Leicester City 2 Everton 2: What happens when you don’t win a must-win game?
For the second time in two games, Leicester City deserved to both win and lose - so, for the second time in two games, we drew. Given this was a must-win game, what happens now?
Whoever ends up in the bottom three after 38 games will deserve to go down. But there are at least five teams that absolutely deserve to go down this season. Southampton for being bottom of a poor league, Forest for signing a billion players and still being awful, Leeds and Everton for losing by a ton of goals every time they play anyone that isn’t Leicester City.
And as for Leicester City - why do we deserve to go down? Well, one of many reasons is because we’ve played Southampton, Forest, Leeds and Everton this calendar year and we haven’t won against any of them.
Everyone else has been crashing four, five or six in against Leeds and Everton. We’ve played them both in the space of a week and we should probably have lost both games.
Back to the start
Another reason we deserve to go down in one word: complacency.
It feels impossible to take any one Leicester game in isolation at the moment without spending most of the 90 minutes (and a fair bit of the rest of the week) wondering why on earth Brendan Rodgers thought he could get away with picking Danny Ward and Daniel Amartey ahead of Daniel Iversen and Caglar Soyuncu.
This game was the perfect case in point. Iversen pulled off save after save and Soyuncu was our best effort at dealing with Dominic Calvert-Lewin. If we’d had Ward and Amartey in for this game, we’d have lost. We had Ward and Amartey for months and we lost a lot of games. Sooner or later we’ll have to get over that. For now, it still stabs away at you while you’re trying to just enjoy life.
There’s also the small matter of sacrificing the Villa and Bournemouth games while we messed around with a plan A of Sadler and Stowell. Not getting a head of recruitment in for the summer transfer window. The board have been in cruise control for months.
This is old, well-trodden ground and it doesn’t really explain why we didn’t win this must-win game, so why is it so pertinent now? Because it feels like the complacency off the pitch has been replicated on it, and that’s what’s going to get us relegated.
Sunday league on a Monday night
At this point I’ll hold my hands up. Perhaps I was complacent too. I thought we’d beat Everton - if not comfortably or convincingly then at least with an element of control to the performance. We may have to play forward a bit quicker than we did under Brendan Rodgers but we still essentially have to play a form of the Rodgers style. Possession football, moving the ball quickly, making the most of our technical quality.
Instead, a team containing Youri Tielemans and James Maddison is on the brink of relegation. It’s absolutely criminal.
Here, Everton shocked me - and, it seemed, everyone on the playing and coaching staff - by coming out all guns blazing and putting us under a hell of a lot of pressure in the opening period. I thought we’d control the game and only fail to win if we were victims of our own mistakes. Instead, we got Dyched. Everton hit the big man repeatedly and we looked shell-shocked.
Most tellingly of all, when we had the ball at the back, there was nowhere to go - no big man to hit, no easy route out from defence. We had two tactics - give it to Luke Thomas to play down the line, or spoon it straight out of play on the halfway line above the head of Harvey Barnes.
This isn’t a Sunday league team. This is a Premier League football club with all week to train players worth tens of millions of pounds.
And even after we’d been shocked by Everton actually looking like a decent outfit, we didn’t really do anything about it. There was the complacency. We continued with the same starting eleven that Dean Smith admitted afterwards had played poorly in the first half and we soon paid the price.
Goat goals
Unfathomably, despite that pretty awful first half, we still went in at the break in the lead. That doesn’t tell the whole story about one of the most chaotic halves of football you’ll ever see at this level though. First, Iversen pulled off a wonder save from Alex Iwobi. Then Calvert-Lewin scored a penalty after Timothy Castagne had clattered into him from behind.
Soyuncu soon hauled Leicester level before a terrible square ball from Iwobi on halfway was cut out by Tielemans to Maddison and he released Jamie Vardy to round Jordan Pickford to score. Vardy then should have scored again but hit the bar. At least the GOAT is back. He looked almost like prime Vardy at times, which seemed impossible until a few days ago.
There were chances for Everton at the other end: Calvert-Lewin missed a couple of ridiculous sitters, there was a chance for Abdoulaye Doucoure on the follow-up, at one point I think even Dixie Dean popped up trying to win back the headlines from Erling Haaland. It was a mad, mad game of football.
Then, in first half stoppage time, we got a penalty.
Mad, mad, mad
A cross from Harvey Barnes struck Michael Keane on the arm. I don’t like these kind of penalty awards. It wasn’t exactly outstretched - defenders have to put their arms somewhere. But it was away from his body and the decision wasn’t overturned by the omnipotent VAR gods so we had a penalty and the chance to go two clear of an Everton side with form for collapsing once the goals start flying past Pickford.
From my vantage point on the halfway line, though, as soon as I noticed Maddison had the ball, I was convinced he wouldn’t score. As gigantically talented as he is, and as much as we’ll miss him when he leaves, and as much as he played in Vardy for both of his goals in the past two games, there’s just something about his current form that made me think that not only would he miss but that we would end up regretting it.
That’s exactly how it played out. Awful penalty, straight down the middle and saved by Pickford. Within ten minutes of the restart, Iwobi was finding the bottom corner of the same net to level it up.
Dean Smith was asked about Maddison being on penalty duty after the game and gave a bizarre answer about Jamie Vardy not having scored at home this season. So you trust him up front to score the goals but not when the ball’s on the penalty spot with just the goalkeeper to beat? Which brings us to…
The uncomfortable truth
I want this to work. I want Dean Smith to be an unlikely saviour, Two Balls Shakey to seal his legendary club status and John Terry to take the credit for our first clean sheet since the Ice Age when we finally get over the line.
But.
Unfortunately, there are still massive problems with this football team and we can only blame Brendan Rodgers and the board for so long. There’s a management trio picking this lineup and it’s not really working, is it?
The whole point of changing manager was that we have the players to beat teams like Leeds and Everton. But the only Leicester City manager to have beaten Leeds and Everton this season is Brendan Rodgers.
When we stayed up in 2014/15, we hit gold with the starting eleven in early April and it carried us through until the end of the season with minimal changes. It was the same with the title win the following year. This season there are still errors being made at this late stage. The alarm bells started ringing when Tete kept making the team.
He was out again for the visit of Everton but in came Wilfred Ndidi, who’s done nothing lately to deserve it and predictably played no discernible part at all in guarding our overworked back four. Meanwhile, Papy Mendy, who’s been one of our better players this season (hardly an accolade for the mantlepiece Papy, but at least you got a place in the squad this time) spent all game on the bench.
The selection of Luke Thomas over Victor Kristiansen was at least understandable after the latter’s struggles at Leeds, though it still had some frothing at the mouth as soon as Thomas first gave the ball away.
Patson Daka is a winger now, apparently, despite being the worst player in the history of football when receiving the ball with this back to goal on the halfway line. We kept giving it to him there though. Maybe we could try Tete again.
The balance of the side is still wrong, most notably in midfield. We’re still giving up tons of chances to really dismal teams. Whether Mendy is the answer or not, something surely has to be done before we start giving 20 chances to the likes of Liverpool and Newcastle and we’re three goals down before you can say ‘Spursy’.
Positivity - your laws do not apply to me
There may be some Leicester fans who look at this game in a positive light. After all, we’re out of the bottom three with just four games remaining. Not only that - there are four teams beneath us. We’re the best of the worst. Tell that to the solemn souls trudging away from Filbert Way on Monday night. The mood was sombre. That’s what happens when you don’t win a must-win game.
It feels like we’ve been here before. This is the failed Champions League qualifications all over again rather than the great escape or the title season. This was Southampton away when we drew 1-1 against ten men. Because if we get overrun by Everton (yeah, I’ll italicise you), we’re not going to get the points we need against anyone else.
I look at this team and its apparent lack of fitness, fight and fortitude and I think we’re going down. You can look this up and shove it back in my face at the end of the month.
Copy. Paste. Set reminder. I really hope to be hearing from you.
Now, onto our next must-win game…
