Southampton away: a defining moment for Brendan Rodgers yet again
When you’re constantly trying to gauge the mood among Leicester City fans, sometimes you feel ahead of the curve and sometimes the bend in the road pops up out of nowhere.
There’s been a bit of both in the past week. Despite the height of the stakes, there was a collective sigh of relief when a trip to Southampton appeared on the horizon.
Following a testing February, it was understandable that a fixture that doesn’t strike as much fear as the prospect of facing Manchester United or Arsenal would be welcomed - however naive that might seem.
Getting it out of the system
Then the calamitous defeat to Blackburn put the brakes on any keen anticipation for Saturday’s game. The ferocity of opinion about the future of Brendan Rodgers and the downturn in the mood about the club has been startling.
Yes, it was a cup game. Yes, it wasn’t our first team.
But the strength of feeling sums up just how bleak it was to sit in the cold and rain and get a sense of deja vu from Daniel Amartey being asked to play out from the back, from Dennis Praet being asked to be a creative force, from Jamie Vardy being asked to turn back time.
Perhaps it was the recent reminder that it’s been four years with Rodgers in charge or the recollection of being ripped apart by a certain Championship team in the same competition last season.
It should be shocking when your team concedes a truly ridiculous goal or finds themselves in defence against attack for five minutes giving up chance after chance like a bunch of amateurs.
It really wasn’t.
Whether you blame the manager or the players or everyone including yourself for making the trip in the first place, it didn’t matter that the game wasn’t part of our fight for survival.
The atmosphere was verging on toxic, perhaps because we’ve seen it so many times before and you could almost hear the thud of thousands of people previously on the fence glumly hopping off to join those who have been Rodgers Out for weeks, months, years.
So talk of looking up the league table rather than down, even fanciful chatter about how far off the European places we were, has gone out of the window. Saturday is massive.
Yes, we’ve mentioned it
It’s fitting that Southampton away is suddenly a defining game for Brendan Rodgers because, while there have been higher highs and lower lows during his time in charge, two previous visits to St Mary’s stand out as defining the Rodgers era as a whole.
Four years - what do you focus on? The good or the bad? You can’t pick one defining moment because we’ve so much of both.
What has come to be known as ‘the 9-0’ saw the height of Brendanball, when we overran teams. We put the City into ferocity, tenacity, velocity. We won eight in a row. We were unstoppable.
Until we stopped.
Then we looked for long periods like we’d never seen a round object before let alone knew whether to kick it, head it or ignore it altogether.
And that streakiness has never really left us. Listening to a few Tottenham Hotspur podcasts after we eviscerated them a few weeks ago, it was striking how inconsistently their fans viewed their team. They fully expect a crushing defeat to follow a famous victory.
There might be the same sort of talk about Leicester occasionally but that doesn’t sum up how we can look wonderful for a few weeks at a time and then get into a period where we make football look so incredibly difficult. On Tuesday night it looked impossible.
Collapses of judgment
The other side of the coin was the 1-1 draw in April 2021. Funnily enough, that game also saw a Southampton red card in the opening ten minutes. It was less amusing when we bought both the players who got sent off in these games.
The BBC’s match report of this game reads: ‘Leicester are still in a fantastic position for a top-four finish but their slump at the end of last season, plus the fact they have trips to Manchester United and Chelsea to come as well as a game against Tottenham on the final day, means Champions League qualification is not yet certain.’
The very next sentence will bring a nod of recognition: ‘For Southampton this was a morale-boosting result coming in a difficult run that had seen them lose 12 of their past 15 games.’
Dropping two points in this game was catastrophic.
It was, of course, wonderful to even be in a position to challenge for a top four spot. But the Rodgers penchant for a late-season collapse will understandably be making fans nervous at present when there isn’t much of a position from which to collapse.
There are some gaps between finishing positions in the Premier League table with consequences far wider than one number.
1st and 2nd - as we learned in 2016.
4th and 5th - as we learned in 2020 and 2021.
17th and 18th - as we hope not to have to worry about in a couple of months.
