Cardiff City 0 Leicester City 2: We’re having a wales of a time
Leicester’s Christmas tour of Championship teams that play in blue continued with the most comfortable win of them all. James Knight savours a game that ensures the Foxes end 2023 miles ahead at the top of the tree.
Has any team worn as many different kits as Leicester over the Christmas period? Leicester blessed us with a third fashion statement in as many games, as the Foxes embarked on a third away game out of four in the space of 12 days.
Winning these games is what a promotion campaign is all about. Leicester have now returned 10 points from those four encounters, extending their lead at the top despite having to do more travelling and having less rest than any of their rivals.
Ipswich got to play at home three times over this spell and returned only three points in total. Their wild celebratory parade through the streets of East Anglia after a Boxing Day draw was rather put into perspective by the way in which they immediately squandered whatever advantage they had gained a couple of days later.
Leeds only delivered four points over the same period. Southampton won all their games but were further back and benefitted from three home games over Christmas. All these teams are having to expend as much emotional energy trying to catch Leicester as their fans are trying to convince themselves that it’s about to happen. The Foxes, meanwhile, just keep racking up the points.
This was not a game that will linger long in the memory. The majority of the excitement came from the Foxes Hub coverage, which added a surrealist soundtrack to the visual of a seemingly interminable number of passes across the back four. Did he just call Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall a “Welsh international”? Why is he reading the current live score of this game off his phone? How long has Matt Elliott been talking?
But that’s the gig in this division. The weeknight games on the road against a morass of interchangeable teams are the ones where everyone else is dropping points. You’ve gotta show up and win, and Leicester did that with consummate ease, once again.
Friday night under the lights
This game ended up as an almost perfect demonstration of The Idea. Both the good, in that Leicester usually win at the end, and the way in which it can often feel like you’re staring at a piece of abstract modern art. I know this is supposed to represent the futility of the human quest for perfection, but it looks like you’ve just painted a wall grey and gone to the pub.
For the first 15 minutes there was, in some respects, a football match happening. There were a bunch of footballers on a football pitch moving a football around. But it was also, from another angle, thousands of people converging at a single point in Wales and experiencing nothing whatsoever. A spiritual pilgrimage where God forgot to turn up, and you’re confronted by the reality that you’re currently standing in a cold, windy field, hundreds of miles from home, on a Friday night in December.
Then, in a flash, it all made sense. It might look as if Leicester are wasting the world away, in fact they’re surgically searching for weakness. When they find it, it’s game over. Out of nothing sprung a sudden surge of activity. A nice passing move to Abdul Fatawu in space, who plonked a perfect cross onto Dewsbury-Hall’s head, only for the goalkeeper to make a good save.
A couple of minutes later, Fatawu and Wales’ finest combined again to dispossess Joe Ralls on the edge of his own box and Dewsbury-Hall buried the opener into the far corner. After that, it was back to the search for meaning. Except now everyone was a believer again.
Abdul’s arrival
Part of the vision for The Idea is that by controlling possession you can suffocate the emotion out of away games. Recently, Leicester haven’t done this very well, and have allowed various blue shirted opponents to use the crowd to drag themselves back into contention. This time, however, the Foxes did this so effectively that they almost suffocated the emotion out of their own fans, so the good folks of South Wales were treated to a dismal evening.
There was barely a glimmer of hope at any stage that Cardiff could get something out of this match. A couple of quarter chances at the end of the first half ended up as the only vaguely realistic chance they had of redemption. Etete, seemingly named after an Italian greeting a former Leicester winger like a long-lost friend, had the best of them, and even that barely troubled the same postcode as the goal.
In the second half, it was more of the same. Long spells of nothingness, followed by devastating attacking play that’s far too good for this division. 10 minutes after the break, a nice move broke down in the Cardiff box, only for Fatawu to nip in ahead of Josh Bowler and lay the ball back to James Justin, who casually lobbed one into the top corner.
Justin deserves praise for the quality of the finish, but it is remarkable how good Fatawu is at 19. His actual output in terms of goals and assists hasn’t caught up to the all-round level of his play. When that comes, it’s going to be a sight to see. While his explosiveness and ability to beat defenders made him a cult hero almost instantly, his work ethic and intelligence is far better than it initially seemed, when he was routinely cutting inside to hammer shots from 45 yards.
He caused the first goal with his pressing from the front, and he set up the second by reacting quickly and having the mentality to try to win a loose ball. That combination of quick thinking and the physical ability to get there first is seriously good. The fact Maresca has felt comfortable using him almost as a wing back in some games is testament to how much he trusts him defensively as well, which isn’t what you’d expect from a teenager in his first season in England.
A couple of minutes after the goal, another sweeping Leicester move saw Dewsbury-Hall feed Fatawu, who laid it off first time to Wilfred Ndidi, arriving late into the box. Only an excellent clearance off the line denied the Foxes a third.
By this point, Leicester were sauntering about and it felt like they could get five or six. Fatawu pulled off his classic move of cutting inside and hitting the post from 25 yards, then watched Patson Daka miss an awkward, if virtually open goal from the rebound. Stephy Mavididi, in a relatively quiet game for him, still managed to humiliate Perry Ng by ‘megging him by the corner flag, hit the post, and shoot wide late on, even as the team went into power-saving mode.
Mind the gap
These sorts of games are not ones for big, sweeping narrative shifts, they are merely the time for solid, professional performances that get the job done. This Christmas period has created even more separation between Leicester and the rest. Only a few weeks ago, Leeds felt like they were within touching distance, now they are 17 points behind.
There are some things Maresca has done over this compressed spell that are surprising and perhaps a little strange. There’s been virtually no rotation, and he chose the middle of the Ipswich game as the one to make the most significant switches. Even here, with the game dead and buried as a contest for most of the second half, he only made two substitutions, and none before the 70th minute. But the proof is in the pudding in the end.
Perhaps he simply didn’t need to rest players because Leicester were so superior that they barely had to exert themselves to win. Rarely has the gulf between two teams this season been as big as it was in Cardiff. All of which means that 2023 ends with Leicester as perhaps the most dominant team in the history of the second tier. Just as we all expected 12 months ago.
12 Days of Christmas at The Bridge
For the past 10 years, The Bridge Homelessness to Hope has served a 3-course Christmas Dinner with all the trimmings to hundreds of people in Leicester who are experiencing homelessness.
This year, they want to go one better and offer their guests (service users) not just one day of celebrations but 12 days of festive events over the month of December.
If you’re enjoying The Fosse Way, please consider donating to The Bridge’s Christmas appeal:
