Leicester City 1 Ipswich Town 1: Oops, we did it again
Conceding one last minute goal may be regarded as a misfortune, conceding nine after the 83rd minute in 14 games looks like carelessness.
A month on from being sucker-punched by the Tractor Boyz at Portman Road, Leicester’s return clash with Ipswich played out in almost exactly the same way. Long stretches of dominance gave way to late-stage panic before a long-range effort in the dying stages forced the equaliser.
At the end, there was a smattering of boos in the Kop. On one hand, it is objectively insane to be booing a team seven points clear at the top. On the other, it’s not that surprising. Booing is essentially the 21st century equivalent to tutting, and there’s only so many times you can watch the same thing before you start to get frustrated.
Enzo Maresca’s style requires immense patience from the players. He has successfully instilled that, so the squad has almost universal buy-in to what he wants to do. Perhaps the issue though is that it’s an emotionless style that requires superhuman levels of rationality from the watching fan base.
At every moment, a fan needs to zoom out and see the bigger picture. To divorce themselves from the emotions of the moment, to understand that drawing twice to Ipswich is fine, and to believe that over the course of the season we will win a lot of games. All of which may be true, but you can’t blame people for getting annoyed when, every time the bright lights come on, you show them the same film.
The ghosts of Leicesters past
Everyone thinks their team is unique, but the sordid truth they don’t want you to know is that Leicester actually are a unique team. One of the by-products of overseeing both the greatest underdog story in the history of association football and suffering one of the most dismal relegations anyone has ever pulled off is that you can’t expect people to reset their expectations and be overjoyed about beating Rotherham at home.
Maresca has said a lot of positive things about the fans and worked hard to generate a closer bond between the players and the stands. He wants more noise and more of an atmosphere. But he’s run up against the fact that Leicester fans are uniquely designed to be sceptical about his sort of football.
Not only have we had to sit through years of Brendan Rodgers teams winning the passing, conceding late goals, and getting battered by set pieces, we also literally won the Premier League exploiting these sorts of weaknesses in everyone else.
We know that passive possession while creating few chances makes you vulnerable to teams that are smarter and better organised than you. In the Championship right now, there aren’t very many, but it is a clear pattern now that Leicester can strong-arm their way past the cannon-fodder and come unstuck against anyone with a bit about them.
Leicester have only dropped points against one team in the bottom half all season. The other six times we have failed to win have all come against top half teams. This is kind of obvious: good teams get more points than bad teams, but it also speaks to why there are still sceptics out there.
Are we good because of the way we play, or would we be good regardless because we have better players than everyone else? Unless Leicester can start beating the teams around them, more people are going to fall into the latter camp. There were nine full internationals in the squad on Monday night, with three more U21 internationals. And that’s in a team missing five more at the AFCON or the Asia Cup (or who turned down a call up and then got suspended so he could go on holiday).
First grade first half
The irony is that for long stretches of the game, this was one of Leicester’s better performances against a top team. After a slow start, in which the most notable events involved each ‘keeper almost passing direct to an opposition striker in his own area, the Foxes took control.
Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall was heavily involved, putting in one of his better displays from the right hand side of midfield. He created one excellent chance for Tom Cannon, well blocked by the defender, and narrowly missed setting up a handful more. KDH’s kryptonite is that he constantly tries to play a ball that’s a little bit too optimistic, rather than taking the easy option. Despite his overall good play, a lot of potential chances go to waste because of this issue.
At times in the first half, Leicester really found their groove. One flowing move led to Stephy Mavididi setting up Hamza Choudhury who, somewhat implausibly, forced a good save out of Václav Hladký. Five minutes later came the crowning glory of Marescaball.
The move for the goal started a long time before the ball hit the back of the net. Wout Faes played a perfect long diagonal over the top of the full back to set Kasey McAteer free. McAteer, as is his wont, slightly wasted the chance and ran around aimlessly before recycling the ball.
From there, Leicester probed and probed relentlessly before Mavididi got the ball on the left of the area, played a rapid 1-2 with Ricardo Pereira, and hammered the ball across the face of goal for Leif Davis to turn haplessly into his own net. This was a triumph of the idea, of the patience Maresca wants his players to display in possession as they wait for the perfect time to strike.
Leicester had two more good chances at the end of the first half to round off a dominant display. Ricardo shot wide after a poor defensive header, then Cannon forced another half-decent save out of Hladký after some more chaos around the box. After the break, though, it was a familiar failing as the Foxes ceded control.
Late no shows
It is hard to explain exactly why Leicester concede so many late goals. It is clearly a mental issue, but a common factor that sets the collapse in motion is when the opponents force a lot more pressure onto the defenders in possession.
Ipswich engaged a much higher press in the second half. As always, that created a doom cycle where Leicester can’t keep possession, are constantly under pressure, and invite weird things to happen at the end.
Most of the time this pattern has repeated itself in away games, where a failure to keep the ball gets the crowd up, which further increases the pressure. There wasn’t even the excuse of a vibrant, raucous crowd on this occasion, but we saw all the usual features.
The defenders started going long to no one in particular, the midfield offered neither an outlet for the ball, nor any presence to stop opposition attacks, Mads Hermansen almost ran the ball straight off the pitch for a corner before hacking it off for a throw. The shadowy presence of the equaliser started to manifest itself. Then, inevitably, a shot took a deflection, Hermansen made a meal of saving it, and it was 1-1.
Making changes
Another factor in the way the team fades at the end is the complete lack of substitutions. On Monday, Maresca only acted with ten minutes to go, by which time Ipswich had made four subs. Against Coventry, he made one enforced change at half time then didn’t act again until there were seven minutes left.
On Boxing Day, Ipswich made five subs to Leicester’s three. Against West Brom, another occasion where the late equaliser reared its head, Leicester made two changes, only one before the 87th minute. Against Cardiff and Huddersfield combined there was only one sub before the 80th minute.
Early in the season, a feature of Maresca’s management was trusting the process above the personnel. We saw wholesale changes for midweek games. Now, he seems to barely trust anyone beyond the starting XI. As the stakes have increased, the manager has become more cautious and, as is often the way, caution breeds tension and mistakes.
Failing to use the substitutions on offer also breeds tiredness, both over the long term and in specific games if the opposition is routinely changing up more of the team. Jeremy Sarmiento was a sub, so too were Jeff Hendrick and Josh Maja, who both bagged late equalisers against Leicester over the last couple of months.
This is a strange blind spot for a manager who seemed to be so willing to rotate early on. There are still 18 games to go in the league alone. If he doesn’t trust the players he has, then Leicester need to act in the next week to get a couple of new ones that he does.
The likelihood is that, with the fixture list easing up, Leicester will go on another run of wins. But January has thrown up a few alarm bells that are worth paying attention to. The failure to beat good teams, a lack of trust in the squad, more financial pressures restricting any attempt to get new players in.
The Foxes might be seven points clear, but they’ve left the door ajar for everyone else, and the rumblings of discontent are simmering just below the surface again.
