Sheffield Wednesday 1 Leicester City 1: We weren’t at the level
Dominating the ball with 70% possession, only to lose the xG, give up multiple huge chances by losing the ball at the back, then concede a last-minute equaliser? James Knight has seen this movie before.
Leicester’s display on Wednesday night has been roundly condemned as the one of the worst of the season so far. Criticism that is warranted, for sure. It was a poor performance that started badly and ended even worse. But there was something about the vibe of this game that elevated a mediocre display into a horrifying vision of Championship reality.
For those of us outside the lucky three thousand who made the trip to Hillsborough, everything about this absolutely reeked of low budget, low quality fare. Sky Sports’ “bonus stream” coverage appears to involve sending a cameraman to the moon to film the game, we were graced with complete silence for the first ten minutes before a commentator appeared, and the concept of a replay clearly failed to make it onto the shuttle.
Then the game turned out to be a 90-minute PTSD experience, transporting everyone back nine months to the bad old days. Days full of cartoonish defending, turgid possession, and a sucker punch at the end.
Hi ho-oh no they’ve nearly scored
The fact that Leicester’s defence remains the best in the division by a distance is a curiosity when you watch games like this. It really does feel like we have a good defence because everyone in this division is rubbish at scoring. In terms of expected goals, we’ve conceded half as many from open play as we “should” have done.
So it was again in Sheffield, where the tone was set from the very beginning. After 15 seconds, with the dulcet tones of “Hi Ho Sheffield Wednesday” still echoing over the ground, Barry Bannan took the ball off Ricardo Pereira and very deliberately, very carefully, shot wide of the far post with the goal at his mercy. A few minutes later Mads Hermansen lost the ball outside the box and was saved by Jannik Vestergaard blocking a certain goal.
While the system can get the blame of this sort of thing, the truth is that the players just have to be better in those situations. We know that both Hermansen and Ricardo have a mistake in them, and we tolerate it because of what else they bring to the table, but it’s still their fault if they pass the ball straight to a forward.
The same is true of Vestergaard himself, who fell over the ball later in the half and had to drag down the striker to pick up his ninth booking of the season. Those nine yellows, the most in the division, are the trade-off for playing a centre back that slow in a high line. He takes the cards when he’s beaten, but at the same time you can’t lose your key central defender for five or six games a season from suspensions alone. He has to be better than that.
While the arrogant gene in us all has always feared that our defence would be exposed in the Premier League next season, the truth is that it’s already exposed at this level far more often than the numbers suggest. In the end, Wednesday created four incredible chances in the first 25 minutes, Bambo Diaby’s free header from a set piece and Calum Patterson straight up missing the ball with the goal at his mercy sitting alongside the two early opportunities in the ‘whoops’ pile.
By that stage, though, it was 1-0. And a reminder that there is a very good team here when they focus on the job in hand. An effortless move saw Stephy Mavididi ghost past his full back with ease and stand-up a cross. Cesare Casadei, as is his wont, missed it, but the ball fell to Abdul Fatawu at the back post to score. Leicester still feel too reliant on the wingers for all our creativity, but it’s hard to stop when it works.
Finishing school
When Leicester fail to win, an admittedly rare occurrence this season, Enzo Maresca has a tendency to come out and blame missed chances. The diagnosis is always the same: we need to be more clinical. But the diagnosis is wrong. The problem is that Leicester don’t create anywhere near enough chances for a team that has so much of the ball.
There are certain patterns that work quite well. The wingers winning 1v1, as Mavididi did for the goal, and then the rest of the attackers flooding the box for a cross or a cut back; long diagonals from the centre backs – usually Wout Faes – after the opposition push up to press and leave space in behind; counter attacks late on when we’re leading and the other team has to attack. But these are often isolated events, mixed in with an interminable amount of passing around.
Most of the second half was rubbish. The occasional nice move from Wednesday interrupted by someone obliterating a cross out of play. These periods, though, seem to be a feature of the current Leicester team, rather than a bug, at least once we’re leading.
For the final half an hour, between Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall and Wilfred Ndidi’s arrival off the bench, and the final few minutes of stoppage time, Leicester had total control of the game. Instead of keeping up the pace and forcing Wednesday back to kill them off, the possession became completely turgid, a means to kill time more than anything else. One chance for Kasey McAteer, after a clever slow-play throw-in routine, was the sum total of good chances created in that period.
Perhaps this is a reaction to the number of games in the Championship and how hard it is to keep up the intensity three times a week. But surely that’s the point of rotating the team so much. Every time he’s had the opportunity to, we see five or six changes for a midweek game. The manager has been let down by how poor Casadei has played in relief of Ndidi, but he’s the one choosing to start him and Yunus Akgun in central midfield over a fit-again Dennis Praet, who didn’t even make the bench. Just as he’s the one leaving Jamie Vardy on to play all 90 minutes, despite having two other strikers on the sidelines.
The danger of this sort of approach, protecting legs ahead of getting results, is that all it takes is a couple of misplaced passes towards the end to get the crowd up and to give the opposition a chance of sneaking something. That’s exactly what happened here. It happened against Sunderland, it happened, even against ten men, at QPR.
What has changed over the last few weeks is some of the chances we give up in these late periods have started to go in. Leicester nearly gave this game away once in stoppage time when Dewsbury-Hall lost the ball only to see the resulting shot saved by Hermansen. In the first quarter of the season, that was the story, being let off the hook and racking up the wins. Now, though, we’re into a new act. First Middlesbrough scored a late free kick, now Sheffield Wednesday got a second chance to save themselves. A long ball flicked into the Leicester box for Jeff Hendrick to poke home.
Over to you, Enzo
These things are going to happen if you play every game so close. Leicester have only scored six goals in the last six games. Our points total is getting closer to what the Opta data would expect, where we rank as ‘only’ the third best defence from open play, the fourth best attack. Our set pieces are in the middle of the pack. This is fine for a team that wants to be in the promotion race, but perhaps not a sign of a team about to destroy the division.
West Brom at the weekend looms as a big test of which side of that divide we’re on. A win, with the first-choice midfield restored to the team, and we remain well clear of the playoff pack. Otherwise, the gap to third is rapidly starting to shrink. Leicester could have been 17 points clear of Leeds had we beaten them a few weeks ago, it could be five by the weekend.
This is the time where Maresca needs to show his stuff. You can get away saying that any complaints about the style are the fans problem if you win, but it ramps up the pressure if you don’t. He spent the build-up to this game waxing lyrical about how tough an opponent Sheffield Wednesday, bottom of the league with one win all season, would be. Presumably this was a motivational tactic to fire his players out of any complacency they might be feeling. It didn’t work.
It is obviously still very early in his regime. Both Pep Guardiola and Mikel Arteta had rough starts to their spells in charge, as they transitioned towards building a squad that could play the way they wanted. Leicester starting so well has masked the fact that it takes time to develop this style of play. This is still, to a large extent, a Rodgers team: at the full-time whistle, only four of the players on the pitch were new signings this season.
At the same time, though, it’s hard to shake out of a funk with the games pouring in thick and fast. This is the meat of the Championship season: there are 7 games in 23 days between Plymouth next weekend and Huddersfield on New Year’s Day, including the top of the table clash at Portman Road.
This game was a sign that we haven’t yet washed off all the Brendan stink. The scars on the pitch and in the stands are deep-rooted. If Maresca’s Leicester are different, if the first 14 games weren’t all a mirage, then now is the time to show it. Do we really have the mentality, and the character, to win this league? Are we at the level?
12 Days of Christmas at The Bridge
For the past 10 years, The Bridge Homelessness to Hope has served a 3-course Christmas Dinner with all the trimmings to hundreds of people in Leicester who are experiencing homelessness.
This year, they want to go one better and offer their guests (service users) not just one day of celebrations but 12 days of festive events over the month of December.
If you’re enjoying The Fosse Way, please consider donating to The Bridge’s Christmas appeal:
