RC Lens 3 Leicester City 0: A headache for the optimists
When was the last time Leicester City fans went into a new season with the current degree of hopelessness? You’d have to go back a long way to find an example.
We’ve seen poor summer transfer windows before, as in 2022. We’ve seen a newly-promoted team having to make the leap to the Premier League before, as in 2014. We’ve even seen some fans underwhelmed by summer managerial appointments, as in 2008 and 2015…
The issue right now is that all of these problems have come at once. There is very little to be excited about, unless you haven’t been paying any attention to pre-season performances, pre-season results, the transfer business achieved so far or the way fans are being treated off the pitch.
There are people who don’t seem to care about any of these things, in favour of blind optimism. It was hard to see what anyone would have taken as a positive from Leicester’s final warmup game of a pretty desperate summer break.
How bad can a pre-season game be? This was the answer.
There’s one caveat. Some Leicester fans were probably oblivious to the fact Lens, perhaps badged as just a random French team that isn’t PSG, were actually in the Champions League last season. They beat Arsenal at home.
But they also lost 6-0 at the Emirates - and that’s the kind of reality we could be facing soon unless something truly transformative happens.
Steve Cooper knows it. His post-match comments were straight out of the Brendan Rodgers circa 2022 playbook. He wants new blood and he’s not afraid to say it. He’s also got recent experience of going into a Premier League season with a team that doesn’t look good enough.
Leicester fans, less so. We’ve been fixating on two or three positions, looking at replacements for the departed Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, the unconvincing Victor Kristiansen and the much-maligned and now sidelined Patson Daka.
The evidence here suggested the problems are far more fundamental than that.
The lack of shooting opportunities has come under the microscope during previous friendly outings. In France, with fans primed for a riposte, we managed two wildly speculative long-range efforts from Bobby De Cordova-Reid and Tom Cannon that you’d be embarrassed to count as shots in normal circumstances.
So with creativity needed, there have been calls for Will Alves to get a chance in the side. He got ten minutes against Lens, but barely saw the ball let alone touched it. The entire structure of the team was the bigger issue.
What’s clear is that Harry Winks can’t be the sole source of technical quality in midfield. Ricardo’s presence alongside Winks is sorely missed. Perhaps the newly-signed Facundo Buonanotte can provide some help. There also needs to be someone up front who can hold up the ball and bring others into play. We were swiftly linked again with the sizeable Panathinaikos striker Fotis Ioannidis. And maybe the Wilfred Zaha speculation will come to something.
Overall though, Leicester look like an entire squad of players who aren’t quite good enough. Even that status is fragile given the lack of depth. After Abdul Fatawu went down just before half time, the relief when he got to his feet was enormous.
While nobody wants injuries, there hadn’t been quite the same sensation when Daka was floored. Perhaps that will kickstart our real, and necessary, spending.
Ultimately, Cooper has to get the personnel right and the starting lineup against Lens looked underpowered.
Starting Ricardo is a must. Wout Faes, whose trademark “I’m above all this” vibe almost led to a calamitous fourth concession, can’t be the senior centre-back in a Premier League defence. Wilfred Ndidi is not the creative force he briefly threatened to be against Rotherham and co last season.
Despite winning the Championship title, Leicester have leapfrogged Ipswich and Southampton to be tagged as favourites for relegation. That’s partly due to a potential points deduction, but the nature of defeat at Lens was a reminder that even if the rumours are true that no deduction is forthcoming, we still might not have enough to compete. At present, we simply don’t look like a very good football team.
We regularly look like conceding. We barely look like having a shot, let alone scoring. In the first half at Lens, we played out from the back until we reached thirty yards from our own goal and then we either gave the ball away in a dangerous position or punted it into the channels and lost it anyway.
It wasn’t so much a recipe for disaster as being a few ingredients short of a recipe to begin with.
If that sounds bad, the second half was far, far worse. It resembled a training exercise where Lens were repeatedly chucked the ball thirty yards from our goal.
It was one of those games where all the warning signs were there but we’d held a stronger team at arm’s length, and then suddenly we were 3-0 down.
It’s probably the body language of the players that made it such a difficult watch. As Lens nimbly moved the ball around their assortment of lively front players, with the play orchestrated by a certain N Mendy, the boys in blue gave half-hearted chase.
Over the years, Leicester have had plenty of phases where we make football look like a very difficult game. Here we looked like we’d need 15 players on the pitch just to be competitive. There were huge gaps between the different departments of the side.
Where Cooper had to choose between a continuation of Enzoball and an uncompromising Pragmaticoball, we seem to currently be wading through the sludge of a compromise between the two which doesn’t suit or impress anyone. He faces a task to convince people what we saw at Lens is not Cooperball and that there will be a plan this season.
Players with vast Premier League experience, the likes of Wilfred Ndidi and De Cordova-Reid, were bypassed like training cones when we didn’t have the ball and entirely absent when we did.
Soon we find out how this affects the mentality of individuals. Since the beginning of 2023, we’ve only lost two competitive games out of 78 by three goals - and those were against Manchester United and Liverpool.
Our players didn’t cope particularly well with adversity last season, crumbling in each of the most hostile atmospheres the Championship had to offer. We don’t know how they’ll react to heavy defeats. What we do know is that the gulf between the league we’ve come from and the league that’s about to kick off is enormous.
The gap between what we’ve produced in pre-season and what we’ll need to produce in the Premier League is just as big.
Steve Cooper has a week to make huge strides on the training ground. Jon Rudkin has a week to make waves in the transfer market. Leicester City fans have a week to prepare for the harsh reality of the real thing, and to decide exactly what our expectations are for the daunting season ahead.
