The corner flag cometh: Brighton & Hove Albion 5 Leicester City 2 (04 September 2022)
We’ve been 2-0 up and failed to win, we’ve been 1-0 up and lost, we’ve played against ten men and lost, now we’ve scored after 52 seconds and lost as well.
Not since the dark days of Paulo Sousa have we found ourselves in a pickle quite like this one.
Over the last decade, our lowest footballing moments have been failure on the brink of success. We’ve had humiliating play-off defeats, we’ve slipped solemnly out of the top four on the final day (twice), and found a variety of exciting ways to get knocked out of Europe.
Not since Sousa’s starlets took their own trip to the south coast and came back, not so much with their tails tucked between their legs but tied around their ankles and their pants stuck on their head, have we seen a Leicester team look so bereft of any organisation, belief, or ability.
This must be the end for Brendan Rodgers. He has never been a beloved Leicester manager but the last vestiges of backing have drained away. If he takes charge at the King Power next weekend, we might see his head on a corner flag above the East Stand by half past four.
First minute good, next 89 minutes not so good
Analysing any game feels like a waste of time, because the end result is always the same. In a sense, there were some positives here: Kelechi Iheanacho, as he is wont to do, started and scored; Leicester created more clear chances in the first half than we have against any team with 11 men so far this season.
But it all feels completely irrelevant. There was no plan here, just like there was no plan against Manchester United on Thursday. Leicester have enough talented players to score goals by sheer law of averages but they are so poorly organised they will always concede more.
Whatever Rodgers once was for Leicester, he isn’t any more. His team selections resemble a man flailing around for something to work. His substitutions make no sense. At Brighton, after a relatively promising first half in which Leicester matched their hosts - and narrowly outperformed them in chance creation - he changed the formation. Leicester lost the second half 3-0, had 2 shots and registered a grand total of 0.1 xG.
The emperor has no clothes
There are plenty of individuals who look out of their depth. But it doesn’t feel right or fair to pin the blame on them. Lots of them have been good, for Leicester or elsewhere, before. Many of them are fine squad players, thrust into a desperate scenario that’s not of their making.
This collection of players is not the worst group in the league by a distance. Yet right now, they look like it on the field. Every goal they concede is awful, littered with collective and individual mistakes. But like an apple that’s covered in bumps and legions and is leaking from every orifice: all that means is that it’s rotten at the core.
It’s obvious that the manager has lost the dressing room. You can’t keep telling a group of people how bad they are at their jobs and expect them to do their best for you. You can’t keep making mistakes yourself and expect your staff to trust your ideas. You can’t expect a group of people to buy in when you’re not selling anything.
There’s nothing there any more, there’s no vision and no strategy. Just an angry man with no ideas left, railing against the world at every opportunity.
Rodgers has benefited from a friendly press for most of his time in charge, yet as he’s started to face some difficult questions this season, his façade has crumbled. His post-game press conference in Brighton was the most embarrassing yet. He played all the hits about the the lack of signings and the lack of quality he has at his disposal. Nobody is buying them any more. So he also played his last, desperate card: blaming the fans for making the players anxious.
This isn’t going to work. It never works. We were here before you and we’ll be here after you.
The week ahead
Leicester host Aston Villa next weekend in the latest must-win, will-lose game. The club is effectively on pause until something changes, and the only thing that can change now is the man in the dugout.
It’s clear that the problems go well beyond Rodgers and sacking him won’t fix everything. Leicester’s situation at centre back is a perfect encapsulation of everything that’s wrong with the club right now: there are five of them at the club, and yet we’ve resorted to playing a midfielder there. In the second half at Brighton, two of the three central defenders were a midfielder and a left back.
While this is going on, Wout Faes, almost incomprehensibly, is locked up in visa jail with the set piece coach. The club has been unsuccessfully hawking two internationals, Jannik Vestergaard and Caglar Soyuncu, to anyone and everyone while the manager airs them out in public.
Now, it seems, Soyuncu might be on the way out, clearing space in the squad just after the transfer window has closed. Vestergaard was allegedly a panic signing last summer but in reality someone Leicester had chased for at least a year beforehand who the manager wrote off within a fortnight of his arrival. After a summer in which it was clear they needed a defensive overhaul, the head of recruitment showed up for work for his first day on September 2nd.
Whether Rodgers clings on to set up a narrative-laden Sack Race head-to-head with Steven Gerrard next weekend or not, things have got to change. The longer this goes on, the more difficult recovering from the inertia and incompetence running through the club right now is going to be.
Those first 52 seconds were good though.
