Levelling down: Arsenal 4 Leicester City 2 (13 August 2022)
Played 27, won 1, drawn 4, lost 22. Leicester’s away league record against Arsenal over the last 50 years. Maybe we’re trying to get relegated deliberately to avoid having to go back.
This visit peaked after five minutes, when Wesley Fofana stole the ball from Oleksandr Zinchenko on the half way line. He played a one-two with Jamie Vardy, burst into the Arsenal box, and hit the ball straight at Aaron Ramsdale.
The away end should have just got up and walked out at that moment and saved themselves an afternoon. An hour or so later, Fofana was running towards the same goal. This time, his own goalkeeper rushed out to meet him, only to hammer a clearance directly into the Frenchman and out for a corner.
Two games into the season and the pressure is building with every half of football. This was one of the most alarming games of the Rodgers era, where there was a yawning chasm between us and a team we finished comfortably above just over a year ago.
The dam is about to break and the Rodgers raft is drifting towards the precipice.
The plan is: there is no plan
We are going to take a bold approach to looking back at the weekend’s game: we’re going to basically ignore everything about it. Instead, this is a lament about our complete inability to do anything right.
Over the weekend Jordan Blackwell wrote a piece for the Mercury on the ‘identity crisis’ at Leicester. Jordan’s point was that there is a gulf between what the players and fans expect, and what Brendan Rodgers is saying his expectations are for the season.
In reality, the identity crisis runs far deeper than that. At half time in this game, an Arsenal-supporting associate text me to say “I have literally no idea what Leicester are trying to do”. Little did he know that this is the mission statement of the modern Foxes.
Death by football
Whenever he speaks about challenging the top six, Rodgers falls back into negging the club. He has always done this to some extent, but the excuses have been ramping up of late: ‘We don’t have the players’, ‘we haven’t invested enough’, ‘we haven’t got enough experience’.
The truth is that we haven’t got a plan.
“When you’ve got the ball 65-70% of the time, it’s a football death for the other team. We’re not at that stage yet, but that’s what we will get to. It’s death by football. You just suck the life out of them.”
Rodgers has the reputation of being an attacking coach. He talks a lot about intensity and he wants his teams to play a high line. He wants to dominate possession, to push Vardy right up on the last defender and play balls in behind. He wants to win the ball back high up the pitch and counter attack in transition.
What’s more, we have lots of good players. I know this because everyone wants to buy them for tens of millions of pounds. We have creative midfielders and fast, direct attackers. We have a centre back everyone agrees is going to be one of the best in the world. We have international footballers sprinkled throughout the team.
And yet…we don’t actually do anything that Rodgers supposedly wants. We aren’t a counter attacking team. We don’t dominate possession in any meaningful way. We aren’t a well-drilled pressing unit. We pack the side with defenders and concede two goals a game.
The only good bits of this game prior to Kelechi Iheanacho’s arrival came from long diagonals to the wing backs. And even then that plan relied on an Arsenal defender ghosting in at the near post and heading home under no pressure to be successful.
That isn’t a plan, it’s just an existence. We exist. We put eleven humans onto a football pitch together. That’s it. It could be any eleven humans and you wouldn’t tell the difference.
Are we the baddies?
The good news is that there is another team that looks more hopelessly inept than Leicester through two weeks of the season. The bad news is that ‘you remind me of Manchester United’ isn’t as reassuring at one would like at this point.
Even worse is the fact that the two teams that have beaten them are essentially alternate versions of ourselves. They recruit smartly; they sell on their best assets to dumber, richer clubs, and then show them up with their style of play and humiliate them. They have forward-thinking managers who know how to plan for an opponent.
Everybody needs a vision to buy into. Brentford and Brighton have that, so do Arsenal now. Leicester and Man United do not. We have been asleep at the wheel for a year now and it’s time to wake up and do something. We need to decide what we want to be and run with it. Doing nothing is a dangerous game.
The week ahead
The narrative is the most dominant force in football. On Saturday, Leicester play Southampton. Ralph Hassenhuttl is still in the opposition dugout. Agent Vestergaard is refusing to leave. This is not going to end well.
I posed a question in our secret communications channel on Sunday afternoon: when will Leicester next be above Notts Forest in the table? If it isn’t next weekend, then when?
