Leicester City 1 Everton 1: Thunder and lightning, very very frightening
Two relegation-threatened teams duelling themselves to a futile draw, played out to the backdrop of one of the most apocalyptic weather displays you’re likely to see in English football. Pure Barclays.
How much should you judge a team by little spells of football?
Does a nice 10 minutes here, a good 20 minutes there, outweigh the evidence of the other 70-80 minutes you have to sit through?
While you ponder that existential question, here’s another one to ponder: in the annals of history, will anyone remember this encounter for anything other than the weather?
In the absence of much resembling entertaining play for the first half an hour, the Weather Gods decided to entertain themselves by unleashing Armageddon on LE2, giving anyone vaguely near the front of the stands the excuse to spend a good third of the game at the bar.
They were the lucky ones. By the half time interval, extended by 7 glorious minutes, Leicester’s situation was looking as bleak as the clouds above.
Only after the referee decided that he simply could not be bothered to hang around this encounter any longer than was absolutely necessary, and took the players back out in exactly the same conditions that had prompted the extended break, did Leicester begin to wake up.
There's 37 minutes to go, lads.
Starting slow
Everton had lost all four of their games so far this season, blowing a 2-0 lead twice in a row coming into this one. Sean Dyche turned up to his pre-match press conference like a gravelly Neville Chamberlain, wielding a piece of paper that contained a list of all the injuries and illnesses affecting his team.
Lack of confidence, or indeed players, be damned, though, as Leicester still managed to almost concede within a couple of minutes of kick off. Iliman Ndiaye sent Caleb Okoli for a hot dog on the left wing and crossed for Jesper Lindstrom to volley wide. Okoli then kicked the ball straight into Harry Winks to lose possession a minute later, as part of what might be charitably described as a ‘shaky start’.
These slow first halves feel like they’ve been a feature of our lives for years, and this was another to add to the list. Leicester did virtually nothing for 45 minutes and were deservedly behind at the break.
The goal came early from the danger man, Ndiaye, who played a one-two with Ashley Young, burst inside James Justin to receive a beautiful return pass, and scored in off the post (first ever Premier League goal: check).
Managers sometimes make decisions that are perfectly acceptable, but then seem to hitch their entire identity to it and refuse to budge, which then makes it a bit weird. So is the case with Justin. There are plenty of good reasons to play him over Ricardo Pereira. There seems to be far fewer reasons for him to play every minute of every game while Ricardo gets none.
The worse Leicester’s defensive record gets, the more questions it is fair to have over this call. He was not hugely at fault for the goal on Saturday, but if you’re playing Justin, you’re playing him to defend. You are playing him, presumably, to avoid situations where their left winger is carving you open repeatedly and running free on the break, yet that is what kept happening with Ndiaye.
Had Everton been even remotely good, they would have buried Leicester. The actual chances they generated were few and far between, and typically fell to Lindstrom, who was dreadful in front of goal. Victor Kristiansen also got away with shoving Dominic Calvert-Lewin over on the edge of the box, centimetres from where VAR would have been able to intervene.
They clearly dominated the first half, though. Everton had 11 shots in the first half to Leicester’s four, and that still doesn’t even really reflect the balance of the game.
Stephy szn
Leicester seem to be regressing in possession, from a team that was trying to move it quickly and put together intricate passing moves, to a team that spends half its time panicking on the ball.
So much of Everton’s attacking threat in the first half came from Leicester giving the ball away in bad areas and leaving themselves open in transition, whether that was Okoli, Wilfred Ndidi - who was good on the whole, but it’s a feature of playing him in a deeper role that he’s going to lose possession - or Bilal El Khannouss, who was appalling for the 55 minutes he spent on the pitch.
It’s periods like these that are going to ramp up the pressure on Steve Cooper quickly. We’re still waiting to see exactly what Cooperball is, and it’s a problem if it becomes more of a confused mishmash of styles the longer the season goes on.
The two clear bright sparks were Wout Faes, who seemed to be the one player able to generate a bit of momentum by striding forward with the ball and attempting a long diagonal, and Stephy Mavididi, who was the only attacking player who looked likely to create anything.
The hope with Cooper is that he’s sensible enough to adjust to reality. With Mavididi, we are seeing signs of that. After he was strangely dropped for the first few weeks, he’s forced his way back into a key role in the team. The confusing part of the Ricardo/Justin decision is that the Portuguese has been given no minutes, despite being a vastly superior attacking player, when Leicester have been behind in four out of five games.
At least with Mavididi, common sense has prevailed. Once he came into the game in the second half, the feel of it changed. He ran at James Garner, out of position at right back, forced the defence to face its own goal, and created a flurry of corners.
A couple of weeks ago we spoke about the (lack of) impact of the new set piece coach, but here we saw some promising signs. Everton are vulnerable in the air - they had conceded four goals from headers going into this game - and Leicester at last managed to hone in on an opponent’s weakness.
Ndidi headed one corner over in the first half, then a well-worked short corner in the second saw Mavididi plonk a cross onto Okoli’s head with the goal at his mercy, only for the Italian to head over as well. When the goal did come, it was the sort of set piece you’d expect to see Leicester concede from, rather than score: both centre backs went for the same ball and it bounced to Mavididi, who scuffed in off the man on the line.
From there, Leicester probably should have won the game. There were a few almost chances, for Ndidi, for Jordan Ayew, for Facundo Buonanotte, none of which quite qualified as a genuine opportunity to score. But Everton were reeling, roles reversed from the first half, and the high press forced a series of turnovers in their half, along with some panicked clearances.
Leicester just lack that edge, the one that turns attacking vibes into genuine chances. There have still been so few really golden chances over the course of the season, particularly from open play. And so it is another draw, another feeling that one got away.
Lacking intent
The ultimate question is the one we opened with: how much do you value the latter stages of this game versus what came before it?
By the end, Leicester were playing reasonably well. When they rouse themselves into action, they look a decent enough team. On the whole, there is a resilience, some fight, belief, and a bit of ability in there. The results alone tell you that they have a chance in every game: 1-1, 1-2, 1-2, 2-2, 1-1.
With added context, though, this was a big missed opportunity. Everton are not only terrible but they were seriously undermanned: along with a patched up back four they named two ‘keepers on the bench and still couldn’t fill it. There aren’t going to be too many more winnable games than this one at home.
Cooper seemed to approach this with that in mind, by starting El Khannouss ahead of Oliver Skipp and playing a genuine 4-2-3-1. But sometimes it’s easy to be distracted by specific personnel decisions instead of the overall approach. Being more positive is often about intent as much as it is about who’s playing.
There is a clear difference in intent between the way Leicester start games and the way they play later on. So far, they’ve avoided the Doomsday scenario of getting absolutely waxed in the first half, so that all the intent you saved up for later goes to waste. Something which could have happened against Spurs and Fulham.
A plan to make it to an hour and see where you are can work in some situations, it can’t be your main vision. And if it is, you need to be more proactive (and, frankly, better) with your use of substitutions.
Leicester only made three changes again, with the second only coming with 7 minutes to play. The third change was to take off Mavididi, the best player, in stoppage time, a substitution that seems to serve no purpose whatsoever.
The attitude speaks to a manager who’s trying to stay in the season until some undetermined point in the future - the January transfer window? The run-in? At which point the brakes come off.
Cooper might be vindicated in doing so. If you trust that the little spells of good football are signs of a side that can improve and threaten teams at this level, then there is a reason to believe this can work. There are signs in every game of a decent team lurking in there somewhere.
To do so, though, requires a leap of faith that the long spells of rubbish, the poor starts, the abundance of caution, are going to suddenly disappear. Last week’s collapse was a big blow in the context of the season, but a bigger one for Cooper personally: we need a reason to trust him, and the proof is in the pudding so far with no wins from five.
Draws are fine, you can build on draws, you can stitch them together and build confidence, you can keep yourself afloat. But it’s going to take a long time to get to 40 points with draws.
