Leicester City 1 Tottenham Hotspur 1: It’s Jamie Vardy’s world
On a night where any of Leicester City’s split personalities might have shown up, it was the Good, Rustling version that battled its way to an unlikely point. Positive points, in August? That’s insane!
What most of us wanted from Steve Cooper's Leicester City was a team full of passion, desire, grit, and as many other buzzwords for "tries really hard" as you care to think of.
Even the most optimistic supporter knows this season is going to be tough. Even without the lack of signings, even with Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, even with Enzo Maresca, this would have been a tough ask. But even if you don’t have the quality, the beautiful thing about football is that you get to choose how much effort you put in.
A lot of the pre-season discourse about Leicester among the neutrals focused on how different this squad is to the one that got relegated two years ago. That a team without Youri Tielemans, James Maddison, Harvey Barnes, et al, is not as good as one that had them. Ergo: they’re doomed.
That analysis misses the very obvious point to those of us old enough to remember the last relegation season, that none of those players cared a jot what happened. Or when the going got tough, they disappeared. If anyone knows that a bunch of names on a teamsheet does not translate to being a good team, and certainly not a resilient one, it’s us.
There are many reasons to feel a sense of dread about the season ahead. We know, everyone knows, the squad is lacking quality in attacking areas. We know there might be a points deduction. We know the club is a bit weird these days.
For about 55 minutes on Monday night, there wasn’t much to dispel that sense of impending doom. The pre-match atmosphere dissipated amongst a Tottenham seige. Leicester couldn’t get out of their own defensive third. They were a goal down and grateful to their opponents for spurning a series of chances to make it more.
Football, though, is a funny old game. A sport built on intangibles, momentum, and vibes. Suddenly everything can change, a totally new state of affairs sprung into being by a touch, a tackle, or a turn.
It was something more run of the mill that transformed this game: a goal. A goal out of nothing and out of nowhere, from which Steve Cooper’s Leicester City, combining high intensity with a decent smattering of quality, emerged. Suddenly there were two teams on the pitch, one packed with nice names and pleasant footballers but no heart, one with resilience and a soul.
Image: Jamie Thorpe
Coopin’ up a storm
As is the way with Leicester, this was in many ways a ridiculous game. Tottenham were so superior to the Foxes for the best part of an hour that Sky Sports were running eulogies for Cooper's Leicester at half time.
By the end, Leicester had spurned at least three good chances to win, despite finishing it with Stephy Mavididi up front, Kasey McAteer on the left wing, and…is that Boubakary Soumare at number ten?
There were a number of very impressive things about this second half. One was, obviously, the workrate across the whole team, when they started to beat Spurs to every 50/50. McAteer alone did more defensive work in a 15 minute cameo appearance than some of our previous wingers have done in entire calendar months.
Another, arguably more impressive, feature was how well Leicester played with the ball once they actually found time to use it. ‘Pragmatism’ is often a byword for dreadful football, but Cooper’s pragmatism is about tactical flexibility more than the style of play.
He certainly made decisions to deal with opposition threats: Bobby De Cordova Reid over Mavididi on the left was an attempt to deal with Spurs’ full backs, who are very aggressive. This one didn’t really work early on, as De Cordova Reid lost his man when Pedro Porro ghosted into the box to put Spurs ahead.
Victor Kristiansen and James Justin at full back over Ricardo Pereira, on the other hand, did work better, a plan based around adding more defensive solidity and energy to cope with the threats from wide. Neither Brennan Johnson nor Son Heung-Min really exposed Leicester, and when they did the full backs got back in well.
Justin also gives the side flexibility in the sense that he can shuffle in and play as a third centre back, which allows Leicester to play a back five in defence. This is effectively what happened at times in the first half, when Abdul Fatawu dropped in as right wing back, similar to the position Maresca used him in when Ricardo moved into midfield last season.
Throughout pre-season we’ve seen the team try to maintain a lot of the flowing, passing football we saw under Enzo Maresca and Brendan Rodgers. We saw that again here, where Leicester looked a genuinely good side with the ball after half time. Any move that ran through Facundo Buonanotte immediately became infused with a sexy caress, and he showed flashes of real promise.
This combination of solidity at the back, positive football on the ball, and tactical flexibility is Leicester’s best chance of staying up. Especially in lieu of any physical presence going forward whatsoever, a situation that reached its zenith when Soumare - career goals: one - replaced Buonanotte late on and found himself playing a sort of hybrid target man-#10 role, a truly jarring sight for a Premier League team in the year 2024.
The GOAT
Fortunately for Cooper and Leicester, his prowess in front of goal wasn’t required as, by then, a rather more successful forward had made his mark. For all the positive signs after the Leicester equaliser, it was Jamie Vardy who basically willed this goal and this point into existence.
Vardy apparently walked into Cooper's office in midweek after playing possum all pre-season and said he would play, as Leicester couldn’t start the season without a senior striker. This was both a heroic act from the club's greatest ever player, as well as a major slam to Tom Cannon, who seems to have been erased from existence over the summer.
The GOAT then delivered a classic of the late stage Vardy genre: an anonymous first half when the team struggled to do anything going forward, then a brilliant half an hour in the second to drag his team towards an improbable victory.
After Dominic Solanke had hit his third attempt of the game straight at Mads Hermansen, and Rodrigo Bentancur had done the same, Vardy manifested space in the middle of the Spurs box, forcing every defender to vacate the six yard area for no obvious reason and leave him completely unmarked. Fatawu picked him out to equalise, and the game completely changed.
Soon after he broke free again, to be brilliantly picked out by Kristiansen in the area, but Cristian Romero snuffed out the chance. A few minutes later, Leicester put together a brilliant, flowing move: Faes - Buonanotte - Winks - Reid - Buonanotte again to play Vardy in behind, only for him to be denied a fairytale winner by Guglielmo Vicario.
The crowd was up. Even after a long stoppage for treatment to Bentancur seemed to have halted the Leicester momentum and Vardy had departed - complete with the trademark rustling of the Spurs end - the Foxes created more chances to steal a winner that would have looked utterly insane half an hour before. Wilfred Ndidi's header, tipped round the post by Vicario, was the pick of them, while McAteer headed his first touch agonisingly over the bar.
None of this would have been possible without Vardy. A lot of other strikers that Leicester have tried are good footballers, none of them have anything like the aura that Vardy has. Even now, when his pace has gone, he plays in moments, like he’s in low-power mode until the point of maximum impact.
His goal and celebration said a lot about the mentality of the team itself, who must know how negative the feeling has been about them going into the season. There was a lot of energy and release in the way they responded to getting back into the match, a feeling that they rode until the final whistle.
First half not so good
The first half, ominous as it was, is easily forgotten with the way the game finished. It is true though that the opening 45 minutes were bad, and there were plenty of other things to nitpick even later in the game
Hermansen’s kicking meant that Leicester gave the ball back too easily too often, which shows how hard it is to strike a balance between taking risks playing out from the back and going long, particularly against a team playing as high a line as Spurs did. Striking a balance between being defensive and being passive is similarly difficult, and Leicester certainly came down on the wrong side of that line for stretches of the first half.
Another glaring warning sign was the way the team defended set pieces. In pre-season that looked a problem once again, here Spurs could have scored three times in the first 15 minutes from corners; of which they had a staggering amount, which is something of an inevitability if you’re going to defend deep.
To some extent, Leicester’s team is literally just not tall enough, a problem that could be exacerbated with Oliver Skipp threatening to take Wilfred Ndidi’s place in the team. Ndidi made one great clearance off the line, but his lack of care and ability on the ball is a real problem when Leicester are under pressure at this level.
Maresca masked that weakness by playing him in a more forward role, but in defensive midfield you cannot afford to give the ball away so easily. The contrast between him and Harry Winks in terms of playing through the lines, progressing the ball, and even just keeping the ball with players around him, is enormous.
Then, of course, there’s the lack of depth going forward. The fact an injured Vardy and Mavididi are the only two players Cooper is willing to play up front is an obvious problem. McAteer and Soumare being first reserves in other attacking areas is similarly troubling.
The set pieces may be a lingering problem - the new set piece coach showed his mettle in a weird way when the team took its only threatening position of the first half and completely botched a short free kick off the training ground - but at least height and depth can still be addressed for the next couple of weeks.
Cooper said after the game that new signings are close, and there’s no reason to disbelieve him, he has been more open about the transfer side of things than you might expect from a modern manager. Those new signings are clearly still required if the squad is to cope with an entire Premier League season.
Most importantly, though, this result has brought some breathing space for the club. As much as the thrashing some people feared might have prompted action, Leicester desperately need to break the cycle of negativity, a mad trolley dash out of sheer panic would have been unlikely to bring the right type of players in.
Instead, a performance like we saw on Monday showed signs of what we might look like as a united club behind a manager with a plan. Back over to you, Jon.
