Southampton 1 Leicester City 0: The return of Brenda Nout
Leicester went into a home game with Arsenal last Saturday on the up, glowing from a couple of big wins and an honourable defeat at Old Trafford. Flash forward seven days and the building is on fire.
No shots on target in the two league games sandwiching an FA Cup defeat to a lower league side at home. A side desperate for consistency finally showed some, by failing to trouble the goalkeeper in consecutive games against the best and worst sides in the league
In many ways, this was no worse than any of the other dismal defeats over the last year and a half. But something felt different. Leicester are normally really, noticeably, in-your-face bad. The kind of bad that hits three or four passes out for a throw and plays the other team in for the winner. There wasn’t much of that.
Instead, there was an air of resignation about it all as we sucked even more life out of the season.
The performance was what we'd want
There are two ways to view this game. If you just look at the match in isolation, Leicester created more than enough chances to win and, once again, were on the wrong end of two big slices of bad luck. First, Carlos Alcaraz avoided a red card for a blatant studs up challenge on Timothy Castagne in the first half. Then Che Adams stayed onside by the width of his fingernail to play Alcaraz in for the goal.
Meanwhile Leicester were comfortably the better team. Kelechi Iheanacho had three golden chances and contrived to miss the target with all three of them. Wout Faes headed a corner sideways with the goal at his mercy. Harry Souttar, confronted by a gaping net in the dying seconds, crashed a header off the top of the bar. Southampton missed a penalty, literally handed to them out of nowhere, and created nothing else.
It's that version of the game that Brendan Rodgers was talking about afterwards when he waxed lyrical about how the performance filled him with confidence. Maybe everyone else would go along with that if this game really did exist in a vacuum. Unfortunately, it doesn’t, and the second analysis is that this was a soul-crushing 90 minutes of ineptitude that has us staring down the barrel of the bottom three.
Despite the chances, this felt completely flat and lifeless for the majority of the game. As the clock ticked towards 95 minutes at St Mary’s, and Danny Ward loped forward on a voyage into the last chance saloon, Sky commentator Pien Meulensteen exclaimed ‘Leicester are trying absolutely everything!’ But they had barely tried anything, let alone everything, over the course of the previous 90 minutes.
The second half performance in particular felt like everyone had already accepted their fate. The Southampton goal barely had to withstand a bit of mild taunting, never mind a siege. It took on the quality of every other game this season where we have been chasing a lead in the second half, where we drift along at the opponent’s pace. The dying stages all follow the same pattern: a raft of changes, a batch of head injuries, an avalanche of throw-ins, and the occasional half-hearted foray into the opposition half.
This time history repeated itself as farce. As the seconds slipped away in a game Faes had proclaimed as a ‘must-win’, he was combining with Souttar and Ward to play neat passing triangles 30 yards inside our own half. Rodgers, stood on the edge of his technical area throughout, clapped encouragingly. If this is finally the end, it was a fitting epitaph.
Yeah, they were all narrow
None of this was helped by the substitutions. Like against Blackburn in the week, Leicester dived head-first into a bad situation and then the changes Rodgers made to try to save the game destroyed any semblance of attacking patterns that might have existed beforehand.
After starting the game well, the Foxes had their, now traditional, five minutes of chaos. You might expect that saving a penalty would boost confidence and settle the team down. Not this Leicester team, with a mentality so fragile that even things going well is a precursor to disaster.
Within a minute, Alcaraz put Southampton in front. Leicester never really regained control. Harvey Barnes departed injured at half time, depriving Rodgers of 50% of the wingers at the club, then he voluntarily withdrew Tete with 20 minutes to go.
Both against Blackburn and Southampton I’ve had the impression that the magnitude of the situation has hit Rodgers and he simply doesn’t know what to do. He has no real experience of a relegation battle. Until now, there’s always been some pot of gold just beyond the rainbow to cling on to, whether that’s new summer signings, the World Cup break, Maddison coming back from injury, or the January transfer window.
Now, there’s nothing left. This is it. And he’s completely lost. He has no vision and no real idea how to turn things around.
On Tuesday night, we finished with Jamie Vardy, Patson Daka, and Iheanacho on the pitch, piling more and more strikers on to no coherent end, an approach that would make a student sat in their pants on Football Manager at two in the morning blush. On Saturday, we finished with right footed players at left back and left wing, a central midfielder on the right wing, and a right back Rodgers is trying to use as a pseudo-defensive midfielder.
Even if the plan by the end was nothing more than praying for some Maddison magic, which would at least have had the benefit of being realistic, the substitutions merely served to move him out of position and further away from where he could impact the game.
The manager has spent much of this season bemoaning the lack of width. How ironic that in desperation his reaction was to remove all of it. Faes and Souttar did, at least, eventually try to move the ball forward, but there was nowhere to go. Faes went on one mazy run through the centre of the pitch, Souttar tried a few long balls. But it was pretty tepid stuff for a team that had spent the week bigging up how important this game was.
Off (target) with their heads
None of this is to excuse the players. I don’t think they don’t care, in a general sense, but they are constantly careless, and the two things often look the same. The players are easy targets and the most obvious conduits for the frustration of the crowd, but a lot of the criticism is perfectly justified.
There’s only so many times you can watch Barnes’ touch let him down. At a certain point, you would expect professional pride to kick in, rather than to keep kicking the ball out of play. It’s hard not to sympathise with Rodgers, bent double in despair, as yet another attempted flick on the halfway line leads directly to a Southampton break away and corner. Ward’s superpower is to make every shot look completely unsavable, the only difference between now and the start of the season is that these days it takes a couple of replays before you notice.
After an early flurry, the non-Kristiansen new signings are losing their shine. Tete exploded onto the scene and has spent a month being pushed off the ball since. Souttar looks like Harry Maguire in the same way the statue at Madeira airport resembled Cristiano Ronaldo.
Yet it is hard to believe that all of these players are incurably rubbish. Many of them have clearly regressed. Barnes is not the same dynamic force he has been in the past. Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall makes too many mistakes to be a Premier League central midfielder but is hardly being helped by suddenly being played on the right side of the pitch, despite his very obvious left-footedness and natural chemistry with Barnes on the left.
You could say the same about Dennis Praet, a central midfielder who plays exclusively on the wing; Boubakary Soumare, who keeps being put in the Ndidi role despite having none of the skills required to do so; or Luke Thomas, a young player clearly lacking confidence who has been hung out to dry.
The strength of anti-Rodgers feeling that has exploded this week after a fairly positive run beforehand might seem surprising, but it’s a reflection of all of those issues and the fact that he has seemingly got no idea how to solve them. If the manager isn’t improving any players and isn’t winning any games, what is he actually doing?
The last days of Brendanball
Then there’s the fact that the bond between fanbase and manager is irreparably broken. Often, he says things in interviews that are entirely correct, whether it’s about the squad needing new players, or how unlucky we are with injuries, or even that we created enough chances to beat Southampton. But everyone’s just fed up, fed up with losing, fed up with what looks like his attempts to pass the buck.
And fans aren’t stupid (mostly). His attempts to take the positives ring hollow because there’s no long-term plan to buy into. We can see the bigger picture after defeats if there is something to look at. Right now, the manager is saying ‘this performance fills me with confidence for that future over there’ while pointing at a blank wall with crumbling plaster and mould springing up in the corners.
All our players are leaving in the summer. What happens here has no bearing on the future, other than on the – titanic - question of whether we are rebuilding in the Championship or the Premier League. It’s not even like we can imagine this squad bouncing back stronger after a year out of the big time. After this season, we basically don’t have a squad. We’re in a short-term, zero-sum situation, while the club is acting as if we have all the time in the world for it to come good.
I still believe, ultimately, that there is enough individual quality in this squad to keep us up. Leicester are neither good nor consistent but we do have sudden outbreaks of quality where we resemble a proper team. Four or five wins is likely to be enough.
The tighter this all gets, though, the worse our chances become. We have no backbone, no ability to grind out performances in big games. Twice against Southampton - Southampton! - we’ve collapsed in a five minute spell at the first sign of pressure. And nothing is going to change. There are 13 games of this loveless marriage left.
