Luke Thomas is low on form and confidence - but does he deserve abuse?
During Leicester City’s FA Cup defeat to Blackburn on Tuesday night, as Luke Thomas came across to take a throw-in at the start of the second half, a man halfway up the East Stand stood up and yelled “Get out of my club, Thomas”.
He wasn’t the only one to vent his anger at our Academy graduate left-back.
But what is this supposed to achieve?
What is the end goal here?
Thomas has played poorly for a while now and, at the moment, doesn’t look like a Premier League player. To be blunt, his performance against Blackburn suggested he can’t be trusted to fill in against Championship opposition. So to even be a squad player for Leicester, he’s going to have to knuckle down and work hard to improve.
However, this is a player who once kept Mo Salah tucked firmly in his pocket for an entire game. Thomas has shown promise. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll fulfil it, here or elsewhere, but it does mean he probably knows he’s struggling at the moment. I don’t get any sense of an arrogant player thinking he’s killing it every time he steps onto the pitch. It goes without saying that Victor Kristiansen is the better option and Thomas must be aware of that.
So what are so many of our fans expecting to happen by giving him abuse?
Thomas doesn’t look to have the physicality for the Premier League - the pace, the strength, the height - when you compare him to the even younger Kristiansen or most opposition full-backs. But I never come away from a game thinking he hasn’t given 100%.
I’ve always thought the only legitimate reason for fans to target individual players with any negativity is when they’re not trying hard enough. Abuse isn’t going to magically improve a player’s ability, and whether a player has the physical or technical profile to carry out the job asked of them is the manager’s responsibility.
In short, you can blame Brendan Rodgers for retaining and picking Luke Thomas but you can’t blame Thomas for playing to the level you think he’s capable of. Because our friend at the Blackburn game wasn’t on his own. It was a similar story at Walsall recently; Thomas received abuse simply for existing, groans echoing around the away end when the ball was passed to him before he’d even had the chance to do anything with it.
So you either think he’s capable of better, which means he needs encouragement and confidence, or you don’t, which means we have to make the best of it when he plays.
Let’s remind ourselves of how Luke Thomas, who was born in Syston and joined the club’s academy aged 7, feels when he steps onto the pitch in a Leicester City shirt.
“I used to go to the games when I was younger and watch all of the players and learn from them,” he said in 2021 following the FA Cup final where he played three-quarters of the game.
“The whole of my family are Leicester fans as well, so it’s great now I’m in the first team, they get to come and watch, they support Leicester so they want us to win as well.
“The club for me was more nerve-wracking with me supporting them, I didn’t want to let the team that I supported down. I’m a boyhood Leicester fan.”
Being a Leicester fan is different now to what it was like in the era when Thomas was brought into the Academy. There’s obviously a specific feel around our home support at the moment. We’ve enjoyed success beyond our wildest dreams in the past decade but we’ve been in sharp decline for two years.
The strong support, clearly evident at some of our relegation rivals’ home grounds, is ready to turn at ours. Palpable frustration at our downturn in fortunes is constantly on the verge of boiling over into anger.
Nonetheless, surely it’s in our best interests to give players like Thomas everything we can to succeed. As durable as Kristiansen looks, if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the past few years it’s that Leicester players are never far from a few weeks out injured. If that happened now, we’d be entering a relegation battle with a key position being filled by a young player struggling for form and confidence.
I’m as frustrated as anyone when players make poor decisions. I’m as angry as anyone when the manager doesn’t make obvious decisions.
But ultimately, the most important decision we have to assess as fans at the moment is whether there’s any sense in turning on individual players who look low on confidence when our need for them to succeed is so great.
