Mads and the madness of last season: did Leicester City get it right all along?
The BSLB Podcast’s Professional Angry Man, Jack Holmes, is still stewing on last season. But in light of recent events, do we need to backtrack as a fanbase and cut the club some slack?
I still wonder about what on earth happened last season. I found the whole escapade hugely confusing and infuriating. Why were sides spending so freely, yet Leicester seemed to be operating in a completely different market which left both the fans and the manager totally exasperated?
The question is posed every week on Twitter: how is this Leicester squad in the Championship?
Top dog
I've got a new favourite player and his name’s Mads Hermansen. It was Harry Winks, and then it was Abdul Fatawu, but now it’s Mads and it’s not just his goalkeeping exploits.
His Instagram account is perhaps the most wholesome thing I’ve ever seen for a footballer, not least because it’s not dull ‘Great performance by the lads, onto the next one’ content, but because he takes his dog everywhere. He has the air of 35 year old ‘latte papa’ (look that one up) - which is a very good attribute for a young goalkeeper.
Without question for me he’s the best keeper in this league, despite many of the Championship experts telling us it’s someone else. It’s Mads by a mile, and he could easily be one of the best Premier League goalkeepers in the future.
All of which has led me to question - if we’d had him last year would we have stayed up?
We’ll never know but I honestly think the answer is yes. Statistically we had the worst goalkeeper in the league last year (alongside Southampton’s), and his replacement has just managed to get himself a move to the dizzy heights of Stoke.
So actually I think we can reasonably deduce that a competent goalkeeper between the sticks may have accumulated us anywhere between 5 to 10 points which, funnily enough, would have more than kept us up.
Compare that to our closest relegation rivals in Everton who had England’s first choice keeper in goal and Forest who had a combination of England international Dean Henderson or European Cup winner Keylor Navas in goal. Danish 4th choice keeper and Welsh 2nd choice keeper behind Wayne Hennessey (Forest’s 3rd choice) doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.
Kasper the friendly GOAT
It’s interesting this year reading the panic in Brentford fans’ tweets when they talk about the hopelessness of their own keeper, and their subsequent fear of getting dragged into a relegation battle.
Goalkeepers are hugely important and I think many of us took the enormity of replacing the consistency of Kasper Schmeichel for granted – a whole chapter in Soccernomics by Simon Kuper is dedicated to our title win and concludes that we actually won the title in 2015/16 because Kasper was very good.
So: keepers are important and we’ve got a very good one – not massively insightful but it got me thinking about a wider point and one that I was initially massively against. Reports emerged after Everton were deducted 10 points that the club planned to sue Everton for losses resulting from relegation (this has never been confirmed by the club, I hasten to add), and at the time I thought it was just a deflection tactic.
Earlier this week, reports emerged that Forest are facing an investigation with accusations they overspent last year. Well, this completely rattled me and has made me think entirely differently about the situation - not least because I’m hugely biased and have a serious gripe against anything to do with the city of my birth, which regular listeners of our podcast will be aware of.
Deeply aware of the contradictory nature of my thoughts, I made like Mads: I took the dog for a walk and thought about it some more.
Were we… the goodies?
If the club are planning to sue Everton, maybe they have a point. You would assume selling Kasper was in part down to the large wage he was on and the club taking action because of the new profit and sustainability rules coming in. The club didn’t replace him and maybe that was down to thinking Danny Ward was more competent than he is, but I imagine if they’d had the financial flexibility to replace Kasper, they would have.
The club took a long time to sack Brendan Rodgers, and maybe that was due to the financial cost too. Whatever the reasons, I’m sure finances were a factor and the prudence of the club in a large part probably cost us our Premier League status in the end.
So you can understand the club’s assumed anger when it turns out other clubs were operating in a different market, and as time goes on it looks like more and more of them are going to fall foul of the P&S rules.
It appears Forest fans have cried so much their whole city has flooded about the injustice of the rules, but what about the injustice of a club that played by the rules and ended up getting relegated? I’d actually argue that 10 points aren’t enough when another club’s decisions have resulted in them being relegated - so I can fully understand why they’d be considering court action (if indeed they are).
To finish, a question to which we won’t know the answer for a while. Maybe the club have got it absolutely right and those that questioned them are wrong – it’s clearly not as simple as that, but if we end up being promoted this year with our reputation intact and the squad cleared of expensive players that we needed rid of anyway - did the club make the right call in the long run?
