Leicester City 1 Blackburn Rovers 2: There’s no substitute for incompetence
The cup dream is dead for another year. The last hope of some excitement out of this turgid season fell at the third hurdle, against the first team we’ve played above League Two.
Last season, we tumbled out of the cup at the City Ground, a result that was far worse than this on paper. It infamously sparked the start of the Great Refresh myth and a failure that we’re still living with today.
This defeat wasn’t so bad on paper, and probably won’t have such dramatic repercussions. But, about an hour in, we were staring an iconic, humiliating defeat in the face once again. At that point it was two-nil going on six and the crowd was on the brink of its latest full-blown mutiny.
There were some rumblings, most notably from my esteemed colleague David Bevan, that Brendan Rodgers ‘chucked’ this game. He made six changes to the starting XI, leaving FA Cup killer Kelechi Iheanacho on the bench, again, and a exhibited a strange reluctance to make substitutions until the game was dead.
The punchline writes itself. Sometimes there isn’t a Machiavellian design working against you, sometimes you’re just rubbish.
There’s only one way to beat them, play it out from the back
Leicester have played much better since Victor Kristiansen and Harry Souttar joined in January. Their aggressiveness and ability on the ball in particular seems to have spread confidence to the rest of the team. They were both on the bench on Tuesday night, watching on as their replacements delivered the worst defensive display of the season.
Everything bad about this performance flowed from the defence. Rodgers wants his team to play out from the back, but all they do is pass it straight to opposition strikers. There were at least four occasions in the first 45 minutes where Luke Thomas or Daniel Amartey gave the ball away in their own half. Blackburn scored once and were denied a couple of times by Daniel Iversen, but the writing was on the wall.
Boubakary Soumare was barely any better. The gulf between Blackburn playing out from the back and Leicester trying it was enormous, and utterly damning. Not only did we routinely lose possession, but our own incoherent press achieved nothing except to tire out the front two, who would go sprinting off to close someone down only to turn around and see the Leicester midfield 50 yards behind them. Dennis Praet slotted seamlessly into the role of Permanently Disgusted of Up Front that has previously been filled by James Maddison and Kiernan Dewsbury Hall this season.
Praet was involved in the one really good moment of the first half early on. Some nice interplay on the edge of the box set up first Tete and then Praet himself, only for them both to be denied by A. A. W. Pears, taking a break from his full-time job on a 19th Century cricket scorecard, to protect the Blackburn goal. But that came out of nothing. Leicester, almost literally, didn’t touch the ball for the first five minutes of the game. As it went on Blackburn picked up more and more momentum as we kept handing them opportunities to break.
The Brendan Rodgers style guide
Rodgers’ default response to any criticism of his style is to brush it off. Like a noughties teenager’s Facebook update, if you can’t handle him at his worst, you don’t deserve him at his best.
Whenever he does this, normally live on Sky, everybody laughs. Everyone in the studio is a believer in the cult of the principles, where sticking to your beliefs regardless of the evidence arrayed against you is a quality we should admire.
This was yet another example of the fallacy of that argument. At half time, Leicester were losing but still in the game and – without exaggeration – every single person watching could see something had to change at the break before it got worse. Thomas, Amartey, and Soumare could, and probably should, all have been taken off.
Instead, we ploughed on. Rodgers, paralysed by the certainty of his own genius, made no changes. Two minutes into the second half, Soumare gave the ball away on the edge of his own box only for Ryan Hedges to blaze over a golden chance. A couple of minutes after that, all three of the main culprits combined to hand Blackburn a second goal: Thomas gave the ball away, Soumare slipped and went tumbling like an elephant on an ice rink, and Amartey evaporated into thin air to allow Sammie Szmodics to score.
It could have got even worse after that. Blackburn missed another chance a minute later and then, finally, Rodgers’ principles allowed him to bring Kristiansen and Iheanacho on. At which point the game completely changed and Leicester came close to salvaging it at the death, when Amartey was denied a redemption equaliser in injury time by the width of the post.
Square pegs, round holes, lots of goals
I have some sympathy for Rodgers, in the sense that he obviously isn’t telling players to make appalling mistakes all the time. But the errors are so widespread and so fundamentally linked to his leadership and tactical decisions that such sympathy has to be limited.
Every squad has players who aren’t as good as the ones in the first team. The Holy Grail of a rotating band of 25 players all capable of immediately playing at an elite level whenever they stroll onto the pitch doesn’t exist.
Some of the squad are young and still developing, others need a run of games to reach The Level, and still others are only right for certain situations or formations. You can cope with this when one or two of them play at a time, surrounded by your top assets firing on all cylinders, or if you adapt to cover up their weaknesses.
One of our problems is that our squad players play so much. Leicester have six first team centre backs on the books right now: Jonny Evans, Wout Faes, Caglar Soyuncu, Jannik Vestergaard, Souttar, and Amartey. At the start of the season, we had Wesley Fofana as well. Every single one has been signed since Amartey himself joined. Yet he has played 21 times this season, more than any of them except Faes.
The other issue is that when they do have to keep playing, we make no effort to protect any of their weaknesses. We have seen all of our squad players have good games in the right situation. But how many times do you need to see Amartey fail to play out from the back before you admit defeat and ask him to do something else? Clearly, the answer is more than 21.
The first problem is more structural, a failure of recruitment and by the medical team. The second is tactical. We’ve seen even in recent weeks that the Rodgers Way can still work when he has the right personnel. Yet two years into an injury crisis and we still show zero ability to win when he doesn’t.
Tuesday night was all the more frustrating because he did have some of the right personnel at his disposal. Timothy Castagne, Nampalys Mendy, Kristiansen, Souttar, and Iheanacho were all sat on the bench. Souttar never made it on, but the others represented such a dramatic improvement as soon as they did that it beggars belief it took until we were 2-0 down for a change to be made. We thoroughly deserved to lose this game, but we’d almost certainly have won it had the obvious changes been made at half time. That is on the manager, as simple as that.
Just the ticket
As the reaction to Tuesday’s defeat has exposed the fault lines between fan base and manager once again, it’s worth pointing out that the malaise still runs far deeper than that. The latest ticketing fiasco outside the ground is just another example of the lack of care and attention from the top of the club at the moment.
Those determined enough to go to a Tuesday night FA Cup tie...in February…against Championship opposition…in the rain…in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis…are probably the people you most want to keep on side. They’re the most loyal supporters, or those who can’t/can’t afford to buy tickets to league games, many of them families with young kids (or, indeed, a bunch of lunatics).
Allowing a big squeeze at kick off because your shiny new ticketing system is still rubbish six months into the season is so poor. Like sending out emails for the women’s team with the wrong games in, or making it impossible to buy tickets, or not releasing tickets for general sale even for games that aren’t sold out, it’s all completely avoidable.
A relegation battle is either a unifying force or a divisive one. The way Leicester have been run this season is almost guaranteed to ensure it’s the latter. I have no idea why this is; perhaps losing exposes issues that existed already, perhaps there’s some new faces in the operations department who are bad at their jobs, perhaps this is just what Premier League clubs are like now. But it’s a far cry from the togetherness and approachability that has been a defining feature of the club over the last decade. This latest miserable cup exit to Championship opposition is just the tip of the iceberg.
