We’re not fearless any more: Leicester City’s identity crisis
Fifteen years ago, the answers to the big questions of Leicester City’s summer were Harry Potter, Rodney Trotter and Pamela Anderson.
The questions being posed to Martin Allen at a fans’ Q&A that night? What nicknames had he given Joe Mattock and Richard Stearman, and who would he buy if given £10 million to spend.
The Q&A was called One Team, One Dream - the club’s attempt at a fresh rallying cry to get behind new manager Allen and chairman Milan Mandaric on their quest to leave the Championship behind. Of course, experimenting with multiple managers known primarily for ill-advised banter lasted one season and ended in relegation.
Slogans - we’ve had a few. Keep The Faith. We’re In It Together. They all live or die depending on the success of the team. If the marketing department had come up with One Team, One Dream in the late 1990s, perhaps those would be the last words read by the players before they run out of the tunnel.
Instead, in a fond nod to the O’Neill years, those words are Foxes Never Quit and the word splashed across the side of the stadium in the recent years of league and cup glory has been Fearless.
Both marketing campaigns struck gold, Foxes Never Quit summing up the battling qualities of Martin O’Neill’s squad and Fearless coming to define a team that felt no pressure whether fighting to stay in the Premier League or win it.
When the club wanted something stirring to whip up a frenzy ahead of the Champions League Round of 16 second leg against Sevilla, the words accompanying the fox graphic descending from the roof of the Family Stand were Forever Fearless.
At the opposite end of the ground, the Union FS display summed up Leicester City at our best - our players were dogs of war that night. They played on the edge. They fought for every ball and they were ruthless as well as fearless.
They were, frankly, the opposite of what we saw for most of last season. Formerly the Fearless Foxes, our players too often seemed intimidated or physically and mentally fragile.
Delusions of grandeur?
O’Neill had Elliott, Taggart, Walsh.
Ranieri had Huth, Morgan, Wasilewski.
But Brendan Rodgers has few hard men and the unsolvable set piece issue made a mockery of the term Fearless. Every corner was a cause for concern. So often, a bump in the road caused the car to veer off track.
Call it delusions of grandeur but, from a season that contained glorious victories against Manchester United, Liverpool, Spartak Moscow and PSV Eindhoven, the abiding memories are the collapses against Tottenham, Nottingham Forest, Liverpool and West Ham.
In particular, no matter how much I want to cast my mind back to the ecstasy of Ricardo Pereira slotting the winner at the Philips Stadion, I can’t shake off the feeling in the pit of my stomach when Tottenham’s Steven Bergwijn quickly turned victory into defeat.
Clearly, confidence issues for key players forming the team’s spine didn’t help. Consider the enduring images of Kasper Schmeichel, Caglar Soyuncu and Youri Tielemans last season.
Schmeichel has a winner’s mentality but followed a stellar season with one he spent stuck on a loop, rooted to his line watching an endless series of headers from set pieces fly past him.
Soyuncu, the current nearest equivalent to the likes of Walsh and Huth, buckled under the pressure of becoming the senior available centre-back and ended the season called out by Rodgers for bottling a 50/50 challenge.
Tielemans, the heartbeat of the side, too often dangled a leg to concede a penalty or misplaced a key pass to put the whole team on the back foot.
Injuries didn’t help either. But if you’ve got a real identity, a central strand that runs through the club, you can cope with injuries without being suddenly unable to defend a corner. Identity isn’t about individual players, because you can lose them permanently or temporarily. It’s about a collective.
Philosophy
Most damningly of all, the mentality was in danger of becoming an embarrassment to the club’s supporters.
No manager wants his team to be a soft touch and, upon his appointment at the club, Rodgers was pretty emphatic about his footballing philosophy and what he would demand from his players.
“Hopefully we can bring in a structure to how we play, which firstly means that you’ve got to defend well, so you’ve got to press the game.
“Supporters maybe have seen my teams at Swansea and at Liverpool and at Celtic and will recognise how intensely we try to press the game.
“That’s the base then to use your qualities technically.”
The importance of ‘pressing the game’ has been prevalent throughout Rodgers’ time at the club.
All of which points to an all-action team, equally capable of outworking the best possession-based teams in the country and suffocating the lesser lights. But so much depends on the speed at which Leicester can play. As soon as the tempo is allowed to drop, the pretty passing appears laboured and we look easy to pick off on the counter.
A bit of oomph
The question is: as a style of play, is pressing anything more than a fairly fundamental necessity of the modern game?
The emergence of Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall last season might hold a clue. In Dewsbury-Hall, we have a new hero to help build a sense of identity around - ferocious in his pressing, with undoubted quality on the ball. A local boy. A fellow fan.
Yes, he’s just one individual. But his presence quickly became central to the team’s ability to compete last season. When he wasn’t selected for the FA Cup defeat at the City Ground, Rodgers admitted the mistake.
It’s a generalisation but broadly speaking, Leicester fans have long valued endeavour over flair. It’s part of the reason why James Maddison hasn’t got a song dedicated to him, whereas Daniel Amartey has. It tells a story every time N’Golo Kante received a warm return to the club while Riyad Mahrez gets a mixed reception, even allowing for the latter’s brief period of unauthorised absence.
Dewsbury-Hall’s immediate popularity reflects the importance of workrate as something we should be able to take for granted as supporters. When passes are being picked off or other players offer enough flair that you can do without the endeavour, you need the solid base of hard work Rodgers referenced upon his arrival at the club.
It was suggested last summer that winning was a prerequisite on the CVs of new signings, to help get us over the line in situations like the successive failed top four bids, Patson Daka and Boubakary Soumare arriving after winning the Austrian Bundesliga and French Ligue 1 respectively. Quite where half of the Southampton back four fitted into that directive is unclear.
So as Leicester supporters eagerly awaited the massive rebuild everybody appeared to agree was required, friends who support other clubs began to ask me what sort of players Leicester needed. If I was younger, I might have said an inverted full-back or a generational talent.
But, having been raised on Walsh and co, the only answer I was able to give was players with a bit of oomph. Players who will be competitive from the first whistle to the last and won’t allow a repeat of The Bergwijn Debacle or any other of last season’s humiliations. Players who will help bring back the feeling of Foxes Never Quit or Fearless.
They don’t have to be hoofers. They don’t even have to be hard as nails, as long as they don’t freak out every time we concede a corner.
With a lack of European football, recovery from injuries and plenty of talent in the ranks, perhaps we really don’t need new blood. There is a chance that steely mentality exists in the squad and can be teased out.
Either way, something needs to change.
Let’s get back to being Leicester.