Leicester City 0 Liverpool 4: Mauled by the giants
Leicester’s immortal, unforgettable pre-season tour of Asia came to an end with a heavy defeat to Liverpool in Singapore. James Knight was watching on.
When 5’8” Diogo Jota leapt in front of 6’5” Jannik Vestergaard to nod in Liverpool’s third before half time, it was hard to shake the feeling that this was a very silly game for Leicester to have played.
Enzo Maresca is a new manager trying to instill a new brand of football. He needed pre-season to involve lots of time dedicated to working on patterns and shapes and getting the players used to the system. Ideally, the friendlies should have been against weaker teams where we dominate the ball, to provide preparation for a season
Instead, he’s had one proper friendly, followed by a biblical flood, and a bunch of corporate engagements that culminated in this, a game against one of the best teams in the country. A game that had its moments, but after a bright start brutally brought home how limited the Enzo revolution has been so far.
Revenge of the placeholders
The team selections throughout pre-season have given us a pretty good idea of who Maresca likes and what he wants to do. Ricardo in his inverted full back role, Callum Doyle on the left so that we can play a back three with the ball, the two midfielders alongside Harry Winks breaking forward to support the attack.
In the early stages of the summer, against Northampton and in the various behind closed doors games, the personnel in those positions didn’t seem to matter much. They were obviously placeholders for new signings that were on the way.
Well, now we’re six days away from the actual season and it turns out that the placeholders might just be the players. Leicester started brightly against Liverpool, playing out from the back well and hitting diagonals to wide areas, then springing midfield runners in behind the Reds’ defence. But the fact that those moves involved Vestergaard spraying it out to Marc Albrighton and Kasey McAteer then Wilfred Ndidi bursting in behind was rather jarring.
Twice in the first few minutes Ndidi was played in on the goalkeeper for a 1v1. His first effort was saved, the second won a corner that Vestergaard headed wide. Shortly afterwards McAteer beat Trent Alexander-Arnold to the ball and wasted the chance rather than squaring to Patson Daka or Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall for a guaranteed goal. Each of those early Leicester attacks saw the same sort of thing we’ve seen in the other games: bodies in the box, lots of opportunities to score.
This was all good stuff, while at the same time being a bit strange. The personnel are totally at odds with the roles they’re being asked to play. I would confidently wager that Ndidi has had more goalscoring chances in this pre-season than his entire Leicester career to this point. That is promising, if someone else is ultimately going to play there and get those chances. It’s less promising if it’s a tactic that relies on him suddenly discovering a finishing touch that has been extremely well-hidden up to now.
It’s the same story in wide areas, where McAteer has shown some promise, and Wanya Marçal-Madivadua injected some pace and creativity when he came on in this game. Both look like they could be useful squad options in the season to come, and McAteer gave Liverpool’s starting defensive line some problems in this game. That’s great, if they can grow into the team over the season. Not so much if they are all going to have to start for the next few months.
The defence, shorn of Conor Coady, currently looks a bit peculiar as well. Anyone who predicted a Castagne - Vestergaard - Doyle - Ricardo back four for the first game would have been sectioned a couple of months ago, yet now looks like one of the most visionary Cassandras of all time. It’s hard to imagine that was on the first slide of Maresca’s PowerPoint during his interview, but some of the peculiarity is down to his choices. No Victor Kristiansen or Luke Thomas here, with Ricardo suddenly switched to play as an inverted left full back instead of right.
Maybe we’re still in beta testing, and there’s still a month of the transfer window to go. The vibe right now, though, is that the whole LCFC Lads On Tour trip to Asia means that no one’s done any work for a fortnight.
Enter the Madsman
That vibe was only exacerbated by the way the walls caved in across ten first half minutes in Singapore, largely as a result of individual errors.
The first warning sign came when Mads Hermansen gave the ball away then was forced to redeem himself with a decent save. Leicester then gave it away again trying to play forward and Vestergaard lumbered around behind the rest of the back four to play Jota onside. Hermansen once again saved his initial shot, but Darwin Nunez poked in the rebound.
The new Dane is clearly a vast improvement on Daniel Iversen in terms of playing out from the back, and his passing early on was a big part of Leicester’s good play. He also made quite a lot of saves as Liverpool started to give us an absolute hiding for the last hour of the game. So far, so good.
However, it’s also entirely possible that he’s a maniac. He looks to have both the extreme self-confidence and just enough fallibility to create a potent mix of goalkeeping madness. The signs were there in the YouTube clips of him leaping up and down to save a billion shots in a row like a hyperactive puppy that’s just devoured a pot of M&Ms. Those signs were adorned with flashing neon lights when he was almost lobbed from the half way line in the second half and, to spare his blushes, saved it by doing a diving header on the edge of his box to nod the ball round the post.
Before then, he had been beaten on two more occasions. Some of them may sound familiar: Ndidi gave the ball away in midfield to set Liverpool on the way to 2-0, then Timothy Castagne gave it away to set up the third. Liverpool’s fourth goal came from a corner when Harvey Elliott was left unmarked to nod in at the back post.
Maresca’s style is going to invite some games like this. All of the Guardiola underlings, and even the Archbishop of Bald himself, have taken a proper hiding and conceded embarrassing goals in the early stages of the process. The goalkeeper is going to give the ball away occasionally, we are going to get caught in transition with five or six players bombing forward.
The challenge is going to be keeping the fans on side if this happens in a real game. Because we are all still in remission after what happened last season, and a relapse is possible at any moment. When this encounter started to turn, it was the old failings from the old players that resurfaced under the pump.
“I don’t think we adapted quick enough and we considered some sloppy goals”
Stop us if you’ve heard that one before.
Get ready for the real thing
The real stuff gets underway next week, and the compressed, disjointed nature of a pre-season with only two official matches means it’s hard to know what to make of it.
The “idea” that Maresca likes to talk about has looked promising against Northampton - who played a bunch of trialists in the second half - and Liverpool for twenty minutes, after which they beat us 4-0.
The new signings all look like sensible additions that fit the plan. Hermansen is good on the ball, Doyle is flexible, has played at this level and comes with a big reputation, Coady is the experienced leader at the back, while Winks sometimes looks supremely good. At one point against Liverpool, Winks saw Ricardo in trouble in midfield, made himself available, played a one-two with the Portuguese and suddenly Leicester were up the other end on the attack. It was a flash of brilliance.
At the same time, the goalkeeper is young, unproven and, I can’t emphasise this enough, literally saved a shot with a diving header, Doyle is similarly young, Coady is injured, and Winks has a patchy injury record himself. While the other areas in need of strengthening - out wide and attacking midfield - are still singularly unstrengthened so far.
What does it all mean? Is it good? Is it bad? Would it be better if every pre-season game was behind closed doors so we couldn’t pontificate on absurd matches in front of about 17 people on the other side of the world?
Tune in next week to find out.
