Norwich City 0 Leicester City 2: Easy like a Wednesday evening
Enzo Maresca’s much-changed Leicester side eased to victory in East Anglia on Wednesday evening. James Knight reflects on the Foxes’ dominance over a couple of supposed promotion rivals after the international break.
It’s going to take a while to fully embrace what Leicester are in this division. Coming down after a long period as the underdogs at a higher tier, constantly battling against the sheer weight of money arrayed against you in the Premier League, and then becoming everything you swore to destroy is a strange feeling that will take some getting used to.
Within the fanbase, there were mixed expectations going into the season. There were constant murmurings of frustration throughout August. It felt jarring to hear the journeyman pundits on Sky waxing lyrical about players you’ve always thought were a bit rubbish and who a decent chunk of the crowd still wanted dropped.
Now it’s September, Leicester look by far the best team in the Championship and clear favourites to win the title. Lots of what we thought we knew is wrong. The mentality midgets have scored six goals in the last twenty minutes and conceded none, Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall is the envy of the country, Jannik Vestergaard is the best centre back in the league.
There’s always a feeling as a football fan that things must be about to go wrong, that you can’t really be an invincible juggernaut that’s going to destroy everything in front of you.
But here we, having faced perhaps the two toughest away games after the international break against two rivals for promotion. The result has been two dismissive displays, six points, and a realisation that maybe we are the baddies down here.
The rotation rollercoaster
For those of us who roam the fantasy football realm, the notion of “Pep Roulette” has taken hold over the last couple of years. The Manchester City manager is liable to drop anyone at any moment for no obvious reason, wreaking havoc on your foolproof plan to start Erling Haaland at home to Luton Town. Mikel Arteta is currently taking this to extremes with the concept of rotating goalkeepers, floating the hilarious idea that he could even sub one off in the middle of a game like any outfield player.
We always knew that Enzo Maresca was a Guardiola disciple, of course. Now we know that Enzo Maresca is fully paid-up subscriber to the wild world of Pep. Though the manager had signposted his plan to rotate the squad this week, he still threw everyone for a loop with his team selection at Carrow Road.
We may have thought that he’d rotate the forward line and leave it at that. Instead, he kept both wide men the same, dropped two thirds of the central midfielders, and replaced one of them with a lightweight, temperamental winger. Hamza Choudhury, erstwhile combative reserve midfielder, started once again as an inverted full back, and was handed the captain’s armband to boot.
Not all of the changes worked perfectly. A central midfield duo of Yunus Akgun and Cesare Casadei is young and inexperienced, without the physicality that Dewsbury-Hall and Wilfred Ndidi provide. There were times on Wednesday night where Leicester lost control of the game, in part because of that midfield. Neither impressed particularly and both were hooked with more than half an hour to go.
But the overall idea of rotating was a total success. The point is not so much to pick players who do better than the starters - though obviously that would be ideal - as to give your key men some rest while still winning the game. It’s hard to quantify the value of ‘freshness’ and ‘a lower chance of getting injured’, but the plan is clearly going to be to keep the number of starts for players in the most physically challenging positions, like the number eights, wide areas, and full back, down.
In winning this game against a genuinely good team, Leicester’s strength in depth, something that’s been lacking for years, shone through again. Even if it wasn’t a perfect performance, there’s a zero-sum element to these midweek away games. Get in, get the job done, get out.
It’s also true that excellent defensive displays are by their nature less thrilling and memorable than the attacking ones. This was probably Leicester’s best defensive performance of the season. Norwich, despite having spells of pressure, hardly created anything of note beyond a Shane Duffy header. The next best “chance”, a free kick that got the crowd excited for a brief second, was so wide in reality that it was more a threat to the corner flag than Mads Hermansen’s net.
All aboard the Marescalator
The players deserve credit for this start to the season. They are the ones, ultimately, who are delivering on the pitch. But so much of this is about the manager. It’s one thing to have a plan, it’s another to be able to coach the team so well that literally whoever plays is able to execute it, even when they would be some of the last people you’d expect to be able to.
One of the most frustrating things about the Brendan Rodgers regime was the way he seemed to be constantly focused on what players couldn’t do. Then, to compound things, he would destroy his whole vision in order to use those as an excuse for why things weren’t working. So the lack of wingers meant that Kelechi Iheanacho could never play up front, so he would play with no wingers and without the biggest goal threat, rather than trying out a younger player or attempting any kind of fix. Despite his reputation for positive, attacking football, he was a cripplingly cautious manager.
Vestergaard is the poster-boy for the difference between the two right now. He has very obvious weaknesses, ones that we’ve all pointed out thousands of times. He was almost certainly the most hated player in the squad among the fanbase. Rodgers preferred to play Daniel Amartey ahead of him, despite the fact that Amartey was a disastrous passer who essentially ruined any hope of playing out from the back, a fundamental part of Rodgers’ game plan.
Maresca stuck him in a clearly defined role in such a way that masked his lack of pace, comfortable in the knowledge that even if his speed costs us a few goals, his calmness in possession was valuable enough to be worth it. His height, which he seemed to fail to use under Rodgers, is a huge asset in defending the penalty area against set pieces and crosses this time around. Now he might keep the big summer signing, Conor Coady, who everyone assumed was a guaranteed starter, out of the side.
One of the quotes that has stuck with me the most was when Maresca was asked about leaving out Wanya Marcal after his goal against Cardiff:
“the reason why is a technical decision. The young players need to learn. We’ll see next weekend. I don’t care [that it was a difficult decision]. I’m here to make a decision.”
Yes! Exactly! That’s the point of having a manager. Nobody thought Vestergaard or Kasey McAteer should be in the best XI at the start of the season. Yet they have been two of Leicester’s most impressive players so far.
McAteer scored once against Norwich and should’ve had another, because he understands exactly what he’s meant to do in this system. He makes the right runs. When Abdul Fatawu crossed for him to head over at Carrow Road, it was strikingly similar to Iheanacho’s cross for him to head in his first against Rotherham a few weeks ago.
The initial run for his second goal, when he ran in behind and Dewsbury-Hall exchanged passes with Jamie Vardy before squaring to him, was again similar to his run for the goal against Southampton. That time he received the initial pass, this time he doubled back but stayed alert and got into the right position again. These are so clearly moves they work on in training and he just gets it, which is why he keeps playing.
Yes, this is a lower division and yes, there is a bigger margin for error at this level. But Maresca’s first couple of months have been seriously impressive. The same thing we see with McAteer getting in the right attacking positions is true of Dewsbury-Hall as well.
The total number of headers inside the box the Shepshed dynamo attempted prior to this season must be about zero, yet he scored one in pre-season, another against Coventry, and headed a very presentable chance over from a Stephy Mavididi cross against Norwich. His final execution isn’t always perfect, but he is very obviously playing the role he’s asked to in the Maresca system. The idea is taking hold.
The Great Dane
In the end, Hermansen won man of the match, despite only being called upon to make a couple of saves. Chris Sutton was mocked a little on Sky for handing him the award. It’s true his well-publicised save from Duffy’s header was a bit overrated, part of a wider footballing trope where a goalkeeper blocking any shot is treated as if it’s the most extraordinary thing in the world. But Sutton explained it as being for his passing as much as the saves, a decision that was totally justified.
Hermansen’s passing really is very good. Twice in the first half he played incredible long passes, first to Stephy Mavididi who sprung a half chance in behind for Casadei, then one that put McAteer in behind the defence. McAteer’s header over late on initially started from the goalkeeper.
Occasionally he is going to make a mistake. Kenny McLean hit the bar when the passing out from the back went awry, but it’s another thing that is worth the risk. It would have been easy for any new manager to stick with Daniel Iversen. It would have been easy for Hermansen to have a shaky start, give up a silly goal, and for the grumbles to set in. Yet none of that has happened, the decision to go with the Dane and Jakub Stolarcyzk as the two ‘keepers is another that has been completely vindicated.
Big Nige cometh
Having started out with a tub-thumping intro about Leicester being the best team in the league, it is worth ending by saying that Saturday’s visit of Bristol City is a classic let-down spot. On the back of two wins in potentially the two toughest games of the season, both broadcast to an adoring nation, the 3pm home game follow up against a frisky team who’ve started well is a dangerous prospect.
In a sense, this is what winning a title as the dominant favourites is about. You have to keep performing. The pressure is in the expectation and the demand to keep picking up wins, of having to overcome every challenge. We are the big fish, and any dropped points are going to feel like a disappointment.
There are some classic hallmarks of the sort of thing that would normally trip up a Leicester team. There’s the Nigel Pearson factor, where everyone’s having a lovely time until he’s strangling your hopes and dreams with a sadistic smile on the sideline. There’s the return of Matty James, though at least the threat of him scoring his first goal in decades has been eliminated by the fact he’s implausibly bagged a couple already this season.
Then there’s also the slight nagging fear in the back of your head that it can’t all be this easy. That surely we aren’t going to stroll through the season and bag 100 points without breaking sweat. Are we?
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