Food for thought: Leicester City 2 Brighton & Hove Albion 2 (21 January 2023)
To paraphrase fans of teams doing business in the transfer window, we’re also cooking. Unfortunately it’s a recipe for disaster.
Take a step back and imagine you don’t support Leicester City at the moment (nice feeling, isn’t it?)
Then read these comments from the manager’s post-match interview and decide whether you’d back this club to win a relegation dogfight.
‘There’s a number of our players who don’t care enough when they have it. They’re happy to give it away, or not bothered enough to give it away.’
‘That’s where the team is at. It’s nowhere near the level I would want it to be, in terms of quality. But you have to respect the players that are available, they’re playing and giving their everything. We’re so short in many areas.’
Who do you like?
Assuming Brendan Rodgers wasn’t talking about Nampalys Mendy at the end there, it’d be fascinating to know which specific players he had in mind.
Because although you can point to individual errors, like Patson Daka’s in the build-up for Brighton’s equaliser, this wasn’t a team of misfits and no-hopers.
This team didn’t include Caglar Soyuncu (an elite centre-back earlier in the Rodgers era, now mysteriously cast adrift) or Wilfred Ndidi (an elite midfielder earlier in the Rodgers era, now mysteriously a shadow of his former self).
It didn’t include Kelechi Iheanacho (who Rodgers has previously got the best from and has since discarded again) or Jannik Vestergaard (signed during the Rodgers era and another picking up big wages for nil contribution).
Other than James Maddison, Youri Tielemans and Jamie Vardy, how many of our other players does Rodgers actually want at the football club?
At a time when there are a billion problems and no easy fix, the biggest catastrophe of all is that we’re paying a manager huge money to get the best out of players he doesn’t seem to like, want or rate.
That sunken feeling
Not that this game marked the season’s lowest point by a long chalk. It was relatively positive in many ways, but it also summed up how bad things have got that Brighton’s late equaliser didn’t even really feel like a kick in the teeth.
However, as much as Brighton have impressed recently and a draw would have been seen as a good result by most prior to kickoff, Leicester aren’t in a position to give away late leads at home.
There are no easy games among February’s fixtures - home games against the two North London clubs and trips to Villa Park and Old Trafford.
Then again, nothing is easy these days. To save you the bother of looking up when we play Everton again, it’s not until 29th April. Let’s not think about what the league table might look like by then.
A man from Japan with a plan
My approach to Fantasy League this season has been to transfer in a player from Leicester’s opposition each week. They don’t have to be in good form. Son Heung-Min hadn’t scored for a decade before I brought him in ahead of our trip to Spurs. He didn’t even start the game. Hat-trick.
Kaoru Mitoma, however, was in good form already.
In he comes.
Despite Timothy Castagne coping far better with him than Trent Alexander-Arnold did last week, Mitoma was always going to cause problems at some stage.
Given the respective trajectories of Brighton and Leicester this season, as soon as he cut inside onto his right foot in the first half the referee should have just blown his whistle and ordered a restart. The ball was so inevitably curling beyond Danny Ward into the top corner.
In it goes.
Mid goals
Ready to read about another of Leicester’s problems so far this season? This one has gone under the radar but it’s that we don’t score many unremarkable goals.
We don’t score from set pieces. We don’t score many tap-ins. We don’t cause havoc in the opposition penalty area. Essentially, we’ve been overly reliant on bangers.
So it made a nice change to see us score two goals that won’t live long in the memory. Marc Albrighton scored the first, three minutes after the bloke behind me groaned ‘noooooooooooo’ when he ran onto the pitch. Harvey Barnes got the second just after the hour, turning in a corner flicked on at the near post.
This is probably how a team low on confidence does manage to score, because yet again in the first half there were good opportunities on the counter only for Barnes or Vardy to make poor decisions. Both have terrorised defences better than Brighton’s in the past but both are at a low ebb right now and we can only hope that Barnes eventually getting on the scoresheet is a source of confidence.
Ending on positives
This has been another downer, hasn’t it? There were positives though, so we’ll end on those.
The sense of relief from the crowd at James Maddison’s return was the kind of unifying positivity we desperately need. Although he wasn’t able to stem the tide that brought Brighton’s leveller, he took the ball in tight spaces and gave little glimpses of how he and we can play at his and our best.
During Maddison’s absence it’s been easy to forget we are also capable of the kind of clever, quick-passing football Brighton displayed on several occasions.
For large periods, we restricted a team that had scored 12 goals in its previous 3 games including a destruction of Liverpool. It may have been a shock to some to see us play so defensively against Brighton but, as attested by Rodgers’s post-match comments, this is our reality now.
Despite losing stature in the starting lineup with Ndidi missing through injury, we didn’t concede from a set piece.
Looking ahead, the FA Cup Fourth Round comes at a good time. It is a perfect opportunity to give Maddison, Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall and Victor Kristiansen some minutes and hopefully there may be one or two more signings before then too. We can but hope.
Perhaps most importantly of all, Union FS took in a wealth of donations for homelessness charity The Bridge prior to the game. We can’t affect what happens on the pitch too much but we can be proud of what takes place off it.
