Leicester City’s makeshift midfield needs to be balanced for Bournemouth
The balance of Leicester City’s midfield has been off all season. Somehow, Adam Sadler and Mike Stowell have to get it right when Bournemouth visit today for one of the biggest games in the club’s recent history.
Despite a wealth of different options, it often feels like Leicester need a player or two that don’t exist. Someone a bit like Wilfred Ndidi but who can pass, a bit like Youri Tielemans but who can run, a bit like Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall but who can pass. And with respect to Nampalys Mendy’s own physical drawback, all of our midfielders have come up short this season.
French connections
The club tried to sign more of an all-rounder 18 months ago to cover the loss through transfer or injury of either Ndidi or Tielemans.
They settled on bringing Boubakary Soumare in from Lille, but he’s still to adapt to the pace of the Premier League. He also continues to show the same lack of defensive awareness that was deemed his own shortcoming before he arrived.
We’ve ended up looking on as, for example, moneybags Newcastle have gone to Ligue 1 themselves and come back with Bruno Guimaraes, the kind of all-round midfielder who offers both steel and a passing range.
The most frustrating aspect of all this is that the Ndidi-Tielemans-Maddison axis that powered Leicester to the brink of Champions League football has still been an option for parts of this season.
But, for whatever reason, Wilf isn’t the same player he was. In addition, injuries to all three and the lack of a reliable right-winger have played their part in the constant search for the right balance.
There’s been a lot of focus on individuals elsewhere in the side - Danny Ward, Daniel Amartey, Tete to name just three - but the midfield has been a major problem at the heart of the team that would have covered for deficiencies elsewhere if it had been functioning properly.
We now find ourselves preparing for a monumental game, when anything other than victory is almost unthinkable, with the same conundrum as usual - who actually starts in midfield?
The runners and riders
The ideal mainstay of the midfield in Tielemans is injured and Dewsbury-Hall, one of the first names on the teamsheet for months, is suspended.
Ndidi has shown signs of his old self in recent weeks. But he comes into the game off the back of letting a runner set up a 95th-minute winner in one game followed by passing the ball straight to the scorer of an 88th-minute winner in the next.
Mendy surely has to play as the only player capable of the control we need, despite the usual question marks over whether he has the physicality to cope with a team like Bournemouth.
In search of that physicality, the option of Soumare comes back to the fore but his fleeting appearances have been rage-inducing lately - most notably a disastrous display in the FA Cup exit to Blackburn.
The lesser-spotted Dennis Praet is next on the conveyor belt. Praet can be neat and tidy, and feels a safe choice. As with Dewsbury-Hall though, he’s not really a defensive midfielder and not really an attacking midfielder and you often end up questioning what he does offer. He’s never been one to grab a game by the scruff of its neck.
The outside alternative, in more ways than one, is Ricardo Pereira. We’ve seen glimpses of Ricardo playing as the trademark Tielemans hybrid central midfielder and right-back. Could he step up to play such a difficult role when there’s so much riding on a win?
End to end
Then there’s the effect all this has on both ends of the pitch. The defence needs to have reliable passing options, which, at the moment, doesn’t include Ndidi. Neither does it include Soumare on recent evidence.
Do we write off the midfield to a certain extent and bypass it to go longer, as Wout Faes did when he found Harvey Barnes for a wonderful goal against Aston Villa?
There we find another Leicester shortcoming though - other than firing the ball straight over the top for Patson Daka to run onto, that Faes pass was probably the sole way a long pass could work for this team.
We have no height in attack to win aerial challenges. It’s an attack built to rely on crisp passing from midfield.
Prepare yourself because with Tielemans and Dewsbury-Hall out of action, the likelihood is that we’re going to see something very different. It’ll probably be a huge gamble. It has to pay off. The stakes are scarily high.
