Leicester City 3 Swansea City 1: Swanning back to the big time
For all the well-documented difficulties Leicester have had against the teams around them, they never have any trouble in games like this. Swansea put to the sword, the lead at the top – at least briefly – back up to double figures, and another game chalked off.
The specifics of this encounter aren’t likely to live long in the memory, but it served as an almost perfect example of a stereotypical Championship game this season.
A Tuesday night game against a bottom half side, an opponent who brought on a random assortment of ex-Premier League players you haven’t thought of for years, the game lingering at 1-0 long enough to make you nervous, a terrible refereeing decision, a late flurry of goals and, of course, Leicester conceding a last-minute goal from a corner.
For six months now we have struggled with the fact that these wins are so comfortable. Enzo Maresca’s post-game melodramatics about his own fan base are the latest act in this struggle. Leicester don’t have many statement wins to hang our hats on, but it’s the relentless, unmemorable wins in games like this that are going to get them promoted.
Not tonight, darling
From almost the very beginning this felt like a Leicester blowout. Not quite the absolute beginning, as Jannik Vestergaard almost handed Swansea a goal inside the first minute, but after that it was more or less one way traffic for the remaining 96.
Swansea took a risk with their approach, bringing an extremely high defensive line along with them from Wales. Often when teams do that, they get a patronising pat on the head for trying to make a game of it, but the reality is that it just doesn’t work against this Leicester side. It’s too easy to slice them open with one or two passes, as happened after a couple of minutes when Patson Daka played a short pass on the half-way line and suddenly Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall had the freedom of the King Power to score.
The best news from a Leicester point of view in this game probably came from the team itself. Rumours of Dewsbury-Hall’s impending move to Brighton have cooled off in the last couple of days – leading us to wonder what sort of content makes it into David Ornstein’s subscription WhatsApp chat if this sort of guff makes it out into public – but had he been missing for any reason it would have been a disaster.
As it was, he was not only starting but restored to a left-sided #8 role, where he’s far more effective than on the right. Maresca’s tactical decisions can have a whiff of genius about them, but they can also have more than a hint of Too Clever By Half, and that’s certainly true of switching KDH to the other side of midfield.
His relationship with Stephy Mavididi has grown more dangerous as the season has gone on, and when one comes short to play the other in behind the full back it can destroy teams at this level. Poor Harry Darling was run ragged for an hour before he decided he’d had enough.
Dewsbury-Hall’s runs into the left channel caused endless problems and should have created more goals. First he stuck a cross on a plate for Daka to inexplicably miss from a couple of yards out, later he dinked a cross into Dennis Praet, only for the Belgian to completely botch his header. In the first half an hour alone Kasey McAteer also broke through the high line only to fail to find Daka for a tap in, then the high press led to a Daka shot that was deflected through to Carl Rushworth in goal.
There have been a few games this season that have had this sort of vibe, the feeling that if the ball bounced differently a couple of times Leicester might score seven or eight. The flip side is that after that doesn’t happen there’s a tendency for the team to almost pass themselves to sleep and let the other side back in.
Even when they started to do that towards the end of the first half, they still created two more chances to score. Daka blazed over with better options, to the annoyance of half the team waiting in the box for a pass, then the link up between the Zambian and Mavididi saw the latter hit the bar.
Postman Pat almost delivers
Daka is a difficult player to get to grips with. If you were to cut a two-minute highlight package of every appearance you could make him look like either the best or the worst player in the world.
With the game still, somehow, in the balance at 1-0 with twenty minutes to go, he demonstrated both sides of his character in one simple move. First, he won the ball brilliantly in his own half and burst through the Swansea defence, tearing forward 60 yards in a few seconds. Then he…sort of malfunctioned, failed to shoot, and fell over.
At this stage, the referee intervened to spare his blushes, awarding a fairly nonsensical penalty to finish the game as a contest. But despite the fact he does have bad misses in his locker and he’s not a great technical player, Leicester seem to be significantly better when he’s on the pitch.
Daka’s first league start of the season came on December 9th, against Plymouth. Before that, he had only played one minute of league football in the entire campaign. Since then, he’s started seven league games and scored four times. Leicester have won six and drawn one of those matches. Before he broke back into the team, they’d won two out of the previous five. While he was in the Ivory Coast, they drew one, won one, and lost one in the league.
Ever since he’s been at the club, Daka has been pitched as the heir to Jamie Vardy. It’s always been a strange comparison because their characters are so different, but they do have a similar ability to be everywhere and annoy defenders. Leicester created multiple chances because of Daka’s pressing and his speed obviously adds an extra dimension to the attack. If you combine goals and assists, he has matched Vardy’s output now in half as many minutes.
It was notable on Tuesday night that when Daka was replaced, it was Tom Cannon rather than Vardy who came on. It took Maresca a long time to work out what to do up front, but Vardy’s injury and Kelechi Iheanacho quiet-quitting a few months ago seems to have solved the problem. Daka and Cannon look much more mobile and dangerous up front and should be the first-choice pair for the rest of the campaign.
Second ball - pin ball
Soon after Mavididi’s penalty, Swansea gave a third goal to Yunus Akgun through an absolute comedy of errors and the game petered out to the end. There was still time, however, for the Foxes to annoy the fan base despite yet another comfortable win.
That late dig came, inevitable, from a set piece. We should caveat this by saying it meant nothing to the end result. By the time Swansea earned their third corner of the match, there were barely a couple of minutes to go.
Yet at the same time Leicester’s weakness against late bombardments is by far the most serious problem in the team at the moment. Swansea’s consolation was a terrible goal to concede. Leicester violated almost every rule of organised set piece defending: they reacted slowly so that the Swans had a 2v1 out wide, they left a man completely free to win the first header, then failed to deal with the second ball after it broke loose in the six-yard box.
The end result was that, for the second time this season, a piece of Welsh archaeology bagged a goal against them. Joe Allen, last seen looking heroically off the pace at the World Cup a year ago, poked home from a yard out.
More and more, it’s these second balls and loose balls in the box that are causing the most problems. Leicester defend “normal” football moves really well, but towards the end when there are more bodies and more desperate opponents, they seem to get caught out and react slowly to unexpected things.
It’s unlikely that this is ultimately going to cost them too much. Leicester have shown that they can brute force most opponents in this division, and eventually wear them down. But for all Maresca’s demands for the fans to believe in his idea, it’s these late lapses and blown points that are causing the doubters to doubt about whether it’s sustainable in the long term against better opponents.
For now, that doesn’t matter. We get to savour another three points and moving another game closer to the big time.
