Leicester City 0 Leeds United 1: Farked up
The winning run is over. Bristol City’s century-long record remains intact. Leeds came to the King Power and delivered a reality check to the Maresca machine. James Knight looks at whether this was a blip or a sign of deeper problems.
Even if you start the season on a historic heater, even if you go on a run where you win nine games out of ten, even if you’re still ten points ahead of the chasing pack, you’re still going to be annoyed by the one you didn’t win. Boy is that one going to stick in your craw.
That it was Leeds who ended Leicester’s record-breaking run made this result more infuriating than it might have been. Not only because of the incessant media narrative that surrounds the mighty Leeds, but because this felt like a missed opportunity – ridiculous as it may sound a couple of days before Bonfire Night – to effectively finish the promotion race.
Had Leicester won this game, the gap to third would have been 17 points. Even at this stage, it’s hard to imagine any team winning enough games to make that up. It would’ve been over. The prospect of having our feet up in party mode for the next six months loomed large.
Then there’s the fact that as soon as this game began, it was obvious that the quality of both teams was far higher than anything we’ve seen in the division so far. This was a Premier League game in all but name, an early test of the Enzo experiment under live conditions, nearly a year ahead of schedule. And instead of firmly stating our case, we stuttered and fell at the feet of a team who decided to take us on.
In the absence of real jeopardy from the other teams in the division, we’ve had to create our own. So, this became, in many ways, a referendum on whether we’ll be able to compete back at the top level. The spectre of Burnley, apparently a revolutionary tour de force in the Championship, who currently look like a pile of discarded Brendanballs against real opposition, looms large.
The turnover trap
The irony of this game is that despite how well they played, Leeds fell into the exact same trap as many other sides we’ve faced this season. They knew they had to press, they forced turnovers high up the pitch, but then they wasted the chances that came from them.
Twice in the first ten minutes they won the ball deep in our half and created great chances to score. First a poor pass from Mads Hermansen put Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall under pressure, only for Joel Piroe to blaze the resulting chance miles wide with the goal at his mercy. Then Wout Faes rather inexplicably booted the ball straight at a Leeds player on the edge of his own area, leading to Ricardo Pereira denying Georginio Rutter with a sensational tackle on the edge of the six-yard box.
Leicester largely regained control after that, with exactly the sort of football Maresca talked about pre-match. “We need to be careful. Probably more than ever, it’s a game we need many passes before we attack”, he said then. And that’s what Leicester did to get a foothold. It’s at times like this where you can see the real value of the central box axis of Faes, Ricardo, Jannik Vestergaard, and Harry Winks.
All of them are Premier League quality, they were all good defensively. Faes in particular has an aggressiveness in stepping out from the back to win the ball that is lacking when he isn’t there, while he and Ricardo were excellent against Crycensio Summerville. Then the four combined for such composure and ability on the ball that it served to calm the whole team down. Gradually they were able to bring our wingers into the game.
Those wingers had Leeds’ full backs on toast for the rest of the half. Abdul Fatawu forced Sam Byram into two cynical fouls in the first 25 minutes, which he was rather fortunate to only be booked once. Stephy Mavididi similarly kept going past Archie Gray on the other side. The problem was their individual dominance didn’t really translate to any chances. Fatawu’s solo effort off the crossbar was the only time Leicester threatened a goal before the break.
Starting slow
The pattern then repeated itself after half time. Leeds started extremely well, with their tempo causing all sorts of problems and disrupting our attempts to keep the ball. A couple of half-chances for Piroe and Rutter forced Hermansen into saves, then James Justin prevented Rutter from scoring immediately before his actual goal.
Maresca said afterwards that he was surprised at how poorly Leicester started each half, as “we usually start in the right way”. The reality is that this isn’t the first time this kind of thing has happened, particularly after half time. Early in the season Leicester gave up huge chances straight after the break in lots of games and were only punished a couple of times.
It’s like a big, lumbering boxer who needs time to crank into gear. Once we get going, we’re very hard to stop, but when we’re warming up there’s a chance to hit us with a couple of quick hooks. Leicester were pretty good overall, it was a tight game between two top class sides. This time, however, and unlike most of the season, the breaks went the opponent’s way. 10 minutes into the second half, a corner fell fortuitously at Rutter’s feet with nothing but net in front of him.
The set piece itself was a great delivery and a bad break, the sort of thing that happens occasionally. The lead up to the corner, though, was symptomatic of one of the biggest failings of the first hour. That is, that Jamie Vardy had a terrible game up front.
The falsest of false nines
The fact that Vardy started at all felt significant, a clear sign that he’s the first-choice striker in Maresca’s mind. This pecking order has been strange for a while, but now that multiple managers have chosen to go that way, we have to assume there’s some deeper reason behind it than my initial assumption that it was merely Brendan Rodgers’ weirdness.
There’s no doubt that Vardy offers leadership that Iheanacho doesn’t. He, along with Winks and Vestergaard, are Chief Pointers in this side. Forever telling teammates who to pick up or where to make a run. But whether that leadership is enough to cover for the fact that he’s simply not as good as Iheanacho anymore is open to question.
As is the exact role the striker is meant to play in this side. Vardy and Iheanacho are quite different players, which is why they’ve often played well together. At times this season it seems like the idea is the striker shouldn’t get involved in build-up and should stay way up front as the finisher. At others, the striker’s ability to drop deeper and offer an outlet for the defensive players as they play through the press has seemed most important.
Against Leeds, Vardy tried to do the latter job, with absolutely no success whatsoever. He kept coming back to act as a backboard, and the ball kept pinging off in all directions. The foot equivalent of a lad having a head like a 50 pence piece. If this was the intent going in, it doesn’t make any sense to start Vardy over Iheanacho. Particularly as it meant Vardy then was too deep to offer a threat in the box going forward. The most notable example of this came in the first half, when Mavididi fizzed a ball across the six-yard box – the most ‘Vardy zone’ zone in the history of zones – and there was no one anywhere near it.
A few minutes into the second half, Maresca had clearly noticed the problem and was trying to remedy it. Iheanacho got the call on the sideline with the score still at 0-0. By the time he actually got on, however, Vardy had given the ball away yet again on the halfway line, Leeds had gone up the other end, won a corner, and scored.
Casadeis hard
If Vardy was one glaring weakness, the other was in midfield. It’s become increasingly obvious over the last week how much Leicester miss Wilfred Ndidi when he isn’t there. Dropping into the Championship has been the best thing that ever happened to Wilf’s reputation. After two largely disappointing years, at this level you’re reminded again of just how much better he is than most other footballers in the world.
Without Ndidi and Dennis Praet, the only option for that third midfield spot is Cesare Casadei. The Italian was probably the most exciting signing of the summer. So far, he’s yet to live up to the billing. This was another hugely disappointing game, as kept committing the cardinal sin in the Maresca system of failing to keep possession, which led him into the firing line of a furious Harry Winks on multiple occasions. The whole Idea relies on the defenders and the goalkeeper playing through the press, and the midfielders and wingers holding onto the ball when it’s fired into them.
A system is only as good as its weakest component, and ours breaks down if the attacking players can’t keep the ball under pressure. We saw against Sunderland last week how poor Leicester were at holding it up in the final stages, when Maresca ended up with a front three of Vardy, Patson Daka, and Marc Albrighton. Your midfielders and attackers are often going to get the ball with a man on them, so anyone who’s off the pace either technically or physically gets shown up. Casadei undoubtedly was here, and it meant so many moves broke down with him.
It's hard to blame anyone too much for that. Casadei is still only 20, while a lot of our squad depth is currently injured. Maresca has been forced to play five of the front six in all three games in the past week and a half. Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, Winks, Mavididi, and Fatawu have played all four games in the last fortnight. The rest of the league might break out the world’s smallest violin, but the absence of Kasey McAteer, Tom Cannon, Yunus Akgun, Ndidi, and Praet has clearly served to limit the rotation options, which is a crucial part of maintaining intensity over such a long season.
It was a surprise, though, that Maresca didn’t turn to McAteer at any point on Friday. At QPR last week, his brief cameo as one of the #8s stood in stark contrast to everything Casadei did beforehand. McAteer has a hint of the Ayoze Perez about him, with less falling over and fewer embarrassing misses. He’s extremely good at finding space and he makes the players around him better. It’s likely he would have recreated the underlapping runs in behind that Ndidi has been so good at and which Casadei hardly ever seems to do. It would have given Fatawu, in particular, some more options, rather than a binary choice between shooting and standing up crosses to the back post.
In the end, one of each of those options created Leicester’s best chances. The first half effort off the bar and then a cross to Dewsbury-Hall in the dying stages, which Ilan Meslier clawed out of the top corner. That was the only shot on target, a reflection of the fact Leicester failed to turn an overall fine performance into legitimate pressure on the Leeds goal.
Everything’s fine
There’s no reason to particularly panic about this result. Leicester remain 11 points clear of Leeds in third and are well on course to bounce straight back to the big time. On another day, that late header would have nestled in the top corner, and we’d be talking once again about our capacity to keep going until the bitter end.
No team, excepting perhaps Ipswich, is likely to pose as stern a test as Leeds did. We are also getting to the point at which the injured players are ready for a return. Maresca has often talked about the necessity of rotating across such a long season and that option will be back in play in the next few weeks.
The main takeaway from this game should be to emphasise that we still have a long way to go. Both in terms of conquering the Idea and in terms of the sheer number of games. We have plenty of time to develop and improve over the next six months.
The fact Ipswich have kept pace with us so far makes it feel like you can’t afford to drop any points at all. And some of the narrative online seems to be based around everyone cosplaying this division as the Premier League, where a single dropped point is a disaster.
It’s not. The Championship isn’t the Premier League. There are a lot more flaws here. Nobody’s perfect and everyone is going to drop points. A solitary defeat isn’t going to derail anything and we’re already almost halfway to the promised land.
