Newcastle United 0 Leicester City 0: The one shot wonders
The most interminable relegation battle in Premier League history is set to last one more week. A draw at St James’ Park took Leicester’s survival chances back out of our hands. One more game, one more chance to be disappointed.
Large chunks of Leicester’s season have felt like a psychological experiment.
What happens if you tell a bunch of players that they’re all rubbish and have to be replaced, then utterly rely on them to save your job?
What if you lose to the worst team in the league twice and tell everyone it’s actually great news?
Can you placate two years’ worth of furious anger with a free beer and a scarf?
Monday was another puzzling encounter with reality. A game where one team needed a draw and the other needed a win, except the team that needed a draw was desperate to win and the team that needed to win was time wasting for a draw. The team that needed to win didn’t have any shots, while the team that needed a draw almost panicked and lost by accident at the end.
Maybe this was a stroke of genius by Dean Smith, a manager beset by the incompatible realities of needing to beat Newcastle to have the best chance of survival, and a squad filled with players who secretly wanted Newcastle to win because it gives them a chance of playing Champions League football next season.
Or maybe he just forgot to record Match of the Day and didn’t realise that a draw wasn’t that helpful.
Defending like foxes
The great irony is Leicester have needed a defensive display like it for months. Bodies on the line, ludicrous slices of luck, grinding out a result. Harry Souttar was immense in the air, a turn of events that only increased our general sense of confusion at why Smith has been leaving him out, while the back three made countless interceptions and blocks to keep Newcastle at bay.
Whether they needed it now is more of an open question. Smith has spent his entire time as Leicester manager committed to the cult of the offensive, determined to go out over the top in a blaze of glory. Until, it turns out, the exact moment at which a draw no longer served much purpose, at which point he set fire to his principles and set out to man the barricades.
Many people have been calling for this sort of effort and application for a long time. We’ve been asking for a realisation from the (T)op that we aren’t who we think we are, that we have to go back to basics in order to drag ourselves out of the mire. As well as a return to the back three to provide extra protection and a deeper midfield to stem the seemingly endless torrent of goals conceded after we lose the ball.
This being Leicester City 2023, however, we obviously can’t have unambiguously nice things. An improvement in defensive solidity came at the price of literally not attacking at all. For weeks on end, we would have taken this. We would have been delighted to see it instead of Crystal Palace breaking Premier League records for the number of shots in a half, goal-repellent Everton creating thousands of chances, Liverpool scoring three against us while playing at half speed.
Except in this case, a crucial piece of information seemed to elude the players on the pitch and the manager in the dugout: we needed to win this one. A draw took our chances of survival from about 20% to, er, about 20%, and thrust them into the hands of AFC Bournemouth, our mild-mannered, forgettable kryptonite. A win would have dramatically altered the tenor of the final weekend.
Don’t mention the xG
The second curious aspect of this most confounding of games is that the brilliant defensive display that has been immediately etched into legend was achieved despite an appalling effort from the goalkeeper and despite kind of, almost, losing 5-0.
Newcastle hit the post on four separate occasions, including a remarkable effort from Bruno Guimaraes where he seemed to handle his own shot off the line from point-blank range. They ended up with 23 shots and an xG of 2.3. Leicester spent vast swathes of the game clinging on for dear life as Alexander Isak, Miguel Almiron, and Fabian Schar blazed shots over the bar.
We were treated to numerous examples of classic Leicester stuff, like Kelechi Iheanacho receiving the ball with a chance to break and planting a square pass directly at the feet of an opponent to spark their own counter. Or Luke Thomas receiving the ball on the edge of his own box and trying a Cruyff turn. Or Harvey Barnes getting the ball in a similar area, giving it away then falling over, rather than running forward like a normal human professional footballer.
Remarkably, this myriad of incompetent events didn’t lead to the usual goal.
Nor did a baffling performance from the goalkeeper. Daniel Iversen was so catastrophically shaky that for a few moments the spectre of Alex Smithies loomed before us. One of the hosts’ woodworking escapades came after Iversen ran out and flapped at Dan Burn, leaving the goal unguarded for Callum Wilson to hit the post and Wilfred Ndidi to head the rebound off the line.
When Wout Faes later headed a corner off the inside of his own post, Iversen was to be found tumbling into his own net miles away from the ball, entirely incidental to proceedings.
The nadir came in stoppage time, by which point even Smith had realised we probably shouldn’t be wasting time anymore. Iversen instead held the ball for an age, then shanked a drop kick straight out of play.
Almost
Iversen’s miskick heard around the world came just after the almost-moment of the season. As we ticked into injury time, Leicester had failed to register a shot. At one stage, approximately 85 minutes later than you would hope to see a stat like this pop up, we had amassed a total of one touch in the Newcastle box.
The longer this sequence of events dragged on, the more you felt sure that something was going to happen – a Newcastle winner, perhaps even a mad Leicester smash-and-grab? The introduction of Barnes and Patson Daka on the hour didn’t prompt anything like a chance, but it did belatedly give us the chance of venturing out of our own half. Had the roles been reversed, there is no doubt whatsoever that Newcastle would have scored with their only shot on target.
We were delirious with joy when we won our first corner (first man, obviously). We had a spell of possession (fizzled out, misplaced pass). And then James Maddison won a free kick on the edge of the box in added time.
In a moment of sublime Leicesteryness that was only missing the sight of Brendan Rodgers clapping away on the sideline, we took it short. After a considerable amount of faffing about between Maddison, Youri Tielemans, and Bouba Soumare, in came the cross. Timothy Castagne met it clean on the volley.
And it didn’t go in.
Nick Pope clawed away the shot, Souttar couldn’t reach the rebound. The chance was gone. But for a brief, beautiful moment, we were alive.
Permutation corner
The ultimate value of this point will only become clear next weekend. If Leicester win and Everton don’t, then the means justify the ends and nothing else matters.
A draw at Newcastle is obviously not a bad result in absolute terms. A draw is better than a defeat. But it was a game and a performance of confusing contradictions: it was good to see a Leicester team with some grit, but this commitment to defensive solidity has come far too late. The manager made big calls by dropping big names, six weeks after he should have been making these decisions. Souttar was magnificent at the back, but he’s barely featured under Smith. Papy Mendy finally made an appearance, but only as a last-minute substitute when we should have been throwing bodies forward.
Smith took something of a victory lap afterwards, sticking it in the craw of the doubters after he’d heard “talk that this could be the night we got relegated”. But that isn’t the reality of the situation. After the results at the weekend, we were going to the last game regardless. A win would have transformed the scenario on the final day in our favour, massively increasing the chances of survival. Yet Leicester didn’t really try to win.
Sports teams live in their own little bubble where the next game is all that counts. Everyone’s always taking it one game at a time. Sometimes you have to break out of that mentality and see the bigger picture. The manager’s comments, along with some of the players’ actions towards the end – Iversen’s time wasting, the failure to press Newcastle’s back line when they stood with the ball trying to kill the clock – suggest that we didn’t properly understand the permutations.
If both Leicester and Everton win at the weekend, we may see those final 15 minutes as a missed opportunity. Some of the fan reaction has been to assume that only two possible performances were possible: this, or getting thrashed. But things are never that binary.
If a defensive mindset from the start was fair enough, there’s no doubt we should have gone for the jugular at the end. A goal would have been so valuable, priceless, even, that it was worth taking a risk for. As soon as we put Newcastle under pressure, they started to panic, and the crowd got nervous. But the pressure came so late that we gave ourselves no chance to exploit it.
Instead, we stagger on for one more week, our fate in the hands of others. The fans – an astonishing 1300 of which made the journey up north on a Monday night to support this merry band of misfits – are going to be put through the wringer again in the hope of salvaging a cause we all thought was lost.
There’s still a chance that it isn’t. Maybe that’s all we could ask for.
