Leicester City 2 Coventry City 1: The birth of the idea
Leicester’s Championship campaign got off to a winning start after Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall’s late brace broke Coventry hearts. James Knight reflects on a rollercoaster opening game.
At the 2017 Open Championship, Rory McIlroy began his first round by bogeying five of the first six holes. After he missed his par putt on the sixth green his caddie, JP Fitzgerald, turned to him and said “You’re Rory McIlroy, what the f*** are you doing?”
Before this game, I wondered how it would feel watching this team in the Championship. It has been a long time since Leicester were expected to win games in the way they are this season, and that’s a sharp transition from heading into every weekend expecting to lose.
After about seventy minutes, with the Foxes a goal down and routinely being carved open by a Coventry side who had lost their best player to Sporting Lisbon and their star defender up the M69, the sense of frustration that exploded out of Fitzgerald began to bubble inside thousands of of fans clad in blue: You’re Leicester City, what the f*** are you doing?
Perhaps that was the message that Enzo Maresca sent on when he introduced Kelechi Iheanacho with a quarter of an hour to go. 12 minutes later, it was 2-1, and everything was fine again.
The NPC becomes MVP
Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall has always had the feel of a man destined to be a sidekick. In last year’s Leicester team he felt like an extra, the supporting character who gets killed off at the end of the first act. He’s long felt like a player who’s not quite at the level we hoped, who is good at everything without being great at anything, who didn’t have the driving personality needed to make it at the highest level.
Whether it’s James Maddison leaving and the resulting vacancy for a star player in midfield, a new system that allows him greater freedom to attack, or the fact that he knows he’s dominated teams in the Championship before, the KDH that turned up to this first game was entirely different. He had his socks round his ankles, he was taking players on, he was pinging shots from everywhere. He had, in other words, swag.
In the end, he had eight strikes at goal, and two of them made the difference. In the first half his decision making left something to be desired, the sort of shots with supporting players in better positions that were the hallmark of Maddison 1.0. The second half, and particularly the final quarter of the game, was another level.
The equaliser was a brilliant, sweeping Leicester move, from Stephy Mavididi to Harry Winks to Dennis Praet, who stuck a pinpoint cross on Dewsbury-Hall’s head. It was, also, an early vindication for Maresca. After scoring a very similar header against Northampton in the first game of pre-season, KDH credited the new manager with encouraging him to score exactly that type of goal.
“I don’t score many with my head. But we’ve been doing a lot of finishing in training and the Manager has been telling me to get into the box, and get on the end of the crosses.”
Strike one up for The Idea.
Praet himself also had a big impact on the game. The Belgian has spent the last few years like Schrodinger’s Cat embroiled in a transfer saga, simultaneously at Leicester and at Torino until you open the box and find out he’s on the bench. He may be one of the six players who have bought into the Maresca project so completely that they now want to stick around and, like Dewsbury-Hall, his skill set seems much better suited to this midfield than the Brendan Rodgers version.
With Praet on the pitch, Leicester had more width and - crucially - quality in the attacking third, which had been absent up until then. He got to the byline and cut back for Jamie Vardy to have a shot saved, set up the equaliser, and crossed for Mavididi to head over later on. The Wilfred Ndidi as an attacker experiment is surely over, with Cesare Casadei potentially on the way and Praet obviously a big upgrade over the Nigerian in that role.
The winner, meanwhile, was another example of that extra bit of quality around the box. Mavididi’s confidence seemed to surge after his involvement in the first goal, and both he and Dewsbury-Hall showed good composure before the latter smashed into the top corner. Between his two goals KDH had time to almost score twice more, hitting one half-chance into the side netting and firing over from just outside the area. More than anything, the confidence, bordering on arrogance, by that point was a massive upgrade on the player we’ve seen before.
The familiar stench of Brendanball
While there was a lot to like about the final quarter of the game, the other three quarters were much less assured. Leicester looked incredibly rusty in the first 45 minutes, perhaps not surprisingly given the lack of match practice in the summer.
Many of the concerns going into the season were borne out: players in roles they aren’t really capable of playing, a lack of pace at the back, set pieces. On another day and with better finishing, Coventry could have ruthlessly exposed those weaknesses. The main concern going forward is how easily they adapted after half time to get at Leicester’s defence.
Within 20 seconds of the restart Ellis Simms was one on one with Mads Hermansen and shanked a horrible effort wide. Matt Godden had two great chances and hit one straight at the ‘keeper then dragged another past the post. Every corner was underneath the crossbar causing chaos, until eventually Kyle McFadzean nodded one in. Coventry executed their plan well until it came to scoring their chances, but it was ludicrously simple stuff: win possession and exploit Leicester’s agonisingly slow back line.
It’s too easy to pick on Jannik Vestergaard, but that isn’t going to stop us. There are centre backs that lack pace, then there is Vesty, who runs like someone’s tied his shorts to the opposing crossbar. His last start before this was the infamous 3-2 defeat to Spurs and it’s hard to imagine any player in the history of the game has been beaten over the top as many times as he has over the course of those two matches. Just before the winner, he was almost lapped by Haji Wright as the American ran through and hit the bar, via a great save from Hermansen.
Wout Faes, for instance, isn’t quick, but he also played like an international footballer who knew he was far better than the bozos he was up against. Any time he was up against a striker, he battered him off the ball. Twice he went on marauding runs up the pitch and tried to get on the end of a through ball. Vestergaard, needless to say, didn’t do that. Which might be just as well, as we’d still be waiting for him to get back in position. He’s entirely ill-suited to this system.
The other problem with the Big Dane is that his lack of speed extends to the way he passes. He takes an age to do anything with the ball. Conor Coady’s absence was most keenly felt in possession, where some of the build-up play from the back was agonising, even when behind. Hermansen, at least, searched out direct balls into midfield to try to spring an attack, and the same was true of Callum Doyle, who clearly understands the system as well as anyone. Vestergaard’s movements are so painstaking that time seems to slow down around him, and all you get in the end is him knocking it back to the ‘keeper.
Despite that, Leicester’s precision would occasionally turn into a scintillating back-to-front passing move. The equaliser is one example, but it was in evidence right from the beginning, when Dewsbury-Hall wasted a great chance to play in one of the front three inside ten minutes. The Idea, ultimately, showed some promising signs. Midfielders found space in between the lines with regularity, and once Iheanacho came on to add better hold-up play and more movement in attack, the system linked together much better.
Iheanacho’s arrival freed up Mavididi as well, who looked pretty lacklustre for long periods before that. He’s likely to be as rusty as anyone, and more or less had to play here given the lack of options out wide. With Iheanacho and Praet on the pitch, Coventry could no longer double-mark him as they had done before, and he grew into the game. It might be a sign of things to come, or it might be the latest example of how stuff start to happen when Iheanacho plays.
Send up the Rudkin signal
Effectively, this is still pre-season for Maresca. It’s a classic Guardiola trope to mess around with personnel and systems for the first couple of months. The games matter, but they don’t matter that much yet. There are only four Championship matches in August and Leicester can afford to drop a few points while we get used to a new system and sort out the squad.
Because it’s clear that the squad is still badly imbalanced and there needs to be a reallocation of resources: there’s not a lot of point having Patson Daka as third choice striker while there aren’t any wingers, or using Ndidi as an attacking midfielder because he’s third choice for the defensive pivot. Leicester have five genuine full backs in the squad and play a formation that requires zero, we still own all three goalkeepers from last year and none of them even made the bench.
The impact of that imbalance is weaknesses in key positions. It’s hard to imagine Vestergaard, Ndidi, and Kasey McAteer will be starting for much longer. The only wide options on the bench when chasing the game were Marc Albrighton or Timothy Castagne. That is clearly going to change, perhaps as soon as this week.
In a sense, this game mattered far more for the vibes than the result. Dropping a couple of points here and there with a hybrid team in August wouldn’t be the end of the world.
But to have lost to a rival at home on opening day, let down again by familiar failings, would have set the Enzo era off on the wrong foot. It would have enhanced the sense of gathering frustration that had settled over the club over the past fortnight.
Instead, the lad from Shepshed swagged in from stage right and dragged his team to victory. Leicester picked up a couple of bonus points, and the unbeaten season is alive.
