Leicester City 3 West Ham 1: The Flying Dutchmen
Ruud van Nistelrooy’s first game as Leicester City manager was the night football became fun again.
On Tuesday evening in Seoul, the South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, surrounding the national assembly with troops in a brief, somewhat slapstick attempt to stage a coup d'état.
In another world, on another day, Ruud van Nistelrooy may have had to resort to similarly drastic measures, invoking military force to prevent his idiotic players from attending the training ground.
West Ham had 31 shots in this game. 20 of them came in the first half, the most they'd ever had in the first half of a Premier League game.
Under Steve Cooper or "Ben Dawson", this would have ended 3-1 to the Hammers. Leicester's early goal cancelled out by some laughable defensive mistakes, the game petering out to the sound of utter ambivalence raining down from the stands.
In this world, however, Cooper's dreary reign is over. The vibes are back, and the footballing Gods graced our new Dutch overlord with a triumphant victory, the sort of win that makes you a true believer in the power of the narrative.
El Khannouss is on fire
There was so much expectation around Van Nistelrooy's first team sheet that we even wrote a whole separate article about it. Would he change everything? Tear up the tiny scraps of shaved pencil that represented The Cooper Blueprint?
In reality, he only made a handful of changes, constrained as he is by the fact his options are so limited. The randomly assorted back three - which looks even more of a prepostorous thing for a caretaker to do in a one-off game given his successor immediately ditched it - was gone.
So too, notably, was Wout Faes, one of four changes from the side that surrendered in West London a couple of days ago. Faes's place in the starting line up was probably untenable at this point. So too would James Justin's have been were there any alternatives.
The most significant change was the intent displayed by replacing one centre back - Caleb Okoli - with a genuine attacking midfielder in Bilal El Khannouss as part of the change in formation. This was only the second time the Moroccan and Facundo Buonanotte have started a game together, and it was the key factor in what followed.
This was comfortably El Khannouss' best game for Leicester, and the two of them regularly found pockets of space to create counter attacks. One of the problems with Cooper's approach was to flood the side with 'energy' in lieu of any creativity, or to force the creativity out wide where it's much easier to stifle them.
El Khannouss nominally started on the left of a front three, with Kasey McAteer on the right and Buonanotte at #10, but in reality it was more like the old James Maddison wing role. He did most of his damage receiving the ball in central areas, turning and playing balls in behind the West Ham defence.
The decision to start him was vindicated after 90 seconds, when he carved the defence apart to put Jamie Vardy in to score the first goal of the Van Nistelrooy era. It also saw the first spin of the VAR roulette wheel, which finally came up with a goal after a couple of minutes of trademark faffing around.
Leicester almost got a second straight away, the reinstated Victor Kristiansen breaking out to play Vardy in again, but this time he was forced wide and into a more difficult chance, saved by Lukasz Fabianski. But the rest of the first half showed how much work there still is to do.
Bumps in the road
Stretches of this game featured the same sort of thing we have seen all season: Leicester aren't very good at controlling games, and they retreat after taking the lead.
It is a curiosity of this club that despite the fact it never feels like we have that many attacking players on, the defence always seems to be completely overrun and every opponent is in miles of space. For the rest of the half that was the story.
West Ham created chance after chance to equalise. Mads Hermansen denied Jarrod Bowen multiple times, including one excellent reaction save from a right wing cross. Danny Ings hit the post, then Jannik Vestergaard made a brilliant saving block to stop Max Kilman tapping in the rebound. Thomas Soucek headed into the side netting, both Bowen and Carlos Soler shot narrowly wide.
Vestergaard is worth pausing on, because his on again - off again relationship with Leicester managers seems to be a canary in the coal mine for which ones are willing to pick players in roles that suit them and adjust their tactics to make best use of what's available, versus who will simply focus on their weaknesses.
The Dane is glacially slow, everyone can see that, but he is a very good defender who can properly knock it about. He seems to be a bit of a marmite character, but on the pitch he's a proper leader, vocal in demanding a lot of his team mates.
The various centre back partnerships without him over the last year or so have been almost universally terrible. Okoli and Faes might offer more mobility, but they make so many mistakes that it's irrelevant. Nobody needs their centre backs to be flash.
One piece of excellent defending to win the ball back led to the sort of move Leicester did very well in this game, a back-to-front, fluid counter attack. According to Opta, going into this encounter Leicester had only had five shots from "fast breaks" over the course of the entire season. Here, all three goals came from that kind of attack.
Vestergaard won the ball with some aggressive defending, fed Buonanotte, who put McAteer in behind. His shot was saved, but this sort of thing was regularly on and Leicester could have made more of it before the break. A few times they created half opportunities, with Vardy or McAteer set free on the break without properly creating a chance.
Talent pools and football schools
The second half saw a lot of the same kind of thing. West Ham should not have lost this 3-1, but they have the same problem that Leicester had until a week or so ago, with a lame duck manager nobody cares about.
They should certainly have equalised before the hour, when Hermansen made a complete mess of a high ball and slapped it into his own net, only for Soucek to be penalised for a phantom foul. The VAR roulette wheel spun again, and again it landed on Leicester's number.
There were more chances for the Hammers while the contest was still alive, including one that saw Conor Coady brilliantly clear off the line to deny Justin an own goal.
It is also worth pointing out though that the two managers are choosing from wildly divergent talent pools. For all the good attacking play in this encounter, Van Nistelrooy's front four included a 38 year old striker, a lad on loan from Brighton, an academy graduate and another kid who's only been in the country a couple of months.
For West Ham, it was Bowen and Mohammed Kudus, with an incredible array of options manifesting themselves from the bench: Crysencio Summerville, Michail Antonio, Niclas Fullkrug, Lucas Paqueta.
While it is very West Ham Way to have spent hundreds of millions on attacking players and be absolute crap, it does speak to how quickly Leicester have slipped behind. Would all of those players get in our team?
Fortunately, football isn't played on paper, and the no-names, freebies, graduates, and £20m-players-who-looked-like-total-duds-a-week-ago combined to bury the Hammers after the disallowed goal. One #10 started the move, Buonanotte finding McAteer out on the wing with a lovely through ball, and another finished it, after McAteer cut it back for El Khannouss to finish into the bottom corner.
The Moroccan's last action of a clear man of the match performance was to set McAteer in to blaze over the crossbar when he could have settled the game for good. His replacement, Bobby De Cordova Reid, tapped in the rebound from a Patson Daka shot only for the VAR wheel to spin once again, the toenail offside coming down in favour of West Ham after yet more faffing around.
In his introductory comments, Van Nistelrooy spoke about his relationship with Enzo Maresca, and how he had asked him for advice before taking the job. He seems a more logical successor to the Italian than Cooper ever did, and the clinching goal was a piece of pure Marescaball; a tremendous move that started with Faes and Kristiansen calmly playing their way out of a difficult situation in their own area.
From there, they flipped the switch with a ball up to Daka, who nipped in ahead of Kilman and surged into the opposition box. As Kilman showed him onto his weaker side, you could almost hear the cogs in Daka's brain turning as he pondered what to do. After a few moments' hesitation, he just battered the ball top bins with his left foot, the sort of finish that the word "emphatic" was invented to describe.
Van the Man
This classic piece of modern Leicester theatre still had time to play a few remaining hits. We had already chalked off a Vardy goal in the first game after an unpopular manager got the boot, the bounce back victory under the new man at the King Power, under lights, was now assured.
To those we could add a couple more. A stoppage time corner ensured there was no clean sheet (one in 19 home games at this level) thanks to yet another set piece goal. The German lump, Fullkrug, got his head on it to ensure that yet another player without a Premier League goal to his name can proudly boast that he broke his duck against the Foxes.
Despite that, this felt like the first real game of the season. Van Nistelrooy didn’t make a sudden, dramatic tactical change, but he declared his intent with the team selection, favouring the younger, attacking midfielders over more experienced, safer choices.
The call to include El Khannouss was vindicated with a man of the match display, whatever the gurus at the Premier League - who awarded it to Wilfred Ndidi - say. He got a tune out of Vardy. His substitutions had an instant impact: De Cordova Reid had a goal disallowed, Daka actually did score.
He also had the classic impact of a new manager with an aura about him. Suddenly you got much improved, professional displays all over the pitch. The crowd was invested in the team again and, crucially, the luck ran with Leicester rather than against us.
There is a lot of work to do, and his team obviously cannot routinely give up that many chances. This was a pretty poor West Ham team on the brink of their own managerial change and they created more than enough opportunities to win. If he is as good at defensive organisation as we’ve heard over the last week, then he’s going to get the chance to show it.
The most important thing on Tuesday, though, was to produce a result that matched the occasion. It is fun to have Ruud van Nistelrooy as manager. It’s nice to go into a game feeling a sense of expectation or excitement rather than, well, nothing at all.
Who knows where this journey ultimately leads. There could be a difficult winter ahead, with tough Christmas fixtures on the horizon and a squad unlikely to get the injection of quality it needs, but for the first time in months it feels like we are actually on a journey again.
Leicester City only won one of our first 26 away games at Newcastle. It was a special one - a 5-1 win in 1928 when the great Arthur Chandler scored four goals - but we’re going to focus on another comprehensive victory nearly sixty years later.