Popped by the Cherries: Bournemouth 2 Leicester City 1 (09 October 2022)
Maybe, at some point in the future, we’ll remember only the good times. The first two years of Brendan, when we were shaking up the top four, when we were in the title race at Christmas, when we finally broke the FA Cup hoodoo.
But with every passing week, those fond memories of Brendan Rodgers are turning into bitter resentment. This tortuous end to the Rodgers regime is turning him into a pariah. A Roman Emperor whose regime is collapsing around him, the last vestiges of his support draining away. He’s giving orders, and no one is listening. He’s fiddling while Rome burns.
Leicester had won two of the last 18 away games, at Burnley and Watford, who were both subsequently relegated. We had kept one clean sheet in the last 30 on the road. We had dropped 27 points from winning positions in 2022, ten more than any other team in the league.
Almost by the time the commentators had finished reeling those off, they were out of date. It’s now two wins in 19, one clean sheet in 31, and 30 points dropped after taking the lead. 13 more than any other side. Until there’s change at the top, Leicester are doomed to repeat themselves over and over again. This defeat was pure Leicester, purer even than at Tottenham three weeks ago.
Meet this week’s game, the same as all the other games
So much of every match is irrelevant to the outcome. Patson Daka justified his inclusion on the south coast after ten minutes with a smartly taken goal on the turn. Leicester had some nice spells of possession in the first half. Daka came close to another after a well-worked move got Timothy Castagne in down the right. But it doesn’t matter, because everyone – the fans, the opposition, the Leicester players – know we’re going to give it away in the end.
From the moment the second half kicked off, there was a crushing inevitability about the whole thing. All the fans really want is some reason to believe in the team, something to get excited about. None of us ever go into a game with that feeling any more. We can’t even enjoy going ahead because taking the lead is a precursor to losing.
The pattern is always the same. As soon as we score, everybody tenses up. The team drops deeper and passes start going astray. If you watched closely on Monday night, this even happened after Leicester took the lead against Forest, the difference was we scrambled our way into a counter attack and scored a second to shift the mood.
Once Leicester surrender possession, it’s a matter of time. Without the ball, it’s an embarrassment. The flow of the game becomes a procession of balls going out of play, lost 50-50s, and conceding set pieces. The opponent suddenly senses a goal without having to do anything themselves. Bournemouth’s equaliser was this whole sorry show in microcosm; Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall ran the ball straight out of play, Wout Faes, leaning hard into the Soyuncu comparisons, made a mess of a throw in down the line, and Danny Ward slapped the resulting shot into the top corner.
Rodgers is justified in expecting better than these individual mistakes we see on a weekly basis. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that everything he does makes it worse. After the game, he spoke – as he always does – of Leicester needing to take care of the ball better. Yet he never tries to fix that issue in the game. Instead, he chose to bring on Daniel Amartey and Jamie Vardy at 1-0 up, perhaps the two outfield players in the squad who are worst at taking care of the ball.
Within five minutes of that change, Leicester were 2-1 down. Suddenly up against it, he poured on more and more attacking players without rhyme or reason; for the last ten minutes Leicester had two strikers, one winger, four attacking midfielders and no full backs on the pitch and didn’t muster a single attack.
“It’s about playing forwards. We’ve always said possession is no good on its own. It has to penetrate. We were too safe and too happy to play it backwards at the beginning of the second half. Whether that was positioning or a poor touch that made it go back, but we had to play forward more and have more directness.”
Brendan Rodgers: Masterclass
A few weeks ago, Tactics Guru Dominic Wells exposed Leicester’s abysmal attempts to press the ball. All of those exact same failings were on display on the South Coast. Leicester routinely commit the cardinal sin of giving the player in possession time on the ball then getting caught square, where the midfielders are all stood in a line and easily bypassed by one simple straight pass or run. This would make some sense if we played a compact, defensive game, as Bournemouth did in the first half, where it becomes difficult to break the lines because there’s no space behind the midfield.
With Leicester, of course, that is not the case. There is acres of space behind the midfield at all times. This exact issue set up Taiwo Awoniyi to hit the post on Monday, when Forest slid a very simple ball between Youri Tielemans and Wilfred Ndidi, who were stood side-by-side, then a second past the defensive line. Here, it meant we saw an endless amount of Lewis Cook and Phillip Billing spraying the ball wide for Marcus Tavernier and Ryan Fredericks to torture the Leicester defence.
It’s an avalanche of ineptitude; a lack of coordinated pressing up front puts pressure on the midfield, the individual failings in midfield expose the defenders, the inconsistency of the defenders leaves the goalkeeper on an island, and the goalkeeper’s inability to make a save piles pressure on the manager.
Another problem that we see consistently is over-committing players forward and then losing the ball. A frequent example saw a nice move work Castagne into space on the right, who would promptly try to cut the ball back to a line of Leicester attacking midfielders – James Maddison, Tielemans, Dewsbury-Hall – on the edge of the area. This is not, inherently, a bad idea, as it can wrong-foot defenders who are sprinting back the other way.
Leicester are far too casual on the ball for this to work. Either the pass goes astray or one of the midfielders loses it, and suddenly you have every single outfield player bar Bouba Soumare and the two central defenders ahead of the ball. This happened over and over again in the first half and Leicester just about muddled through, including one example where Soumare demonstrated a turn of pace I had no idea existed to recover the situation.
There are many things that Rodgers isn’t to blame for. The financial situation and last year’s injuries are (largely) out of his hands. He can’t force good players to stop making basic mistakes. But it’s hard to argue that ‘tactics’ are outside the manager’s purview. When Jamie Carragher asked Rodgers if he’d ever thought about setting his team up more defensively after the MNF win over Forest, he said no, and effectively laughed the question off. That answer was simultaneously a lie – just watch Leicester’s attack evaporate every time we take the lead - and an exasperating thing for a manager to say on the back of two wins in an entire season’s worth of away games, and one away clean sheet in the last 18 months.
Danny, (oh) Boy
Beyond his choice of tactics and in-game changes, there is one other glaring, consistent managerial error that is costing Leicester every week. It’s hard to recall a player so obviously out of their depth as Danny Ward having a consistent run of games.
Ward is utterly lacking in all of the skills you’d expect a goalkeeper at this level to have. He looks like an outfield player, plucked from the local Sunday league team and forced between the sticks, decked out in a shirt that’s too big for him and inspiring palpable terror in everyone around. The fact he routinely concedes more goals than makes saves isn’t even the worst of it.
It’s a complete failure of planning, analysis, and leadership that Ward ever ended up as Leicester’s number one. The botched handling of Kasper Schmeichel’s exit, so close to the start of the season, should never have happened. The paralysis that gripped the upper echelons that meant no replacement was signed should never have happened. That much, again, was out of Rodgers’ hands. But it is absolutely beyond belief that a serious Premier League coaching staff chose to start the season with him after he failed to play a single minute of summer action and chooses to keep playing him every week.
We have seen numerous examples of teams switching the goalkeeper and dramatically improving their defence. Liverpool did it, Manchester City did it, Arsenal did it. But we aren’t even asking for anything remotely successful as that. If Leicester had the 19th best goalkeeper in the league, we would have conceded four or five fewer goals. Why is there such loyalty to a player so clearly not up to it? Ward is not young, has no experience at the top level, and has no particular tie to Leicester or Rodgers. He seems to be playing because to drop him would be to admit a mistake, and the manager doesn’t want to do that.
It is hard to imagine that a new manager’s first act would be anything other than to replace the goalkeeper. That, indeed, was our erstwhile opponent Gary O’Neil’s first act as interim coach at Bournemouth, followed by a mysterious upturn in defensive performance. Daniel Iversen may not turn out to be the saviour, but he at least has some things in his favour, not the least of which is the fact he’s actually been playing in goal for professional football teams for the last few years.
The week ahead
The ghosts of sackings past loom large next weekend. Leicester take on Crystal Palace at the King Power on Saturday lunchtime, the same bloody scene as that which finished off Emperor Claude. Palace may well be what we hoped Leicester were: a good team handed a brutal early fixture list that is destined to turn the ship around.
However, it’s difficult to see what would force a managerial change at this point. The World Cup is the next obvious chance for a change but there are still six weeks and six games before then. Writing off all away trips until further notice, Leicester have Palace, Leeds, and an absolute hammering at the hands of Manchester City to look forward to at home before then.
After the joy of Monday night, it’s back to being difficult to see where the next points are coming from. We’re in a holding pattern until the club acts, left with nothing but the hope that things aren’t too far gone by the time they do.
