Leicester City (R) 0 Manchester United 3: Pointless again
Leicester City Football Club’s relentless quest to find more misery to heap onto its fanbase gained another success with the fourth defeat of the season to the worst Manchester United team in living memory.
This is currently a shell of a football club, reaping the rewards of sticking with decision-makers who have overseen a remarkable decline while still paying their players enormous amounts.
Leicester’s best chance came in the 4th minute, when Jamie Vardy stabbed a shot straight at Andre Onana. When the early chance we occasionally craft for our 38-year-old striker isn’t dispatched, we know the script. Since Vardy scored in the opening minutes against West Ham in Ruud van Nistelrooy’s first game in charge, almost every single game has become ludicrously predictable.
We don’t just trudge down Raw Dykes Road on the way back from games these days. We trudge to the games, completely devoid of hope that this terrible set of players, compiled by a clueless regime and overseen by one of the worst managers in the club’s history, will not score and they will not win.
That may all sound dramatic but it’s totally supported by inconvenient facts. It’s now seven defeats in a row in all competitions. It’s also seven league defeats at home without scoring a goal. In a parallel universe, someone within the club’s leadership would have spotted this coming or done something about it prior to now. They’d have removed van Nistelrooy before he’d got down the tunnel, or resigned due to their own sheer incompetence.
On an individual basis, there’s obviously a huge gulf in the resources available to Manchester United and Leicester City. Hoovering up fans across the country and the world due to success thirty years ago now means, with the drawbridge of financial regulations pulled up to settle the elite once and for all, Manchester United can spend £64million on a striker who can only score against Leicester.
Our own entire team cost around twice that amount. You can overlook the vast sums that go into creating this monster until it becomes a chore to even drag yourself down to watch the end result. Tens of millions of pounds wasted on players unable to compete at Premier League level.
We’d have been better off only signing loans and free transfers, and donating the money to a local cause instead - like the designated charity for this game, the Leicestershire hospice charity LOROS.
Instead, our club has conducted a masterclass in how not to construct a squad fit for top flight football. There are still players getting a start in the year of our lord 2025 who it was patently clear two years ago were absolutely terrible footballers. It’s remarkable just how bad some of them are, and almost as remarkable that van Nistelrooy keeps picking them.
Going after the players seems futile but when you watch your team lose so many games in a row you can barely remember how to celebrate a goal, everything’s fair game. Van Nistelrooy has only been watching Wout Faes hare back towards his own goal as a previously profligate striker fires the ball into the Leicester net for a few months. We’ve been watching it for years now.
That’s the thing with buying the wrong players. You can’t find anyone to sell them to, and you’re saddled with watching them for years while the other members of the back line beam about the camaraderie and walk their dogs around the club’s £100million countryside retreat.
Boubakary Soumare is also somehow still getting a game every week despite proving consistently that he’ll never be part of a successful top flight Leicester City team.
And van Nistelrooy, incomprehensibly, has decided Patson Daka is the best choice to play as a wide supporting attacker despite his inability to run with the ball, head it, control it or shoot in the right direction. It would be one thing resting an ineffective Vardy to play Daka as some kind of pressing forward just to irritate opposition centre-backs but to wilfully play him out of position when he struggles to play his actual position is shameful.
So those are the players.
Going after the fans is never a good idea either. But as Ayden Heaven lay in agony, receiving medical treatment from several professionals at the side of the pitch, hundreds of Leicester fans decided the right thing to do was to jeer the referee’s refusal to restart play and cheer sarcastically when Heaven eventually left the pitch on a stretcher.
You can, at a stretch, put this kind of behaviour down to tribalism and the frustration of watching your own team labour to defeat every week. There’s a wider point here though. The same set of fans are not using this apparent vocal ability towards creating any kind of positive atmosphere, nor are they making life uncomfortable for the club’s decision-makers. This is life in the middle of the “Kop”, where an opposition player receiving treatment for a serious injury is the thing most worth getting worked up about.
At half time, with Leicester trailing, van Nistelrooy could have been bold and thrown on either Stephy Mavididi or Facundo Buonanotte. Not perfect players, nor particularly stellar during the few minutes they’ve been granted by van Nistelrooy, but also not Patson Daka.
Van Nistelrooy has taken against both of them though, turning someone who looked like a £40million player into a £4million one and refusing to countenance the idea we might need someone to deliver the ball into the box at some stage.
This looked like a team picked by an eight-year-old, that age when you haven’t really picked up on how football works and you think if you pick all your strikers then you’ve got more chance of scoring a goal.
When Buonanotte and Mavididi eventually did come on, Leicester looked a bit more threatening. But the game was still over early yet again, Alejandro Garnacho and Bruno Fernandes putting it to bed with a pair of fine finishes.
The final few minutes became a game of whether Leicester could even muster a meaningless consolation goal against such a woeful Manchester United defence. This was played out to a soundtrack from the stands that dripped with sarcasm, most of all when pleas for a player to shoot resulted in Harry Winks putting a weak left-footed effort from distance straight at Onana. In a season full of new lows, this felt like another one. A moment of pure humiliation.
Van Nistelrooy then walked around hugging Manchester United players while barely acknowledging Buonanotte. It summed up a celebrity appointment who gives the appearance of caring more about his previous club than his current one. And like it or not, we seem to be stuck with him.
Because victory for Wolves at Southampton the previous afternoon had already made relegation look a certainty. Even the faint what-ifs have disappeared now. It doesn’t really matter what team van Nistelrooy picks for the remaining nine games. There’s no point in wasting money on sacking him now either.
That leaves a glum final quarter of the season which currently promises to be, both literally and figuratively, pointless.
At least we don’t have to do it again for a few weeks.
