a half, is he ok? Why am I still getting ad after ad for King Power even though I paid once already?
And then, if you decide not to pay the money, and instead go on the official website later that evening in search of a detailed match report, you get treated to some garbled mess that reads like it was written by ChatGPT. And not even the good ChatGPT, the one that gets a picture of Shrek confused with the Mona Lisa.
Can someone get a grip here, please? Can we put a few of the £10s together and pay for a Ryanair flight to send someone to the game to cover it properly? Can we have a teamsheet graphic that shows us the Leicester line-up at the very least, given this is quite literally the Leicester City website you’re showing this on? Can we, for the love of God, invest in a microphone with a cough button?
Now, on with the football.
Cooper’s clues
Oh yeah, that was rubbish as well.
Only joking.
Well, not really joking, it was rubbish. But these friendlies are about trying to work out which parts meant something and which bits were just noise. From that perspective, we certainly learned a few things.
The first was that the starting XI looked a lot like the sort of side that’s likely to start the first game against Tottenham in a fortnight’s time. The starters played about an hour before the procession of subs began. Once again, what looked like a straight up 4-3-3 on paper was much more flexible than that, with Victor Kristiansen pushed way up on the left wing and James Justin effectively tucking in as third centre back on the right.
Kristiansen got a lot of the ball in the first half. Like against Shrewsbury, by flooding the centre of the pitch Leicester created space in wide areas. The way Cooper has set the team up is causing a few problems for opposing defences, because the front three - Patson Daka, with Stephy Mavididi and Bobby De Cordova-Reid either side here - plays narrow and inevitably draws defenders inside. At Shrewsbury it meant Ricardo was always free on the right, this time it was Kristiansen free on the left.
The problem in this game, and probably permanently until a new striker joins, is that Kristiansen never did anything with the possession he had. He’s a good crosser of the ball, Leicester even had him taking corners, but in open play he never put a cross in, preferring instead to cut back and play inside, taking the momentum of the attack with him. After a summer of watching Kieran Trippier play left back, it was all a bit on the nose.
The only time Leicester ever threatened was when Mavididi or Abdul Fatawu cut inside, using De Cordova-Reid - henceforth BDR - as a wall to bounce one-twos off or a shield, then shooting. Fatawu inevitably had a few of these efforts, only one of which troubled the keeper, Mavididi had a goalbound effort well blocked by a defender.
BDR was probably Leicester’s most intelligent attacking player thanks to this, and the way he made some clever runs in behind the Augsburg defence, but the fact he was in such an advanced role shone a light on the second big problem: we simply don’t have players with enough quality to trouble teams in those congested central spaces.
That fact is probably one reason Cooper has tried Mavididi more central in pre-season, because he can dribble and beat players under pressure. Beyond him the options are seriously thin on the ground. Will Alves has shown flashes of being able to do it, but he’s so young and inexperienced and hasn’t really featured all that much, it’s hard to believe he’s going to play once the shooting starts.
The alarming lack of depth was laid bare by the fact that after just two attacking subs in the second half, Leicester were fielding a front six of: Harry Winks, Hamza Choudhury, Wilfred Ndidi, Kasey McAteer, Abdul Fatawu and Patson Daka. That is not the stuff Premier League goals are made of.
By that point, of course, Leicester were behind, having conceded an extremely soft goal from a corner early on. A near post flick-on looped over Mads Hermansen, hit the far stick and nestled in the net. The sort of goal that made the ‘keeper look like a confused child separated from his parents, and the first of many opportunities the Germans created from set pieces.
Maybe the corners mean nothing: Augsburg are a big, physical team. Maybe they were just bigger than us, maybe that explains the number of times they won the first header.
Maybe it doesn’t.
Second half: not so good
We have now officially exhausted The Good Bits. Leicester were straight up awful after half time. They could’ve conceded inside 30 seconds of the restart after Augsburg waltzed through the defence and smashed a chance into the side netting, an event that treated us to the first 2024/25 sighting of Wout Faes looking around in furious bewilderment. We don’t think that transfer to Barcelona is happening any time soon, mate.
More chances followed. Ndidi lost the ball on the edge of his own box and was only saved by a good block from Jannik Vestergaard as Augsburg attackers queued up to finish the job. The throwback Leicester move of losing it in their own area after passing out from the keeper reared its head, later Conor Coady made a brilliant last ditch clearance off the line to deny a certain goal.
There’s no hiding from the fact this was bad. For stretches of the first half, when Leicester failed to really create a proper chance, you could convince yourself that this line up was more suited to counter-attacking football than dominating possession. By conceding early, they probably had more of the ball than they planned as the opponents sat in.
In the second half, that theory was comprehensively disproved as Augsburg completely dominated and Leicester couldn’t do anything. Beyond a couple of long range attempts from Fatawu and the odd cross that went long over everyone’s heads, there was nothing in an attacking sense at all after half time.
More concerningly, from a big picture point of view, is just how weak the bench looks going forward. Leicester have lost Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, Kelechi Iheanacho, Dennis Praet, Marc Albrighton, and Yunus Akgun from last season’s squad. They’ve gone up a division and replaced them with Bobby De Cordova-Reid.
That weakness is reflected in the sheer lack of chances we’ve seen in pre-season so far. Cooper is trying to play quite a flexible, attractive brand of football, but he’s seriously lacking the sort of players to make it work. A serious team cannot be this close to playing Wilfred Ndidi at number 10, a sight we were treated to in the second half of this encounter, in a real game.
As with all friendlies, this Saturday will fade into insignificance very quickly and no one will remember it once the main event kicks off. But the warning signs are there. This was another pretty grim effort all things considered. The need for reinforcements grows by the day.
