Leicester City 1 Nottingham Forest 3: The search for scapegoats
As the temporarily red segment of the King Power Stadium celebrated wildly at the end of a chastening night for Leicester City supporters, in the home sections the search for scapegoats was well underway.
There were low grumbles about Steve Cooper. Whether he is up to this job. How long it will take him to know his best team. About setting up a defence and getting the balance right and making good substitutions.
As the players trudged around the pitch, they bore the brunt of the fans’ frustrations. One supporter, for want of a better word, temporarily took leave from telling all the players one by one to fuck off and turned his attentions to another fan, saying “this isn’t Liverpool, this is Forest” - conveniently forgetting that this Forest side have recently won at Anfield and are now fifth in the Premier League table.
That gulf in quality exposed during a torrid second half was what provoked one gruff voice to sail a third suggested scapegoat out from the top of the Kop.
“Rudkin out”
Enzoball strikes
The truth is that the first half had been terrific as a spectacle. Every five or ten minutes I found myself muttering “what a game” as both sides designed ways to get the ball to their exciting wingers.
Leicester were admittedly open, and created very, very little - but they progressed the ball well and there was a welcome buzz around the ground whenever a fast, free-flowing attack threatened to lead to something.
In fact, it looked a bit like a coked-up Enzoball. The returning Ricardo took up his position from last season as an inverted full-back, rolling back a year to play quick one-twos with Harry Winks and help drive the team forward. There were threats from both wings as Cooper finally fielded both Stephy Mavididi and Abdul Fatawu. The man of the hour, Facundo Buonanotte, found pockets of space in the number ten position.
Of course, the story of this game was sadly not any of that. It was one of Leicester’s costly mistakes.
Buonanotte’s poor decision to try to dribble the ball out of the penalty area in the 16th minute was compounded when a second opportunity to clear was bungled by James Justin. Ryan Yates found the bottom corner of Mads Hermansen’s net and for all Leicester’s early promise, Forest were ahead.
It was hard to see the response as anything other than a goal created as much by Enzo Maresca as anybody currently employed by Leicester City on or off the pitch.
A quick exchange of passes in the middle of the park and Leicester were away. The third man run was from Winks rather than Wilfred Ndidi or Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall but the result was a familiar one - Jamie Vardy wheeling away in celebration.
It was a magnificently constructed goal and offered possibilities of what this team could eventually morph into, or perhaps morph back into.
Two minutes later, we should have been behind again but Hermansen brilliantly denied Nicolas Dominguez with the kind of improbable save that is becoming routine.
Any Leicester City fan who has been paying attention this season should have known deep down, as the fans roared the players off at half time before tucking into their free crispy coconut rolls, that it was time to go home. We’ve seen the good half. Don’t put yourself through the inevitably bad one.
Not stopping the Wood for the Trees
But we stayed, didn’t we, like the fools we are, and within fifteen minutes Forest were home and hosed with two goals from a 32-year-old we discarded nine years ago. One whose current goalscoring exploits are now provoking BBC articles about how he and Erling Haaland are leading a renaissance of the big man.
Before the game, news of Victor Kristiansen’s injury and the restoration of Ricardo to his Enzoball role felt like the right thing at exactly the wrong time. Forest’s main attacking strength is their transition out wide, and suddenly we were trying to play through the middle with our full-backs having to scramble to recover when we lost the ball.
But there’s also Chris Wood, who made the most of the huge contrast between Forest’s own central defence and our cartoon character of a senior centre-back.
The mistakes were multiple for Wood’s first goal, a careless Winks pass not seized upon by Fatawu before Faes and Okoli both gave space to their men and the ball ended up in the bottom corner through an admittedly excellent turn and strike.
The second was an utter calamity, the kind that feels like slow motion for the watching fan of the defending team, the kind that proper teams would never allow, the kind that relegated teams concede. A routine long ball from Forest goalkeeper Matz Sels travelled almost the length of the pitch, a retreating Okoli let it drop over his shoulder and Faes nodded it up perfectly for Wood to head over a stranded Hermansen.
And that was that. The thing about starting all your good attackers is that there’s nobody to come off the bench and make any impact. Cooper turned to Jordan Ayew and Bilal El Khannouss and there followed half an hour of Leicester endlessly recycling possession from one wing to the other before eventually losing the ball. It was frankly painful to watch, and Forest added to their highlights reel on the counter in the meantime. It should have been more like five or six.
Shout to the top
But this is where we go back to that lone cry of Rudkin Out, because this fixture almost exactly two years ago resulted in a comprehensive home win. Since then, Forest have bought and bought and ended up with enough hits that they’ve compiled an effective Premier League squad.
In contrast, our horror show in the transfer market was summed up by a Boubakary Soumare cameo greeted by howls of derision from the moment he trotted onto the pitch.
There will be moments, such as the comebacks against Tottenham and Southampton, where fans will be caught up in the ecstasy of an unexpected point or a 98th minute winner. The tone for the season seems more likely to be repeated reminders of how far we’ve fallen due to failings at executive level.
A team that will fight hard but which will effectively start almost every game on -1 because at some point someone will make the kind of mistakes we saw last night.
A manager that has the feel of being not quite good enough, a backup option for the one we really wanted but couldn’t secure.
An ownership that has been on cruise control for years, watching as other clubs have made key personnel changes or continued to implement a clear long-term plan.
This dismal evening was a reminder that it’s never far from a disaster at Leicester City. This is a manager, a team and a club flying by the seat of its pants, desperate to point to good moments while everything around those moments looks rotten.
Even back-to-back wins and a promising first half couldn’t prevent the mood turning rapidly bitter. The stands emptied long before the final whistle and many of those who stayed were furious at anyone who applauded the players.
It was a familiar feeling, but do Steve Cooper and these players have enough to make it a fleeting one? To make all the rage look ridiculous in retrospect? We need to be convinced.
In the opening part of a double header this week – with the first team welcoming Nottingham Forest to King Power Stadium on Friday night - Leicester City Under-21s suffered narrow Premier League Cup defeat at the hands of their Forest counterparts at a cold Seagrave on Monday evening.