Eagle’s down: Crystal Palace 2 Leicester City 1
The return of Premier League football after two weeks off was once something to look forward to. These days, the international break is like a long walk to the gallows. When we finally get there, we’re not even granted the mercy of a quick and painless end.
At Selhurst Park the executioner hacked away for hours, before finally putting us out of our misery as the clock struck midnight and the chance of a pardon loomed large.
You have all seen the stats by now. Crystal Palace, managed by noted attacking football savant Roy Hodgson, outshot Leicester 31-3, the largest shot differential between two teams in the Premier League this season.
It was worse than that. Palace, without a win this year, without a home win since October, without a goal at home in months, and without Wilfred Zaha for the second half, came back from a goal down to win. The winner was scored by Jean-Phillipe Mateta, a man who hadn’t scored since August.
Starting fast
Leicester had two weeks to prepare for this game. A fortnight to develop a tactical plan, scour the opponent for weaknesses, prime our players to come out of the blocks fast.
The result of all that preparation was one of the most embarrassing first half displays you’re ever likely to see from a team at this level. That it remained goalless at the interval allowed Rodgers and his team to play the unfortunate victim in the second half, undone by a bad bounce and a last-minute goal.
The truth is that this could have been 3-0, 4-0, 5-0 at half time and we would have had no complaints. Leicester offered no resistance to a Palace team that swarmed forward with ease.
It has become jarringly familiar to see Leicester on the ropes inside the first minute. In this reprisal, Zaha had the freedom of the penalty area after 60 seconds, only to shoot straight at Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall. The Foxes could have been two or three down after ten minutes. Wout Faes made two last-ditch blocks. Daniel Iversen saved well from Cheick Doucoure and then from Eberechi Eze.
It's one thing to be overrun by Manchester City, or Arsenal, or even Brighton. It’s another thing entirely to watch Jeffrey Schlupp tear you to pieces from central midfield. His link play with Zaha destroyed Timothy Castagne, who defended the Ivorian like he was radioactive. Even when Zaha’s groin blew up in first half stoppage time, he was occupying his own personal exclusion zone on the edge of the Leicester box.
By the time the interval loomed, Faes had gone from celebrating his blocks to reacting with utter fury as he was forced to throw himself in the way of yet another shot. Palace had 20 in the first half, more than any team in a Premier League game for eight years. Leicester delivered a goose egg. On our one foray forward, Victor Kristiansen hit the post by accident. It was that kind of day.
Rodgers explained this first half rampage as he usually does, by pointing to the magic of ‘home advantage’, which turns all of our opponents into world beaters that particular week. Not only does this absolve him of any responsibility to prevent it, it begs the question of whether there’s a unique weather phenomenon over the Holiday Inn that prevents any of that magic ever reaching the King Power.
Brendan Rodgers: Masterclass?
One of the ironies of this game is that for a brief 15-minute spell after half time, you saw a flash of what Rodgers can do as a manager and what Leicester can do as a team. Ricardo replaced Tete, who is starting to resemble Cengiz Under more with every game, and the whole feel of the game switched.
To cope with Leicester’s woeful defensive record before Christmas, Rodgers used Youri Tielemans in a hybrid right back role, where he’d drift into the space behind Castagne and provide an extra body behind the ball. Ricardo played that role in reverse, a right back who moonlighted in the middle. Suddenly, a midfield appeared. The Portuguese occasionally forayed forward, otherwise he was a spare man for the central defenders to find and move the ball up the pitch.
After Maddison tested Vicente Guaita a few minutes into the second half came the one shining moment of the afternoon: Wilfred Ndidi, briefly blessed with the ability to pass, played a raking cross-field ball to Castagne on the right, who cut back for Ricardo to hammer home into the roof of the net.
For all this season’s mistakes, Rodgers does occasionally have these moments. Most fans would have taken Castagne off for Ricardo at half time. Ndidi was lucky to make it past the break as well. He made a clever change and all those players combined for the goal. Every now and again there’s a fleeting apparition of what this team is meant to be.
Then the vision disappears and you’re alone, haunted by the sound of Own Goal ringing in your ears once again.
Everyone has a plan until they give up a free kick 25 yards out
You can get away with being bad and you can get away with being unlucky. You can’t get away with both. The classic relegation trope is a team where every bounce of the ball goes against them. Leicester were unfortunate with the equaliser: a soft free kick that Eze moved to a better position, then bounced off the bar into Daniel Iversen and in.
But like giving up a chance in the first minute, crumbling at the first sign of trouble is this team’s calling card. There were two minutes between our goal and the Palace equaliser. There were three between Southampton’s missed penalty and their winner a few weeks ago. Patson Daka equalised after 40 minutes against Chelsea and we were losing by half time.
We have no ability to settle down and control the game after scoring. By the time you finish celebrating, you look up and we’re giving up a golden chance at the other end. For all Rodgers’ belief in possession football, we can’t do it when it matters. This is a team for plain sailing in perfect weather. As soon as there’s a breath of wind, the boat capsizes.
Leicester never got back into the game after the equaliser. Palace were nowhere near as good either. At least the hosts had an excuse, given Zaha’s injury, while Leicester simply couldn’t do anything. James Maddison had his worst game of the season, Kelechi Iheanacho was greeted by a couple of wild hoofs over his head when he entered the fray, Harvey Barnes was crowded out whenever he tried to go on a run.
There didn’t look like there was going to be a winner, until there was one. Harry Souttar had been creaking for a while. Booked earlier trying to beat Odsonne Eduard to the ball on the halfway line, and he tried to do the same thing again to Mateta on the edge of the area. The Frenchman did him with an, admittedly excellent, turn, and that was that.
Your head must be in the sand
One of the biggest frustrations with the whole Leicester operation this season is how they won’t ever admit any mistakes. Rodgers carries the banner but everyone else follows along. The whole team is like a slippery kid you know is having you on, but who you can never quite pin down in a lie.
There’s always an excuse. We didn’t sign anyone, Ricardo is injured, Evans is injured, Maddison is injured, Tielemans is injured, Kristiansen is injured, we dominated and lost, we battled back well for a point. This time we had a harsh free kick and an unlucky bounce.
Some of this is true, but it ignores the many failures of our own making. The terrible starts, dropping 22 points from winning positions, giving up 30 shots to Roy Hodgson’s Crystal Palace. And there’s no indication that anyone is taking this situation seriously in private.
Over the past few weeks alone we’ve had Maddison taking to Twitter to utter the immortal line that “if we play like this we’ll be absolutely fine” after a 1-0 defeat to the worst team in the league. Jonny Evans echoed him after the loss to Chelsea, adding “the supporters are free to say what they want”, in response to the Rodgers Out chants. Then Dewsbury-Hall got so rattled by a critical tweet that he slid into the person’s DMs.
These are not the actions of people who understand the situation. This is what people do when they feel like they’re being treated unfairly, that everything’s fine, that The Plan is working well. The result is that we live in upside-down land, where every defeat is met with relentless positivity.
That attitude has been all over the club all season. It’s why Rodgers is still here at all. At every step of the way, the leadership could convince themselves that things weren’t as bad as they seemed. A bad culture has a way of seeping through the whole organisation. You can only run away from reality for so long.
Maybe a slump into the relegation zone this late in the season will spur the board to act. Perhaps it’ll take a toxic home defeat this week to finish the job. But it won’t fix the failures that got us to this point, it would just be a last, desperate shot at salvation.
Viewpoint
Via @OwynnPA