Bristol City 1 Leicester City 0: When are we allowed to try something else?
With just over two minutes of injury time remaining in this hugely important Championship game at Ashton Gate, Wout Faes, standing on the halfway line, slowly rolled the ball five yards to his left to Jannik Vestergaard.
It was completely inconsequential in the grand scheme of things and had no influence on the result of this game or even the action that followed. It’s something that happens thousands of times a season, and yet it summed up the current failure of The Idea, the tactical system implemented by Enzo Maresca which had taken us to the top of the league and which has also now resulted in one win in six league games and the obliteration of a yawning gap.
When The Idea works well, it looks great. When it doesn’t, there is nothing else. And so, in the dying moments of a vital game we’re losing 1-0, we get one defender slowly rolling the ball to another.
Slow off the Marx
Wout Faes had been the talking point of the starting XI after a run of poor displays. It was his error that led to Hull’s opener on Leicester’s previous Championship outing three long weeks ago, and he was in the thick of the action at both ends of the pitch throughout this miserable start to the Easter weekend.
Faes had probably Leicester’s best chance of the first half, a looping header wide from a Harry Winks free kick. He also spent much of the game marauding forward in the inside right channel, making the kind of runs that were so profitable for Wilfred Ndidi in the first half of the season. Defensively, it was a throwback to the FA Cup defeat at Stamford Bridge before the break as Vestergaard and Faes were repeatedly exposed, sometimes by other players but mostly by each other.
It was a game that demanded a quick start and a frantic finish from Leicester, but tellingly got neither. There was a lot of talk in the days leading up to the game about Enzo Maresca dying his beard. This actually looked more like the dying of his sense of superiority. To heavily paraphrase Groucho Marx, this is our idea, and if you don’t like this one… well, we don’t have anything else.
Because a lot of Leicester fans have put up with a lot of nonsense about these tactics. There’s been a snootiness from one or two in the media towards anyone questioning the wisdom of this approach. Personally, I’ve struggled with it at times for various reasons, and have been proven wrong at various points too. But as we approach the important part of the season, it’s all falling apart and you have to wonder whether we’re getting the best out of this squad at the moment.
Earlier in the season, when Maresca was asked how far along the squad was in picking up The Idea, he plucked a figure of 20% out of the air. At the time it was exciting, as we imagined how good we’d be once that percentage rose. We talked about someone getting a 5-0 hammering eventually. That team was Stoke at the start of February, and we’ve only won three games since.
Body language
Anger will grow as long as we continue to fail to win football games, but some people will point to the off-field controversy as a mitigating factor for Maresca. That talk has already begun. Yet let’s not pretend this is anything new to him. Part of the reason for Leicester fans’ resentment of the current financial saga is the 115 charges hanging over Manchester City.
It’s Maresca’s job to ensure what’s happening in the boardroom doesn’t affect the players. It’s a difficult task, but that’s why he’s paid hundreds of thousands of pounds a year. It’s a big job with a big responsibility. But fans are beginning to question the attitude and body language of the players.
There were early signs of those issues at Ashton Gate when both Stephy Mavididi and Abdul Fatawu flung themselves to the ground in the first fifteen minutes. Our old friend Wout then got caught by a ball over the top, tugged at Tommy Conway’s shorts and was fortunate not to concede a penalty.
The first half ended with both sides stuck on repeat. Vardy put a couple of shots marginally wide from the angle. Faes again got caught the wrong side and was this time rescued by a kind bounce of the ball.
Early in the season, we weren’t giving up chances. Bristol City were just one of the teams we passed into submission, and it all appeared too easy. The worrying thing now is that we look like we could lose to anyone. This isn’t just a mental block against the division’s other top sides any more. Bristol City are a lively young team assembled on a low budget and captained by Matty James. They are mid-table because that’s where they belong, where they’ve been for years, and in the context of a Championship promotion race, they’re just another of the teams Leeds and Ipswich have been seeing off for weeks.
Leeds beat them 1-0 at Ashton Gate at the start of February, while Ipswich came back from 2-1 down with ten minutes to go to beat them 3-2 at the start of March. These are the results our team don’t look capable of getting at the moment - we’ve only kept 3 clean sheets in 13 league games since the turn of the year, and we haven’t come from behind to win since December.
Daka deja vu from Vardy
Admittedly, this narrative would have been entirely different had Jamie Vardy not wasted two golden chances. Both were on a par with the infamous opportunity missed by Patson Daka at Elland Road and in both cases, you could reasonably attribute the three points dropped to misses like these.
Halfway through the second half, Bristol City decided they’d had enough of watching us miss chances and put together a bit of sustained pressure for the first time since the interval. Within five minutes, they led. We even managed to miss another one before they scored, Fatawu curling wide of the far post. It was a good finish when the home side eventually took the lead, Anis Mehmeti striking into the corner from the edge of the box after given the freedom of the west by Hamza Choudhury.
Rather than supplementing Vardy with another striker, Maresca stuck to his guns and replaced him with Kelechi Iheanacho. It nearly had the desired effect, Iheanacho straying marginally offside when receiving a through-ball from Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall before lobbing the ball expertly into the net. Of course that was the one that went in.
Ricardo came on for Choudhury but didn’t look sharp, returning from injury and possibly still pondering some of the razor-sharp questions from the Foxes Trust AGM on Monday evening.
Even elite teams sometimes find themselves in situations like Leicester did in the final twenty minutes of this game. That’s where they need to increase the tempo. We had Wout Faes slowly rolling the ball to Jannik Vestergaard.
We also had Abdul Fatawu standing on the halfway line firing the ball straight out of play from one touchline to the other, another symptom of a steadfast refusal to look to a plan B, with the two wingers remaining on their respective flanks throughout the game despite being largely nullified.
Maresca talked before the game of finding different solutions during the international break. It’s time for him to prove he is capable of something else, because this team isn’t getting promoted if it carries on like this - and, regardless of what’s happening off the pitch, with these players and given the position we were in, that isn’t good enough.
