Bobby Decordova-Reid, Jordan Ayew and Leicester City’s existential crisis
I have a WhatsApp group with a couple of my cousins where we sporadically whine to each other about how irritating our football clubs are. One of them is a Cardiff City fan and the other is a Cheltenham Town fan.
When we set up the group several years ago, we had to name it after a player who had played for all three clubs.
The Josh Low Ultras was born.
This summer, Leicester signed a player who had previously played for both Cardiff and Cheltenham. So now when I tap on the WhatsApp icon on my phone and scroll through my list of groups, I see Bobby Decordova-Reid’s name.
Decordova-Reid, primarily known for his spells at Bristol City and Fulham, played just 28 times for Cardiff between 2018 and 2020. He played one solitary minute for Cheltenham on loan from Bristol City back in 2011, sharing the pitch with Josh Low very briefly.
Now Bobby Decordova-Reid, along with Jordan Ayew, has come to represent something bigger than just one or two players. When a lot of fans see Decordova-Reid or Ayew, they see Leicester’s terrible squad-building, the inconsistency of the club’s strategy, the pointlessness of watching this team at present and they also see the club’s uncertain future.
What does seem certain is that this season will be characterised by Decordova-Reid and Ayew in the same way Danny Ward sums up the 2022/23 relegation season.
It’s possibly a little unfair - especially on Decordova-Reid, who cost nothing in transfer fees, was signed as a squad rotation option rather than a first choice player and who seems like a decent person.
He’s also scored a couple of notable goals - the late equaliser against Brighton in early December and the opener in the FA Cup defeat at Manchester United. The latter wouldn’t normally be notable given we lost but Leicester are plummeting out of the spotlight at such a rate of knots that it could be a while before we play at Old Trafford again, never mind score a goal there.
I have a theory that Leicester’s hopes of staying up effectively ended when Abdul Fatawu was ruled out for the season. When Reid and Ayew were signed, there was still a chance they would be late substitutes brought on to help see games out - replacing players like Fatawu, Stephy Mavididi, Facundo Buonanotte and Bilal El Khannouss.
The problem is that you can’t rely on players staying fit and in-form all season. Fatawu got injured. Mavididi has struggled to make the step up in quality. Exacerbating a long-term aversion to signing good wingers, Leicester didn’t bring in more of the same in the summer and the options to actually cause a threat to opposition full-backs began to dwindle.
Steve Cooper’s apparent insistence on Premier League experience has come back to bite Leicester’s decision-makers. There are an awful lot of top flight appearances out of the team even with Decordova-Reid and Ayew in it at the moment - Conor Coady, Jannik Vestergaard, Harry Winks, Odsonne Edouard.
It seems like a lifetime ago now but Decordova-Reid actually started the first two games of the season under Steve Cooper. This was when it was dawning on Leicester fans that Mavididi and Fatawu - two of our strongest performers at Championship level - wouldn’t be spending a lot of time on the pitch together under Cooper.
With Fatawu’s injury and the gradual acclimatisation of El Khannouss to the demands of the Premier League, Buonanotte began to be seen as a right winger rather than playing centrally. But there have been defensive issues with both Mavididi and Buonanotte in wide areas, which has caused a headache for Cooper’s successor Ruud van Nistelrooy.
After the promising performance of El Khannouss and Buonanotte against QPR in the FA Cup, the team news for the following weekend’s trip to Tottenham hit like a sledgehammer. Ayew and Decordova-Reid. Ironically, this was Decordova-Reid’s best display by a distance. He put in a wonderful cross with his weaker left foot for Jamie Vardy to equalise and played the ball to El Khannouss to place home from distance.
Since then, we’ve also seen that predatory strike at Old Trafford. Van Nistelrooy declared himself very happy with the team’s performance in that game. But it seems unlikely that this legend of Premier League goalscoring is looking at this set of players and seeing the kind of attacking menace he would want one of his teams to exude.
Ayew has a couple of goals of his own to remember this season, the late strikes at Ipswich and Southampton that secured points against the other two dismal teams in the league when both were down to ten men. The long-term effect of those goals at the moment is to cause Leicester fans - and Forest fans - to become sidetracked in a debate about whether Cooper was better than van Nistelrooy. Cooper is majorly culpable for the current squad.
To build an effective Premier League squad, especially if you don’t have billions to throw at players, you have to have enough pace, height and strength so that you can be competitive. With Decordova-Reid and Ayew in the wide positions complementing a 38-year-old striker, Leicester don’t have enough pace to get up the pitch from the defensive positions in which they often, understandably, find themselves.
The options within the constraints van Nistelrooy has, so far, chosen to work are limited. Those constraints are essentially the same formation and approach he has employed in every game, with seemingly no appetite for the kind of radical change many fans are desperate to see.
In fact, even the popular El Khannouss has offered little more than Decordova-Reid or Ayew in recent weeks. It would help him to have some pace to play off and around, but it’s hard to see where that’s coming from. El Khannouss retains his popularity because of the hope of something better. There’s so much potential there that we know he will either prosper in the future or be sold for good money. Decordova-Reid and Ayew don’t carry the same potential.
So this is what we have. For those of us who enjoy the thrill of a winger flying past their marker to cross or shoot, who were captivated by Riyad Mahrez and fell instantly for Fatawu, these are barren times. It actually affects how much you enjoy football, regardless of the result.
Van Nistelrooy’s continued selection of Decordova-Reid and Ayew threatens to reach the levels of either stubbornness or insanity previously only plumbed by the Rodgers/Ward axis. But the Leicester hierarchy need to understand there’s something even more deep-rooted at play here. We want this ridiculous situation to put an end to signing old players on big money.
This doesn’t come down to desire in all cases as while some players are picking up huge wages for little contribution, you could argue that Decordova-Reid and Ayew are still putting the effort in. They’re just past it. Having seen the value available in signings like Mads Hermansen, it’s more that we want our team to be built from promise elsewhere, not cast-offs from clubs run better than our own.
