Leicester City 0 Liverpool 3: Top marks for not trying
The greatest night in Leicester City history was a Monday. So it is that the world comes full circle, and now a series of Mondays are slowly snuffing the light out of our Premier League lives.
The first leg of Leicester’s quadruple Monday header was a chaotic mess of a game. A classic of the relegation battle genre, leaving everyone in pieces, exhausted at the final whistle.
A fortnight later, Merseyside blue replaced with red, we witnessed the polar opposite of that encounter. An exercise in the futility of man, where millions of people dedicated hours of their precious lifespan to watching a foregone conclusion that made them feel nothing at all.
There was no anger, just acceptance. Most of the crowd left long before the final whistle. Some of those that stayed actually clapped the team off, an astonishing act in isolation but one that reflects the resignation that has settled over the King Power over the past week.
Our anger sustained us for most of the season. Anger at Wesley Fofana, at Brendan Rodgers, at the board’s inaction, at the club banning people for tweeting, at James Maddison being from Coventry.
The anger burned out on the Thames a week ago. Now we’re sat in the waiting room, numb to it all, waiting for the inevitable.
Plus ca change
The game itself was such a barren, emotionless experience that it barely deserves analysis. Leicester started well enough, forced a few set pieces, then handed their opponents the first goal and completely collapsed. Because that’s what we do.
A few weeks ago, we’d have spent thousands of words analysing the couple of minutes of game time between Curtis Jones’ opener and Cody Gakpo missing a golden chance to make it 3-0 in the first half.
Wout Faes made a dismal, avoidable error, and the team completely gave up. Leicester were on the wrong end of two toenail offside decisions, Wilfred Ndidi gave the ball away on the halfway line. Everyone wandered about without a care in the world.
There’s only so many times you can break down the same thing. That’s what happens, because that’s what always happens.
Paper foxes
Seven of the team that started on Monday night also started the 4-0 defeat to the same opponents on Boxing Day 2019, when we were the top two in the table. Two more - Caglar Soyuncu and Dennis Praet - are still at the club. Only the goalkeeper and the left back had changed.
Liverpool started six who played that day themselves. For all the talk about squad refreshes, simply having a lot of the same players for a long time doesn’t have to make you terrible. Our issue is that keeping the squad together without getting them to commit beyond the next few weeks means they don’t care in the slightest about what happens now.
As the second half meandered on, the complete lack of effort became more and more stark. At one stage, you could hear Dean Smith screaming at his team to run and press, to no effect. It must be one of the oddest managerial experiences of his life.
Some of these players will walk straight into European competition next season. Most of them will be snapped up by top-tier teams. You can see why Rodgers, then the caretakers, then Smith himself have all kept picking the same core: Maddison, Tielemans, Ndidi, Castagne, Vardy, Ricardo, Evans. On paper, it looks great.
But they are just names now. Youri Tielemans operates within Youri Tielemans’ body and wears his name on the back of his shirt. He’s not Youri Tielemans in any footballing sense. He’s unfit, frustrated, and protecting himself.
The final stages of this squad’s time together is being played out as farce. Tielemans looking exhausted has been a trope of his entire Leicester career. Against Liverpool he was gasping for air after five minutes. He’s stuck in a permanent state of being passed around, he has no influence on any game.
The Belgian core that drove Leicester forward for a couple of years now looks like one of our biggest liabilities. Their little clique is driving the dreadful body language that’s infecting the entire team. None of them have any interest in being here next season.
Effort and commitment
“We’ve got two more games left and we have to put in the same effort we showed tonight, the same commitment”
The defining feature of this season is going to be the endless stream of ridiculous statements we’ve been subjected to by the club.
Maddison’s immortal ‘if we play like this we’ll be fine’ will live forever. So too will Rodgers comparing his own team to a Mini before losing to a Chelsea team that didn’t win another game for two months.
Late on Monday evening, Jonny Evans added another epic piece of doublethink to the hall of fame. Perhaps they think that if they keep saying they’re trying hard, we’ll all miss the evidence of our own eyes. Or maybe he’s just on the wind up.
Evans is another of the contract club, a man on his last legs both literally and metaphorically. Absent for months when his leadership was most required, he finally rolled up at the final curtain to play Jones onside for the second goal and give the free kick away for the third. He lasted 89 minutes, approximately 88 more than looked likely when he was hobbling and grimacing around a few seconds after kick off.
He shouldn’t play for Leicester again. We have no chance of gaining another point as long as this group is playing together. Assuming we are still trying to stay up - a debatable question at this stage - we would be better off dropping anyone who has a foot somewhere else.
The difficulty is that it’s almost impossible to find 11 football players at Leicester City with any long term commitment to the club. As a thought experiment, I started to draw up an XI that features none of the Quislings, and got as far as Luke Thomas before I got stuck.
That, ultimately, is the original sin. We let the squad reach a point where a critical mass had no stake in the team’s fortunes, and this is the result. Another must-win home game that evaporated into nothingness before our eyes.
It could all be over next Monday. If we scrape through another week, it’ll only be because other teams have failed to win around us. Either way, there are only two weeks of this ghostly existence left. And that’s the beauty of it.
