Plymouth Argyle 1 Leicester City 0: Stick a pin in us, we’re done
Friday night under the lights…this was a far throw from the Atletico Madrid game on this day in 2017. The Foxes had a huge chance to put their best foot forward in the title race but we tripped ourselves up again. Back to back midweek defeats leave us top for now but sitting precariously at best.
722 miles of travel, more than £50 in tickets, not to mention the money needed for food, drink and some time off work. This is what it’s taken for the majority to attend both of these midweek away trips (and a lot of you have done both trips). And all for what? Well, for two losses in utterly limp fashion. Hours spent after the game wondering what you've just witnessed and why you bother. The away end deserves to be seething. Where’s Wout Faes cupping his ear for that?
I cringed when Sky cameras zoomed in on a ‘Fearless’ flag pre-match. It felt like an omen and not a good one. Our record at Plymouth has been poor and their recent home record has been worse. You know what that means, Foxes fans. Fearless Foxes? Toothless and utterly out of ideas, more like.
On a day where yet another Leicester City statement battled another EFL statement about PSR and charges and points deduction, we could all have done with a game to really forget about that ridiculous saga. I suppose we got a distraction, though simply because we’re all just raging at how pathetic this game was. Still, the club probably sees that as a result given nobody will be talking about that for at least a couple more days.
We didn’t do the predictable and make ourselves the fools on April Fool’s day itself because that’s too easy, right? We’ve played the long game of just making ourselves the fools for the rest of April instead. Airing our incompetence nationally too, because all of these games are on television so that fans of every other club can enjoy us bottling it and questioning how this team was top for so long. Or berating us for giving other teams a leg up in the relegation battle.
Leicester fans have of course been here before. We had some pretty rough back to back away fixtures in Nigel Pearson's Championship years that also ended in loss and vitriolic away ends. The difference in those years though was that we hadn't seen our team fritter away a huge point lead and re-open a title race that seemed over for months.
The truth is always in the stats, and they ain’t pretty. Six defeats in the last ten is hardly the form you need in a promotion battle. Or the kind of form to be taken into the Premier League if we somehow get there.
The big concern right now isn’t just whether we’ll finish the job off but whether we actually deserve to. There’s no possibility for us to finish third and still make it, not with the momentum void we’re carrying. Love is pain as per the lyrics in the song you keep playing us pre-match at the King Power.
Burning that hope
The first fifteen minutes at least felt hopeful. Despite bemoaning the fixture congestion and mentioning tiredness, we named…a very similar starting line-up yet again. Abdul Fatawu came back into the side, as did James Justin and Patson Daka was preferred to Jamie Vardy, though Tom Cannon was finally back on the bench.
We started brightly enough, Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall restored to attacking down the left of our midfield yielded some early excitement, linking up with Stephy Mavididi and Fatawu’s energy was ever present. Dewsbury-Hall was one of the only players who came away from this with some credibility because you could see he cared, and that's even if he did go down too easily in the box looking for a penalty. Which tells you all you need to know about the levels of desperation we found ourselves in.
But the familiar, old problem of converting our possession into meaningful chances still haunts us. Once again, our lack of ideas and penetration in the final third were all too apparent. As were the stupid little mistakes we seem to keep on making.
Ricardo didn’t rush back to cover his man when Plymouth found themselves breaking down the right and Wout Faes employed all the defensive prowess of a Tory politician during lockdown by not closing down his man, making a tackle or…well, doing anything. Cue the inevitable goal for Plymouth.
Had you not watched our performance at Millwall, you’d have been backing us to get back on top and take the game by the reins. We had looked the more likely team to score. Given that you, and I, did watch the game on Tuesday you knew exactly what was coming. Lots and lots of frustration.
We seem to go into some kind of panic mode of late when conceding, it’s not visible on the player’s faces, but composure seems to go out of the window. As does the ability to remember that on paper, this team should be more than capable of scoring a couple of goals a game. Although we’ve been here before too.
It's ludicrous really that for how poor we were at Millwall and having also lost that 1-0, we somehow still started this game top of the league. That was the one get out of jail free card lads, you don't get a second. A win was needed but a dominant, commanding performance was just as required to make up for Tuesday. We got neither.
Cutting our nose off to spite our own face
Enzo Maresca’s stubbornness is either admirable for unwavering commitment to his philosophy or more likely a source of abject rage. If curiosity killed the cat, stubbornness is going to kill Maresca’s Leicester. His decision making and utter reluctance to change the system or tactics for even fifteen minutes of a game is fine when the results go your way and performances are fun. Running Plan A into the ground when it’s already failed several times is verging on madness.
After Millwall had added their name to the list of teams who have royally sussed out our tactics we insisted on sticking with them against another team looking for points to avoid a relegation battle. And I’m sure we’ll act surprised that this team also found a way around them.
Plymouth didn’t have some of the quality that Millwall possessed which makes this 1-0 feel worse than the last. Where players could have been taking shots and just trying something a little different, we persisted with the status quo. Again.
This is Maresca’s inexperience laid out for all to see, both as a manager and in the Championship. This was always the risk. Couple that with a group of players who also haven’t found themselves in this position before and it’s a melting pot of possible disaster.
On the one hand, Maresca’s belief in Patson Daka is endearing but this was an incredibly, woefully poor outing from the striker who has struggled lately. Not content with looking sluggish in his reaction and anticipation, he missed not one but several chances he had to at least put on target. I appreciate he was never going to throw Tom Cannon back in straight after injury, but still.
Where Daka’s previously found himself the scapegoat unfairly, this display was impossible to defend. And you have to point the finger at Maresca. He puts the players in these positions. His substitutions and the timing of them have filled many, many pages this season already. His insistence on sticking with players that he says are tired, or who have been faltering and flailing for weeks, a la Faes, is mind-boggling.
No kudos to the Sky production team either who failed to see that cutting back to Conor Coady to see his face after each Faes wobble could have provided some much needed entertainment to Foxes fans.
We should have brought Dennis Praet on at half-time, not waited another ten minutes to see if Plan A would suddenly fool the opposition again despite knowing exactly what we’re going to do and when. Praet injected some life and tempo for a little while, but not enough in the end and we only made one other change. Jamie Vardy on for the dejected Daka. Though it made very little difference.
Trapped in groundhog day
This feels pretty much like the Millwall game on repeat. Except somehow worse. We’re stuck in a blue version of groundhog day.
The manner in which we conceded after the opponent had done essentially nothing, the way the rest of the game plays out in seeming slow motion tempo despite the match clock racing onward. Even the goal itself, one we saw more times than I care to remember while Ricardo was absent.
Much like last season, if you want to utter a phrase to boil my blood, tell me it’s still in our hands. Technically it is, but those hands are shaking and sweaty and you wouldn’t trust them to hold a piece of rubbish right now, let alone a fragile, breakable item like our current run of form.
We approached the final half of the second half with all the haste of a sloth waking up as we sort of looked for an equaliser. Which turned out to just be a lot of wasted balls pinged forward to nobody and Justin and Faes generally trying unsuccessful through balls after we'd held onto the ball for a while and further ran down the clock.
For all the movement and creation up top, I wouldn't have been against throwing on Conor Coady or Callum Doyle to try their luck there since Enzo seemed to have no intention of using Cannon. We just needed to throw the kitchen sink at it yet there we were persisting to polish up the tiny specks on the sink first.
The biggest deja vu comes from how concerned we are as fans, and how dismissed that seems to be yet again. Our concerns are being waved away because ‘you’re top’. For now, yes, but we look more like Mufasa hanging on in the Lion King right now. A sporting version of being gaslit, we’re being told that the performances are good and that really, we’re just unlucky. The players are tired? We’re tired!
Maresca has voiced his dissatisfaction with the crowd previously and it’s clear from his body language. But what is there to cheer for? Seeing the same joyless performance churned out while being behind in the game isn’t going to breed a lot of chanting. Yes, we’re still top and we still have the game in hand but after how similar things panned out last year under Rodgers, forgive us for being somewhat paranoid and nervous.
This is not a harmonious relationship and you wonder between this and the financials that won’t be resolved for a while whether Enzo has got the stomach for this.
On Tuesday we asked if this was the death of the idea? Based on tonight, it feels like it’s in the death throes if not fully extinguished.
Another televised fixture is next for Leicester, a week on Saturday, West Brom will be the visitors to a King Power Stadium that’s likely to be emotionally charged.
