Leicester City 3 Norwich City 1: Canaries on the goal line
The title tilt is back on, as Leicester dispatched both in-form Norwich and the Gathering Storm Clouds to regain top spot in the Championship.
Every time you think you know what this Leicester team is, they surprise you.
Mentality monsters, guaranteed to fight to the end and bag you a late goal? Here’s a three month run of conceding in the last minute, straight to the chops.
Best team in the league, on course for a record points tally? Here’s four defeats in 6 and a 14 point lead gone in a flash.
Overrated, found out, and destined for playoff heartbreak? Bang, have some of this.
A goal down and with the season on the line, Leicester responded with one of their best performances of the campaign, over an hour of utter domination that produced three goals and a crucial statement win in the Championship promotion race.
Appropriately, for the strangest team in the country, pathologically incapable of just winning a game in normal fashion, it was a comeback full of weirdness, featuring the sort of mutual antagonism between fans and players that has defined the last two years of Leicester City history.
We had deafening sarcastic cheers every time the team worked the ball to Abdul Fatawu that began 15 minutes into the game. We had Wout Faes aggressively cupping his ears at the crowd after the equaliser. We had Stephy Mavididi kind of hovering between ‘look at me’ swag and staring down the crowd after putting Leicester ahead.
All of these events served to show that this set of players was under extreme pressure. Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall’s revelation afterwards that the team had treated this game “like a cup final”, was perhaps evident in the mad scenes of jubilation that greeted Jamie Vardy’s coup de grace, deep into injury time, when everyone belted off in all directions: Harry Winks and Jannik Vestergaard to one corner, Vardy to another, and half the bench down the touchline.
It also goes to show what an impressive comeback this was. Going into the game, there was little to no confidence among the fans, there would have been even less who expected a victory from 1-0 down. Yet here it is, a vital three points that eases the pressure, for a few days, at least.
Comeback kids
Leicester’s record from a goal down this season has not been pretty. Before this encounter, they had conceded the first goal 10 times and only come back to win three of those games, with six ending in defeat. Ipswich and Leeds, by contrast, have each made up more than 20 points from losing positions.
Yet the irony is that the early goal in this case had a huge, positive impact on the way Leicester played. A lot of the criticism throughout Maresca’s reign has focused on how slowly we move the ball, especially out of defence. This time, the urgency of the occasion forced a far more proactive, positive approach.
Mads Hermansen’s 23 pass attempts was his lowest in a game all season. When the centre backs did have their foot on the ball, it was beyond the halfway line. Faes routinely won the ball 10-15 yards inside the Norwich half. There were far more forward passes, often raking diagonals from Faes and Callum Doyle to the wingers in space.
Following a similar pattern to his first year in a Leicester shirt, Faes has gradually become more annoying as the season has gone on, with more mistakes and his bravado seeping into unjustified complacency. But here he was excellent.
He won a tackle a few yards outside the Norwich box in the build-up to the first goal, then another tackle to spring the counter for Leicester’s second. By stepping forward in the right centre back role, he helped get the ball to Fatawu more and created an overload on that side that kept seeing Wilfred Ndidi get in behind the Norwich defence.
It also seems to be true that Doyle helps this whole system work much better than James Justin does. He may not be as good at defending as Justin, but his left-footedness and his distribution creates far more problems for opposing defences. Some of his cross-field passing is unbelievable to watch, and he helped get Fatawu into endless 1v1 situations, a vast improvement on the usual slow sideways moves that see the wingers facing two defenders every time.
Part of this was down to some strange Norwich tactics, who failed to do any of the things that usually work against Leicester: double up on the wingers, pressurise the defenders in possession, or break quickly to isolate those defenders and their complete lack of pace.
Instead, they pulled off one, admittedly clever, set piece routine that they stole from Manchester City, then did nothing whatsoever except some half-hearted attempts to time waste for the rest of the game. Those dismal efforts did, at least, result in one of the most hideous goals Leicester have ever conceded, complete with Stephy Mavididi, the near post defender, appealing for offside as the man behind him slotted home a corner at the near post.
Wide boys
In the short gap between games over Easter, there were calls for widespread changes from the team that lost on Friday, but we got a performance that shows why Maresca is so stubborn in selection. When you cast your eyes around the squad, it’s not obvious who should be playing instead of the XI who do play most of the games.
As is tradition whenever Leicester win on Sky, the man of the match award went to Dewsbury-Hall. It could easily have gone to either winger, who gave both Norwich full backs a torrid time all afternoon. When you see performances like this, it feels like insanity to suggest Marc Albrighton should be shuttling up and down the wing instead.
Even if we know that both wingers lack consistency, and can be immensely frustrating, it is at least easy to understand why there’s a reluctance to throw on anyone else. What is crucial is getting them the ball early and often, and offering support around them given the system ensures they’ll never have an overlapping full back to provide space.
On this occasion we saw how crucial Ndidi is to making that work. His runs into the corner of the penalty area were a constant threat, and it was his brilliant cross that set up the equaliser. He could’ve scored once himself when he was played in by Fatawu and denied by Angus Gunn, and he kept attacking that byline all game.
It is easy to forget that he’s barely played since Christmas and how unique his skillset is. He’s probably one of the most important players in the entire division, but gets a little lost in the wash with the players around him. Bristol City was the first time he’d lost a league game all season.
Ndidi’s excellence freed Fatawu to turn Sam McCallum’s brain into mush in the first half, which could have paid dividends on two separate occasions. First when he headed a clearance straight to Fatawu in first half injury time, only for the Ghanaian to blaze over the crossbar, and then again in the second half when he nodded a backpass straight to Patson Daka, which was promptly Daka’d miles wide from a few yards out.
Again, though, it all came down to tempo. Both wingers were prepared to take on the full back again and again, and Leicester were aggressive from wide areas in general. They delivered more crosses in this game than all except one match this season, which also goes to show the value of having a left-footed left back and both Faes and Ndidi as advanced right-footed players on the opposite side to put those balls in.
The subs, they aren’t a changin’
That speed and forward momentum is the special sauce Leicester need to keep hold of for the rest of the season. The biggest problem - far more than personnel - seems to be a passivity whenever the game is close, whether that’s a goal down, a goal up, or literally level in scoreline. On this occasion the game was evidently so important that a goal down felt like a disaster, but that isn’t always the case for this team.
We even saw some fleeting glimpses of the Bad Ways once Leicester were ahead. Although they saw the game out relatively comfortably, the in-built urge to sit back and slow things down, which gives the opposition the chance to grab a lucky goal or produce one bit of quality to blow the house down, threatened to rear its ugly head.
Jack Stacey should have been the man to profit from it, bursting past Mavididi to put a brilliant chance into the side-netting. Luckily, the footballing Gods favoured Leicester this time around. That was followed by some more slightly curious substitutions, which seemed to serve no other purpose than to goad those very same Gods into kicking us once again.
Ricardo Pereira, Ndidi and both wingers were withdrawn with only a few minutes to go and a precarious one goal lead intact. Every manager makes subs like these, but few teams have such a drop-off between the players coming off (the core of your team) and those coming on (Dennis Praet).
Once you’re into the last five minutes, it’s difficult to argue that you’re ‘resting’ or ‘protecting’ anyone in any sense, and the risk of suddenly finding yourself needing another goal with a drastically weakened team - the exact situation that happened at Leeds - doesn’t seem worth it. Particularly nowadays with wild amounts of injury time in every game Leicester aren’t leading in.
In this case, everything was fine, and the Foxes sealed the deal by scrambling home a third in injury time. But for a team that has been bitten so many times by late goals, it would make everyone feel better if we either made the substitutions early enough to make a significant difference, or binned them off entirely.
For now though, some positivity is restored, and clouds have cleared to give us hope that this season might end in triumph after all.
