New Year, Same You: Leicester City 0 Fulham 1 (03 January 2023)
When fourth official Darren England raised his board into the Leicester sky on Tuesday night to reveal seven minutes would be added to the end of the game, it was greeted not, as you might expect, by a roar of expectation.
Instead, it was the cue for thousands of hardy souls who had braved this latest miserable defeat to up sticks and leave. By the time those seven minutes were up, the King Power Stadium was barely a third full. The remainder could muster little more than a few half-hearted boos on the final whistle.
Ambivalence has infected a fan base who have had nothing to cheer for more than a year. Leicester failed to beat a top half team in the whole of 2022. We have started 0 for 1 in 2023.
Like against Liverpool on Friday night, the Foxes really had no business losing this game. But losing is what we do. At Anfield, it took us scoring all three goals to ensure defeat. The procession of missed chances against Fulham was less flashy, but equally effective.
A star man and 10 blah men
The irony is that this was one of Leicester’s better displays. In isolation, there were positive signs: we created more chances, Fulham barely had a sniff in the second half, and Youri Tielemans was at the heart of everything good.
But we didn’t take any of those chances, Fulham had already bagged all they needed in the first half, and Tielemans is half-way out the exit door. On this evidence, you can’t blame him. Had anyone else been at anywhere near his level, we’d be basking in the glow of a new dawn in 2023.
He set up a sitter for Ayoze Perez in the first half that the Spaniard inexplicably sent soaring into the night. He was the only player willing to move the ball forwards. He hit the bar with an exact replica of his goal at Goodison Park before the World Cup. He even had another late shot dragged narrowly wide.
This was a vintage Tielemans display. Even including another of his trademarks, where he lost the ball on the half-way line to let Fulham in for a counter seconds into injury time that should have finished off the game. And that, ultimately, is the problem. Someone always makes a mistake.
Brendan Rodgers wants Leicester to control games, like a budget Manchester City. Death by the ‘thousand million passes’ that Pep Guardiola believes in. By slowing the game down, Leicester can prevent counter attacks and make sure everyone is in position. Except that the theory runs into reality on a weekly basis. This time, it was Daniel Amartey playing a hospital ball into midfield, and ten seconds later Aleksandar Mitrovic made it 1-0.
Doctor, doctor
It’s one thing trying to play like Manchester City with your strongest XI. It’s quite another trying to play like them with a reserve side. Leicester have been in the middle of an injury crisis for two years now. In the last week it’s taken yet another turn for the worse.
Already without Jonny Evans, Ricardo Pereira, James Justin, James Maddison, Patson Daka, Dennis Praet, and the ghost of Ryan Bertrand, Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall injured himself shooting in the warm-up and Boubakary Soumare went down with a hamstring inside five minutes.
Like with losing games you should have won, at a certain point injuries stop being bad luck. After the game, Rodgers blamed them on having a ‘small squad’, a frankly laughable comment that should be ignored. The truth is that something is apocalyptically wrong with Leicester’s fitness regime. You cannot remain competitive when you have no players fit and no money to replace them with.
The fitness issue goes beyond literal absences, too. It shows up in a complete lack of energy on the pitch. The days of the instant counter-press, where Leicester engage high up the pitch and win the ball back are long gone. There’s no intensity. Everyone looks like they’re running in treacle.
Fulham, who for the most part looked rubbish, played through our ‘press’ with ease. In the first half they briefly threatened to destroy Leicester with the way they could stroll up the pitch under no pressure. When the situation was reversed, of course, the centre backs in blue passed it among themselves for ten minutes before trying to move forwards.
The week ahead
The tactics truck trundles down to Priestfield at Saturday lunchtime to take on Gillingham, a side rock bottom of League Two with seven goals all season. Did somebody say Newport County?
The real quiz takes place off the pitch over the next few weeks, however. In the bleak midwinter at the end of Claude Puel’s run, Leicester signed Tielemans on loan from Monaco and gave us something to believe in. We are in desperate need of something similar again. While we need bodies at almost every position, the club is crying out for some vibes.
On social media you see more and more people losing interest in the season. That was evident as well from the atmosphere at the King Power on Tuesday night. You can’t expect people to keep believing that something is going to change with no evidence to the contrary, 30,000 Charlie Browns happily waving ‘honesty flags’ as Leicester fall behind again.
Rodgers is already trying to downplay expectations, saying after Fulham that ‘there's not a lot of money’ to strengthen with, but to do nothing is to completely lose the fans and court a much bigger financial disaster.
