A full house in Leicester Bingo: Tottenham Hotspur 6 Leicester City 2 (17 September 2022)
One of the features of supporting a non-Sky Six club is that there comes a point where the national media suddenly notices you. We have seen this play out in a good way, like when everyone realised Leicester were really good after the Manchester City game in 2016. On Saturday, we got the opposite, when everyone realised we are absolutely hopeless.
After watching the goals rain down in North London, we were hit with a second deluge of takes from the wider media about Brendan Rodgers and whether his time is up.
It’s a disorientating experience to feel like you have slipped back in time. The national conversation is miles behind what we have all been talking about for weeks, if not months. The time when there was a debate about whether Rodgers should go has passed. I know it’s over; you know it’s over.
What that means is that we get to go into weekends freed from any hope or expectation of actually winning. Instead, we get to spend the time with our own little game of Leicester Bingo. This is particularly of weekends where we come up against Tottenham, the footballing equivalent of waking up on Groundhog Day.
Did we concede from a corner? Did we concede as a direct result of a catastrophic defensive mistake? Did we concede within two minutes of scoring ourselves? Did we concede to someone who had never scored before? Did Harry Kane score? Did Son score? Did Danny Ward make a save? Get those cards ready!
One of the better 6-2 defeats
Were this a normal game, without any context of what had gone before, and perhaps if we all spent less time riling each other up on Twitter, you could see some positive signs here. Leicester were good in the first half. This was the first game against eleven men this season where we created genuine chances from open play. Rodgers and James Maddison both said after the game that the scoreline didn’t reflect how close the game was, and that is true until the closing stages. The xG was more or less even with the game at 4-2.
Despite losing every game, I have never felt that the team isn’t trying. They are obviously bad, with no organisation and no confidence whatsoever, but they haven’t given up. Spurs are the best team Leicester have played so far and we showed much more than we have seen in any other game. Rather than chances coming at random, we created them through actual good play, either as a result of building attacks or winning the ball high up the pitch, against a team that was largely happy to sit in and let us pass around. That has not been the case in any other game.
James Justin’s burst for the penalty was a reminder of what he can be. As was Timothy Castagne’s effort for the second goal. Maddison was excellent, he and Patson Daka had a couple of good chances each to equalise. This felt like a more balanced and coherent team than we have seen for a while.
Wout Faes clearly made a difference with his passing and his general positive vibe. He was aggressive in defending, he played some nice forward passes, it’s nice to have a man with that sort of hair flying about. It was quite reminiscent of Caglar Soyuncu before he went to the Euros and malfunctioned.
The life and times of a centre back
Yet the fact we are in a situation where we can sit here, with a straight face, and say ‘the centre back played well’ about a game in which we conceded six goals speaks volumes. At this point, the poor lad must be bewildered and angry about his introduction to English culture, in which he’s seen his new team concede 11 goals in two matches, had to wait ages for his debut because he couldn’t get a visa and then had to plan his commute to his first game around a snaking queue that stretches for literally miles across the capital city.
He was certainly furious here. One of his most endearing qualities was how he slipped effortlessly into spending the whole game disgusted with his teammates. And he’s not wrong. We have a lot of centre backs and we, collectively, don’t really rate any of them. But they have got no chance. Playing in central defence for this Leicester team is a hopeless task.
Two goals from set pieces, the first an egregious failure of planning and execution that left Castagne marking Harry Kane at the back post and Ward demonstrating all the poise and presence of a cardboard cut-out sliding across the goal line. Two from hopeless individual errors by Wilfred Ndidi and James Justin. Two more from counter attacks where Faes and Jonny Evans were left to fend for themselves as half the stadium bore down on them.
Not only was that particularly awful, it’s also almost exactly what happened at the King Power in January as well, when Jannik Vestergaard was left in a footrace with Steven Bergwijn. Like asking C3PO to chase down Usain Bolt.
It’s only the latest in a long line of repeat errors that make you wonder what the coaching and analysis teams do with their time. We’ve seen West Ham beat Leicester the same way about ten different times, every Spurs game is the same. Last week, we finally hired a set piece coach. Maddison said post-game that the team had really “bought in” to his ideas and that we had worked “so hard” on the training ground to prepare for the game. This week, we could have conceded four goals from set pieces in the first half.
The follow-up question you often get when you talk about sacking Rodgers with fans of other clubs is who you would replace him with. To me, rather than being a ‘gotcha, Brendan is the best you can get!’ situation, it’s fundamentally missing the point. It doesn’t matter right now. It’s like bringing in a builder to do up the kitchen and watching him spend months smashing down every other room in the house. My first priority is not worrying about whether the next one might burn down the conservatory.
The week ahead
One assumes the axe will fall over the international break. Rodgers’ post-match press interviews on Saturday sounded like a man who accepted he would sack himself in this situation. What the atmosphere would be like for a home game with Notts Forest with him still in-situ in a fortnight doesn’t bear thinking about.
Until then, there are two more glorious weeks where we don’t have to watch this team play. A managerial change and a win against Forest would transform the feeling around the club. Which is further reason, as if it were needed, to pull the plug.
During the break in the men’s season, Leicester Women play twice at home. A tough start against Spurs today and then Villa next weekend. It is possible, just possible, that we might see one of our teams win a game soon.
