Millwall 1 Leicester City 0: The death of the idea?
Another away game, another tepid performance, and a big step back in the push for the Championship title. If familiarity breeds contempt, then there are going to be a lot of baby contempts scuttling around the streets of LE2 by the end of this season.
If this season does ultimately end in a Leicester promotion, it will surely go down as one of the strangest successful campaigns in history. A joyless promotion of necessity and convenience rather than one of passion and excitement.
This defeat was only the ninth of the campaign. Leicester are still top, pending Ipswich’s result on Wednesday night, and will go into Friday’s game at Plymouth in the automatic promotion spots whatever happens. It is, in the immortal words of the philosopher Brendan, in our hands, and that’s the beauty of it.
Yet this game felt like approximately 80% of all matches this season, a formulaic grind where it feels like someone’s infected the system with malware and all the players are moving around at half speed.
It is true that the business end of the season can throw up some awkward games, where teams further down the table can prove to be more difficult opponents than those in the middle. Particularly as underdogs in front of their own fans.
But this was not the same Den that stole Ben Chilwell’s soul a few years ago, a burning cauldron of hate and intimidation. This was a half-full, half-interested stadium, where it felt like someone had put ‘ambient background noise’ on the Spotify playlist and hooked it up to the PA system for 75 minutes.
Even that, it turns out, was too much for Leicester to bear. You can point to a few chances and say you were unlucky, but the whole feel of the occasion was that Millwall worked harder, executed their plan better, and totally snuffed out any attacking threat for the vast majority of the game. And they also showed the one bit of true quality we saw all night to boot.
Oh dear for the idea
There are plenty of individual performances to point to as reasons for this defeat. It would be difficult to pick out anyone who was good, in any sense of the word. But the creative players in particular were hopeless, with Stephy Mavididi the prime culprit, routinely losing the ball and blowing one of the best chances of the game with a horrible heavy touch when played clean through on goal in the first half.
This defeat, though, is on the manager. Sometimes players, wingers especially, are going to have bad games, and Mavididi is a poor man’s Harvey Barnes who combines some absolutely stinking performances with an excellent goal record. What you can’t do is have that be the death knell for your entire tactic on any given day.
It’s not news to say that Leicester have become too predictable, but it was Enzo Maresca’s tactical decisions that made them outrageously so in this game. With Yunus Akgun in for Abdul Fatawu and Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall and Wilfred Ndidi on the ‘wrong’ side of midfield, the entire gameplan relied on Mavididi beating his defender 1v1. When that didn’t happen, there was absolutely nothing.
Millwall deserve credit for the way they defended, because it required a lot of hard work to ensure there was no space for anyone and to press Leicester to force the ball away from their own area. But this was essentially the same tactic we saw for 18 months under Brendan Rodgers as well, with about as much success and complete with the act of letting the game drift on and on despite the obvious need for changes.
There were plenty of changes that could have been made. For one thing, Ndidi and Dewsbury-Hall are obviously a lot better on their stronger sides. The latter has excellent chemistry with Mavididi, while Ndidi’s great strength in the right-sided #8 role is his ability to make underlapping runs into the penalty area. The sight of him occasionally doing that on his left side and then forlornly swinging his foot at the ball like a drunken child on the driving range should have been a sign that this wasn’t a very good plan.
There is a simple way to fix this problem: tell them to swap. This could have happened in the first half, but it wasn’t until Leicester were behind that Maresca acted, and then it required replacing Ndidi with Dennis Praet to do so. Somewhat predictably, that right side then provided two of the most dangerous moments in the final stages.
The other, most obvious issue is Akgun, the world’s first positionless player, theoretically someone you can use everywhere but in reality not good enough to play anywhere. With him on the right, two inverted full backs and the two central midfielders preferring to cut inside on their stronger foot, this was an absurdly narrow team to pick to break down a compact defence.
Akgun lacks literally any speed whatsoever, and then when he does get into dangerous central areas he routinely botches it, as he did by passing tamely to a defender when both Jamie Vardy and Mavididi were in on the goalkeeper.
More broadly, though, the fact Akgun was playing at all highlights the way Maresca has narrowed his field of vision as the season has gone on. Earlier in the campaign, he was prepared to be provocative with team selections, resting and rotating players to keep the squad fresh and everyone engaged.
Now, it is the same players every couple of days, and when there are changes they serve purely to weaken the starting XI without giving any of the benefits of keeping key players fresh. This was a golden opportunity to put pressure on Leeds and Ipswich after their slip-ups at the weekend, and to only introduce Vardy and Akgun in place of Patson Daka and Fatawu managed to slash the speed, pressing, and threat of the front line while still ensuring that it was more or less the same tired team that plays every week.
Perennial problems
On top of the selection flaws, there’s the obvious and avoidable weaknesses that suddenly stare you right in the face, and which it still feels we’ve largely gotten away with this season. The ones that have the unmistakeable whiff of Rodgers about them.
There are kick-off routines that seem to lead to other teams having shots alarmingly early in proceedings, as happened here where Millwall had a free header in the box within the first minute. Or when Harry Winks and Ricardo pulled their ‘tap the ball 17 times to each other from a yard away’ trick again, only to be put under pressure and immediately lose the ball at the start of the second half.
Then there are the set piece frailties: the aforementioned free header in the first minute, then Jake Cooper heading a golden chance tamely at Mads Hermansen towards the end of the first period. The gaping holes on the counter that flared up after Millwall scored, which should have seen Michael Obafemi finish the game off after sending Wout Faes to the morgue. The surprisingly terrible attempts to keep possession under pressure.
Combined with all that, a cutting edge so blunt it resembles the sort of thing you might read about in a 16th century textbook, when it took 17 attempts for the executioner to lop off Lord Sir Talbot Buxomly’s head on the scaffold.
Leicester have only scored more than once three times in nine games, which if anything oversells the ability of the forwards to find the net. Part of the problem is chance creation: 97 minutes against one of the worst teams in the league offered up barely a touch inside the box. Part of it is also that Jamie Vardy is a more or less sedentary figure these days, who has no ability whatsoever to get ahead of his marker or to move around to put defenders under pressure.
But then when the chances do materialise, they are often greeted with an astonishing lack of composure. In the latter stages here, once Fatawu and Praet started to get the ball on the right, they did create opportunities, most notably for Kelechi Iheanacho, who had a header from point-blank range cleared brilliantly off the line. Then for Patson Daka, who shanked a free header horribly wide.
Daka’s eight minute cameo summed up, in many ways, how all over the place Maresca and the team have been for the last couple of months. Leicester’s attack almost always looks significantly better with him on, because he can press and trouble defences in a way that Vardy no longer can. Yet he is in a timeshare with Vardy, a plan that takes two streaky strikers and ensures they never have a streak.
His introduction came with only minutes to go in this encounter, as Leicester slapped pathetically against a brick wall, and by then it whiffed of panic. He replaced Winks, the cornerstone of Maresca’s system and a man who is never substituted - he hasn’t been taken off since September 15th, when Leicester were 4-1 up at Southampton - and then the team promptly created a bunch of chances and he missed one in horrible fashion.
Really, though, Leicester didn’t deserve anything from this game. The onus was on Maresca and his team to set the tone, and they didn’t. Millwall fought and grappled them to a standstill, and then knocked them out with a brilliant goal on the break.
That can happen, but when you look at the bald facts of how much money has been spent on putting this team together, the repercussions of doing so, and then look on the pitch and see what gets served up again and again, you have to ask some difficult questions about the future, whether that ultimately ends in promotion or not.
Long way home
In a way, Leicester got away with this defeat. Leeds’ failure to beat Sunderland means that it wasn’t as existential as it might have been. But after a good week last week this was a reversion to what has been served up for a couple of months now, a team that looks like it’s on its last legs and on the brink of giving out entirely.
Nothing is going to change now. We are in this with this manager and this system and these players for five more games. The hope - the need - is that they scrape together enough performances to collapse over the line.
It’s hard to know which is the aberration: the team that looked back to its swaggering pomp against Norwich, or the one that turned up small in south London. Which says a lot in itself, that this is now an inconsistent team that needs to produce a consistent run of results to guarantee promotion.
There aren’t many of us who feel confident going into the last five games that this is a team capable of getting enough points. There are even fewer who would expect it to come through the cauldron of a playoff semi final against one of the in-form teams chasing sixth spot who would come into it on a high.
Once again, there’s not much time to recover. Leicester have won only one of the last five away league games, and now take a trip to Home Park on Friday night, another of those awkward end of season games against a bad team who’s up for it in front of their own fans.
Perhaps it would be appropriate if it’s The Likes of Plymouth who finish off this stuttering automatic promotion party for good.
