Ipswich Town 1 Leicester City 1: The ghosts of Christmas past
Leicester’s top of the table trip to Portman Road ended in a respectable point, after a very unrespectable equaliser in the dying seconds. James Knight revels in a Christmas tradition that was, at least, quite a bit better than last year.
There are some curses that even Enzo Maresca cannot break. Leicester headed to Portman Road having only won twice on Boxing Day in 13 years. They left it having extended that dismal run and with the sour taste of another blown lead on the road lingering in their mouths.
In the grand scheme of things, this wasn’t a bad result. Leicester can afford to play their closest rivals to a standstill and pick off everybody else. Ipswich, Leeds, and Southampton have had to exert a huge amount of energy just to stay within screaming distance of the Foxes so far, and there aren’t too many gremlins on the schedule over the next month.
This was, however, also a huge missed opportunity. Like when Leeds visited the King Power at the start of November, this was a chance to create an almost unassailable lead at the top of the Championship. Again, Leicester failed to take it, with a performance that was a bit tired, sloppy, and rough around the edges, and in a game where the breaks emphatically went Ipswich’s way.
Every analysis and critique of Leicester now has to be relative. Whatever may be wrong with a performance, the sky isn’t falling, we’re still miles ahead of the rest, and remain on course for a record points tally. But despite the near-perfect away results, the amazing defensive numbers, and the gap at the top, Leicester still have a lot of work to do to be ready for a higher level. The late sucker-punch at Portman Road may have been thanks to a ridiculous goal, but it wasn’t entirely undeserved.
The late, late no-show
This was the third away game out of four in which Leicester have conceded an equaliser after the 89th minute. The previous away game before the start of that run was at Middlesbrough, where they conceded an 83rd minute winner.
The common theme to all these goals is that they’re a bit fluky. A great free kick in the top corner, a goalmouth scramble, or a chaotic long ball. At Ipswich, the present came wrapped in a comical double deflection off Ricardo Pereira’s boot and Jannik Vestergaard’s face.
As much as it’s easy to explain these away, they are the consequence of inviting pressure in away games by failing to finish the opposition off. The pattern is often the same: Leicester lose control with a few misplaced passes, the crowd gets up, and suddenly they’re on the ropes. Leicester’s defence is generally good, but it’s good in the sense that it rarely comes under sustained pressure. When it is subjected to that, it tends to give way.
Ipswich are a much better team than any of the others Leicester have faced on the road. Throughout much of the second half the Foxes were forced onto the back foot and Ipswich largely dominated possession. Even then, though, their threat had largely fizzled out by the time the last few minutes rolled around. What chances they did have came from range, where Conor Chaplin had a couple of opportunities, one saved by Mads Hermansen and another dispatched over the bar.
In these situations, Leicester need to be more clinical on the break, or better at taking the sting out of the game. Instead, they had lots of ‘almost’ chances, where the final pass was just out of reach, including one occasion that should have resulted in a penalty for a pretty blatant shove on Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall that might have finished things off. They then gave Ipswich a second wind through avoidable mistakes on the ball.
These three things
There are basically three related problems with Leicester’s approach on the road. The first is that they still haven’t got comfortable seeing out away games in possession. A few times now we’ve seen the ‘control, control, control’ mantra break down under the pump. Leicester get caught between stools, unsure whether to continue to play out from the back, or to play ‘safe’ through Hermansen hitting it long.
Against Ipswich, they resorted to option two, with a series of goal kicks at Abdul Fatawu, who apparently wears stilts in training and has successfully deceived everyone into thinking he’s 6’7” and an appropriate target to hit with a long ball to relieve pressure. It’s ironic that it was his ludicrous attempt to play out from the back that led to Ipswich’s equaliser, given that the long balls to him are a far more egregious mistake, with very little chance of succeeding.
The second, related, issue is that the team is still too sloppy on the ball. Fatawu’s long switch of play across his own back four was the nadir, but that was just one of many occasions where Leicester gave the ball away with straight up poor execution in a bad area. These feel like much more like mental errors than a problem with the style.
On three separate occasions Hermansen played a straight pass along the ground direct to an opponent. At one point, Dewsbury-Hall played a square pass in midfield that couldn’t have been any more telegraphed if it was written in Morse code, and which almost ended up in Hermansen being lobbed from the half way line.
In all likelihood, this isn’t too much of a problem in the Championship. Leicester are evidently far better than all bar one or two teams, and we already have a huge gap to third place. From a long term point of view, though, it’s a reminder that there’s still a lot of work to do. There are only a handful of players, like Vestergaard and Harry Winks, who tend not to make these kind of mistakes.
The third, and related, problem is that the depth in the squad is seriously lop-sided. We may have four starting strikers, a bunch of international centre backs, and enough goalkeepers to field an entire five-a-side team, but elsewhere the ranks are paper-thin. The most obvious example of this is that Leicester ended up seeing this game out with a Cesare Casadei/Yunus Akgun midfield pairing that has looked incredibly lightweight every time they’ve played together.
Enzo’s oopsy
This may be one of those rare occasions where the manager did a boo-boo. Post-match, Maresca spoke about how difficult it is to play so many games in a short space of time. But throughout the season, he’s shown a willingness to make wholesale changes in some games to keep the most important players fresh for bigger challenges to come.
He notably didn’t do this against Rotherham at the weekend. He started the first-choice team, when it probably wasn’t necessary to do so, and when he did replace Dewsbury-Hall and Wilfred Ndidi it was Dennis Praet, along with Casadei, who replaced them. Praet then wasn’t in the squad on Tuesday night, leaving the manager with limited options to freshen up those crucial number eight spots if he needed to.
It’s hard to know with Praet whether his absence was a coach’s decision or the latest example of his incredible ability not to be there at the exact moment you actually need him to play. Or whether he was simply exhausted from his excessive celebrations at the weekend. Even without the Belgian, though, there were other options: we’ve seen Ricardo push up into that role before, or Hamza Choudhury could have come on in midfield himself.
Maresca has done a great job so far, but there are elements of the maddening Guardiola decision-making that has been enraging fantasy football managers for years. You almost have to accept that sometimes the 4D chess move he’s trying to make exists on a higher plane, outside the understanding of mere mortals.
Do we really need to randomly make Ndidi and Dewsbury-Hall play on the other side of midfield to normal? Is it a good idea for Fatawu to virtually play at right back when the Ipswich left back got roasted like a Christmas turkey at the weekend? Is Tom Cannon a physical being or does he merely exist in spirit? Must we try the Casadei/Akgun midfield duo again?
To expose two young loan players, one of whom might be a winger, in central midfield against our closest competitor seemed unnecessarily risky the moment he made the substitution, and proved to be so when Casadei did his best Youri Tielemans impression for the equaliser, still in the midst of his turning circle as the ball nestles in the back of the net.
Perhaps some of it is out of his hands. It’s tempting to wonder whether Leicester have an agreement with Chelsea that demands Casadei play a part in every game. He’s shown so little genuine quality that it's hard to believe Maresca thinks he’s one of the best options in the squad. The drop-off from Ndidi to Casadei is enormous, which is a warning sign for the next month or so when the Nigerian is at the AFCON.
New year, new you
It’s unlikely that any of this is a particular problem in the short term. On another day, the referee gives Leicester a penalty and we coast to a 2-0 win. Even in the world where he didn’t do that, Cardiff followed by Huddersfield and Coventry isn’t a particularly taxing run of fixtures before the return game with Ipswich in a few weeks’ time.
This sort of performance probably should inspire a few moves in the January market, though. This is still a squad in transition, and Leicester are in a strong position to attract players with the promise of Premier League football in six months’ time.
The fact that the manager wants to rotate, but has spent most of the first half of the season with no options to replace the wide players and can’t swap the midfielders without a huge drop-off in quality is a sign that there is still a way to go with this team. Giving new players a bedding-in period to get used to what Maresca wants could be a huge help in easing the transition when (err, if) we do get promoted.
One game remains in 2023, and the last line of the previous paragraph rather sums up one of the strangest years in Leicester’s recent history, one that ends with me slightly annoyed we’re only on course to break the Championship points record by 10.
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:
