Year-on-year improvement: LCFC Women 0 Chelsea 8 (3 December 2022)
A tumultuous week for Leicester ended in a demoralising beating against Chelsea where any chance of a surprise result evaporated inside the first twenty minutes.
Eagle-eyed TFW readers will spot that I’ve just copy and pasted the opening sentence here from James’s review of the Arsenal game a few weeks ago, and swapped in Chelsea instead.
Phoning it in seemed an apt way to start, given that I didn’t even watch the game. But who else is phoning it in?
The players?
There is no disgrace in losing to Chelsea, a team awash with internationals…
Sorry, I did it again. That’s the last time, I promise.
But it’s true. The gulf in quality between Chelsea and Leicester City is so gigantic you find yourself looking for precedents to prove that it’s worth playing the match in the first place. Relegated Birmingham beat title-chasing Arsenal last season, while champions Chelsea lost on the opening day of the current campaign to newly-promoted Liverpool. But we aren’t necessarily asking for victory in these games. It’d be nice not to look at sixes and sevens while conceding eights and nines to teams in the same league.
Watching each goal back, there eventually came the trademark Leicester goalkeeping howler with Demi Lambourne scooping the ball into the path of England international Fran Kirby. That was the eighth goal though, and there’s an argument the game was gone by then.
Certainly the majority of Chelsea’s goals were purely examples of players with excellent technical ability picking their way around a substandard WSL defence.
It’s not so long ago that we were singing the praises of that defence, but here Leicester were missing the injured Ashleigh Plumptre while Sam Tierney has since been redeployed into midfield. Which brings us to…
The manager?
“The plan is to bring in players of a higher quality than we’ve currently got” - the words of Willie Kirk prior to this defeat.
While it’s utterly inarguable Leicester need better quality in several positions, that doesn’t seem the most motivational pre-match quote. The WSL may be beginning to wind down before the Christmas break but there’s still a trip to Liverpool this Sunday, not to mention a Conti Cup schlep up to Sunderland in midweek.
It strikes me that Lydia Bedford was a popular young coach who had achieved something significant in the club’s young history at the top level and was essentially doing the best she could with the quality at her disposal.
Her tactical implementations were impressive in the way she managed to limit dangerous opponents and create periods of pressure at the other end. She just couldn’t get the points the performances, at times, deserved. She also didn’t get the chance afforded to the manager of the men’s team to turn things around.
Perhaps January will sort everything out. Which brings us to…
The club?
We tried to be positive about last summer’s transfer business, because the relative absence of bile and fury in the women’s game is quite refreshing. And you could see the logic - experienced heads were brought in to try to inject some knowhow into a team that showed naivety on several occasions last season.
Frankly, that hasn’t worked. Being realistic, you have to start questioning how serious the club is about investing in the women’s team given the quality brought in by other teams. Kirk is clear we’ll find out next month.
Meanwhile, the men’s World Cup should have been an opportunity for the club to push the women’s team. Instead, they’ve been too busy flogging £15 tickets to sit in the freezing cold watching TV. In all fairness, I decided to save my £15 to spend on something more exciting such as heating the house and watched the Netherlands against the US from the comfort of my sofa.
And yes, it does feel strange to be writing a match report of a game I didn’t watch. But I began this season excited about going to watch LCFC Women play, especially after the high of Euro 2022.
Sadly, the strongest argument in the club’s favour for promoting their World Cup fan zones more prominently than one of their own teams playing a real-life match is that you’d rather sit in the freezing cold watching TV than sit watching a Leicester team concede eight.
But hey, at least it wasn’t nine like last season. Year-on-year improvement!
Around the WSL
Surely there’s some good news to be found in this section?
Well, no. Quite the opposite. Sorry.
The two teams nearest to Leicester in the table both registered home wins to pull further clear of a relegation zone we’re rapidly trademarking as our own. The gap is now 7 points, which is a lot when you have no points from the first 9.
Reading beat Tottenham 1-0, while Liverpool put two past West Ham without reply.
The team in our sights now is Brighton, our next home opponents in the New Year. They lost 3-1 at Manchester United on Sunday.
Saturday’s other results saw wins for Arsenal and Manchester United. But that feels like another world to life at the bottom.
