The Maddison and Tielemans era ends with one final chance of salvation
There have been various points during the Leicester City careers of James Maddison and Youri Tielemans when the thought of losing either would have been difficult to contemplate. The thought of losing both in the same summer? We’re getting into the realms of catastrophe.
But over the past few weeks, as a Leicester side in desperate need of steel and leadership has drifted towards relegation, that thinking has certainly shifted for a lot of fans.
Previously considered undroppable, Maddison suffered his own small individual relegation on Monday - consigned to the bench for the trip to his enthusiastic suitors Newcastle United. Meanwhile, Tielemans did start but few Leicester supporters would have grumbled had he not.
What followed was a fittingly strange final away game in blue for the pair. Tielemans was largely bypassed in midfield as the ball sailed over his head from back to front and then passed around when it came back in the other direction. When he did receive the ball, he - as presumably instructed, and like everybody else - hammered it as far up the pitch as he could.
It was a bizarre sight to see such a technician, responsible for so much of the best football we’ve seen from a Leicester City side in recent years, reduced to a role practically anyone could have played.
When Maddison came on at half time, his primary role was as an auxiliary right wing-back in support of Timothy Castagne ten yards behind him at right-back.
The biggest threat Maddison posed during his time on the pitch was not the usual goal creation but the very real danger he would dangle a leg and bring down Allan Saint-Maximin just inside the penalty area. If this was his audition for Newcastle’s newly-qualified Champions League team, we made sure we gave him his lines in the wrong language.
It was a huge contrast with the first period of the Brendan Rodgers era, when Maddison and Tielemans played as twin number eights with peak Wilfred Ndidi behind them. Their link-up was dazzling and they put a succession of opposition midfields to the sword by playing through and between the lines.
This looked like a blueprint for success, but when success finally arrived Maddison was no longer an assured starter. His form had fluctuated massively and Rodgers didn’t select him for the FA Cup final. That must have hurt.
We all know the role Tielemans played that day, the moment that secured his legacy more firmly than any current player with the obvious exceptions of the title-winners.
While we’d enjoyed the greatest sporting story ever told just five years previously, we didn’t get to write the final sentence ourselves. That was left to another Belgian, a few miles south of Wembley. So to have our team produce the moment of glory themselves, even if it was in front of only 6,000 or so of us, meant even more.
It wasn’t just the cup final for Tielemans either. His form in the league during a 2020/21 campaign disrupted by all sorts of unforeseen circumstances resulted in one of the finest individual seasons a Leicester City player has ever had.
Fast-forward 18 months and the roles had reversed somewhat, despite Tielemans still pinging a couple of unfathomably good goals at Molineux and Goodison Park. Maddison had become the undisputed star of the team, providing genuine elite quality to a side looking for answers.
Both were already experiencing a post-World Cup decline in form and effectiveness by the time Leicester eventually sacked Rodgers but, as two players who will forever be synonymous with our previous manager, it remained to be seen how they would react to a different man in charge.
The captaincy situation has undeniably been a farce this season and both Maddison and Tielemans have been a part of that. It’s all been a far cry from the clear and consistent leadership of Wes Morgan and Kasper Schmeichel.
Rodgers always said that Tielemans was his “captain on the pitch” while Maddison was regularly talked up as a growing part of the “leadership group”. In reality, they’ve often both seemed like an England cricket captain struggling to juggle the jobs of being a key player while also providing leadership and direction.
The situation was neatly summed up by the first half of the must-win Everton home game when these two conductors of the team stood with their hands on their hips while the ball failed to even reach them.
So we come to the final game of the season and while, despite our best endeavours, it remains unclear whether this will also mark the end of a top flight era for the club, we know it will be the end of the Maddison and Tielemans era.
We’ll probably look back on their time with us and wonder how we managed to attract such good players. At this moment in time, both seem more assured of success at the highest level in the next few years than Leicester City Football Club does. That’s why this is worth getting over and done with now - so we can move on quickly after Sunday.
Nonetheless, the recent weeks and months have been a reminder, if needed, that the club is bigger than any individual. On Monday, we sacrificed the one player whose mere presence has seemed to assure everyone outside of the club would keep us up by magic.
In the end, the contract situations allied to performances like the one at Fulham have threatened to damage our view of these two wonderfully gifted players.
The most striking recent memories have been Maddison giving the ball away for Bournemouth’s winner, Tielemans giving the ball away for the Wolves opener, Maddison’s saved penalty against Everton, Tielemans looking shattered just minutes into being dominated by Liverpool’s midfield for 90 minutes.
Of course, in the short term the stakes have been so high it’s been impossible to care what anyone’s legacy will be. We’ve just needed to do whatever we can to stay afloat.
Sadly, it feels like we clung on far too long to this ideal of playing attacking possession football when we should have been doing whatever we could to tighten up at the back. We kept picking Maddison, Tielemans and Harvey Barnes despite their defensive deficiencies and just hoped we would score more than we conceded. It’s what we wanted so desperately to work. The table shows how well it actually has.
It should never have got to this. Yet somehow, Maddison and Tielemans have one final chance, with a bit of help from AFC Bournemouth, to close their own chapters without a full stop for Leicester City’s Premier League status.
