Tottenham Hotspur Women 2 LCFC Women 1: Losing the Leicester way
Leicester City Women led their FA Cup Semi Final at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium for over an hour, but ultimately fell short, conceding a last gasp winner deep into extra time.
One of the things about supporting two Leicester City teams is that the possibility for devastating pain and despair is doubled.
Why experience only one agonising defeat a weekend when you could indulge yourself and experience two?
The chance to win the FA Cup doesn’t come around very often. On the men’s side, as we know, it took more than a century to finally bag one of these things. The women’s FA Cup has been dominated over the last decade by three teams: Arsenal, Chelsea, and Manchester City, and the gap between them and the rest is enormous.
So we travelled to the shiny new Tottenham Hotspur stadium on Sunday with only another one of the have-nots standing between us and Wembley. We weren’t to know it at the time, but the result of the other semi-final meant that it wouldn’t be Chelsea, the dominant force in the league and a near-inevitable defeat, but Manchester United awaiting in the final, a side Leicester held to a draw earlier in the season.
This was a golden opportunity. A chance at another improbable, unbelievable Leicester success against the odds. A team with no manager and a Championship club only a couple of years ago, who had literally zero points half way through last season, 90 minutes from a Wembley final.
For 82 of those minutes, the impossible dream was so close we could reach out and touch it. Then it got snatched away.
Smash and grab
The stadium currently known as Tottenham Hotspur, while Daniel Levy searches for a Gulf state willing to throw enough dirty money at the naming rights, is a seriously impressive arena. Even with only the bottom tier open for this game, the atmosphere was excellent and - perhaps more importantly - the sausage rolls are excellent value, compared to the usual footballing fare.
With women’s football becoming more popular, and home crowds getting larger now that big games are generally held at the club’s main stadium, it’s worth wondering how long it’ll be before cup semi finals are held at neutral venues. This was far from a full house, but it is a bit jarring that one team benefits from home crowd, a situation which is obviously more stark when one of the bigger teams is involved.
Certainly here the crowd and occasion seemed to suit Spurs better than Leicester from the start. Leicester were seriously on the back foot in the early stages, often thanks to problems of their own making. Within the first ten minutes Lize Kop was forced into a good save from Celine Bizet after Josie Green gave the ball away, then Leicester lost it in midfield and were fortunate as Bizet again wasted a golden chance.
Beyond the individual mistakes, from the off Leicester’s left was a serious problem. With Deanne Rose pushed high up to exploit space behind Spurs’ back line, it meant Janice Cayman had to defend that whole side of the pitch, and she was badly exposed by Jessica Naz’s pace and the lack of anyone else to offer support.
Yet, somehow, despite the early struggles, Leicester took the lead. Bursting forward for the first time, Jutta Rantala cut inside from the right and hammered a shot past Becky Spencer. From my vantage point at the other end of the ground, I didn’t appreciate how good a goal this was, my initial instinct to blame the goalkeeper for every concession kicked in until I saw a replay, at which point the quality of the strike was pretty obvious.
Women’s football in general is a more wholesome family experience than the men (antics of various managers notwithstanding), and this smash and grab start prompted the first of many amusing outbursts from the young kids scattered around my seat among the Spurs fans.
Rantala’s goal, coming as it did seriously against the run of play, prompted a lad of about 7 years old to exclaim “that’s classic Tottenham that is!”. Strap in, kid, you have no idea.
It never really felt like Leicester solved their defensive weakness on the left for the whole first half, but the goal really settled the team down as an attacking unit. When they relive this game again in their nightmares, Leicester might feel like they could have finished Spurs off while they were still reeling from going behind.
Both sides had a pretty clear game plan to get the ball wide, to Rose in Leicester’s case and Naz in Tottenham’s. Their speed caused real problems in a curious first half where both teams were constantly caught out in transition. After the opening goal, Rose had a really threatening spell that could easily have created more goals.
The best chance fell to Sam Tierney, after Cayman brilliantly played Rose in behind, the winger squared for Tierney, who probably should have scored. A few minutes later, Rose got in behind Ashleigh Neville again, then shot over from a tight angle with better options available. On the brink of half time, the highly effective ‘whack it over the top and let Rose rinse them’ tactic almost paid off again, the Canadian pouncing on a defensive mistake but shanking her shot well wide.
A feature of this game, and a reflection of the fact this was two teams in mid-table rather than the elite of the WSL, was some pretty poor decision-making and execution in the final third. Both could have done a lot more with the opportunities they had, but often took too long to decide what to do so that the opportunity vanished.
Sucker punches
Leicester were much improved defensively after the break, and other than a couple of half chances, completely shut their opponents down. Saori Takarada started to impose herself on the game, helping the team keep possession, and they reduced the number of times they got caught in transition. Partly this was through some good use of the old tactical fouls routine, which served to limit the damage of losing the ball.
The increasingly subdued crowd became frustrated as the game stretched on towards a Leicester victory, shocking your intrepid correspondent out of his calm reverie with sudden, synchronised chants of “I’m blind, I’m deaf, I wanna be a ref” whenever a decision went against them.
There was no sign of an equaliser, until the exact moment it arrived. With 8 minutes to go, Leicester decided to take out the nearest howitzer and aim it directly at their own big toe. While the midfield could have done a lot better initially, there’s no hiding from the fact it came as the result of a horrible individual mistake.
Green, strangely for someone who’s spent a lot of her career in midfield, was shaky in possession in the first half, but this was a classic centre back cock-up, the cardinal sin of failing to deal with a bouncing ball. She swung wildly at it, made no contact whatsoever, and Naz was in behind her to level the tie.
A lifetime of Leicester City experience has taught me to be on high, high alert in these sorts of situations. Like watching England bat over the winter, you can be sipping cocktails at Relaxation Station one minute, only to trip over the tablecloth and impale yourself in shattered glass the next. The moment that goal went in, the path of pain opened up before us.
The only surprise was that it took another half an hour to arrive. The remaining few minutes of normal time saw Tottenham lay siege to the Leicester goal. With all this action taking place at the other end of the pitch, my memory of it is that the entire spell took place within a narrow 20 yard space, with shots and crosses pinging in every few seconds or so.
There was one penalty shout (“I’m blind…I’m deaf…”), some half chances, a cross just out of Beth England’s reach. It seemed impossible that Martha Thomas’s shot drifted wide of the post, but it turns out it was a brilliant save from Kop to deny her. There was a free header from the resulting corner deposited straight at Kop. Then another chance into the side netting before the sweet relief of the full time whistle.
Once again, Leicester did well to re-establish themselves in the game in extra time. Having been completely on the ropes at the end of regulation, the additional period was more like the rest of the second half, with very few chances for Spurs and they even managed to forage forward and create a couple of chances for themselves.
Then for the second time in the match, with the game drifting towards penalties, they let in an avoidable goal. In a recurring theme, the goal happened at the other end of the pitch, and it looked horribly soft. Any time a goalkeeper gets lobbed by a header it doesn’t look good, although in reality it felt like an accumulation of a few small mistakes rather than a single individual error.
Kop probably could have done better to deal with the initial corner, Leicester then had eight players in the penalty area against four opponents, yet Spurs won the first header. Aileen Whelan should probably have been stronger in defending the back post, but Martha Thomas had a run on her. Then Kop was caught awkwardly under the looping header as it sailed over her into the net.
Sim to end
There’s no escaping the fact this was a tough loss, perhaps the hardest most of these players will have experienced. Eight minutes from a Wembley final, then two minutes from a penalty shoot out. The nature of the goals they conceded, particularly the equaliser, are going to stay with them.
With nothing left to play for in the league, the season is more or less over and there’s a long time to reflect on what happened. An uncertain managerial situation and the nature of women’s football, which sees high turnover in the playing staff over the summer, means it may be it for this group, a team that has undoubtedly been the best Leicester side the women’s team has had thus far.
The hope is that the squad as a whole has learned from this experience and can come back stronger in the future. If not in cup semi finals, then at least in big WSL games against tougher opponents next season. But you may never get back to this position, and the hurt of this missed chance will linger on for a while yet.
