Invitation to rant: The C words causing problems for Leicester City
Leicester City have lacked 3 Cs that mean we’ll end up with one (R) next to our name. It’s David Bevan’s turn for a rant.
If the buzzword of the first half of the season was malaise, the buzzword during the second has been complacency. We drifted into a position of peril and have seemed either oblivious or uncaring both on and off the pitch.
While complacency has become commonplace, the lack of 3 important C words have led to another one being hurled at anyone and everyone responsible for this mess.
Commitment
I strongly believe there should be a clause written into footballers' contracts that is activated at some point towards the end of the season, if there's something big to play for like a title, European qualification or avoiding having to listen to Don Goodman commentate on your games.
This clause would basically reduce everything they've ever thought they were as a footballer down to the absolute basics.
So as much as they've enjoyed trotting around all season, playing nice backheels and taking three touches in their own penalty area, regrettably all of this would have to stop.
It would be replaced by the most unquestionable commitment - both to give everything for the shirt, which is the minimum we should expect, and to give up a few principles if it means a greater chance of victory.
It doesn't matter if the team have had success up to that point by Barcelona-ing it around or not. It all stops. Allardycheball.
They would have to work their absolute nuts off and earn the right to a bit of tiki-taka if they’re 2-0 up - that glorious passage of play when 2016 Leicester City showcased their one-touch passing against Liverpool didn’t come when the game was goalless. For one thing, Robert Huth wouldn’t have permitted it.
Trying to play out from the back with Danny Ward and Daniel Amartey was Brendan Rodgers being stubborn. Trying to play Boubakary Soumare and Youri Tielemans in a midfield two is Dean Smith being careless.
That isn’t to label the two as equal - Rodgers put his principles before the club’s interests while Smith has only been here five minutes. But both approaches have been negligent in failing to address how easy we are to play against.
It’s the simplest thing in the world for a football fan to say their players aren’t trying hard enough. I don’t usually have much time for it because I think players, by and large, do try. Pressure gets to them perhaps, they make mistakes, they fail. I get it.
Until, after the latest in a long line of biggest games of the season, one of the players essentially admits those on the pitch in royal blue weren’t trying hard enough.
And not just any of the players - the star player. The sometimes captain, sometimes penalty taker, all-the-time self-appointed-in-the-admitted-absence-of-anyone-else mouthpiece for the squad.
Communication
We’ve already filed James Maddison’s post-Fulham interview alongside his post-Southampton tweet in the vast catalogue of Things That Were Inevitably Always Going To End In Relegation. He’s written something ridiculous. He’s said something ridiculous. He’s got three games left to complete his hat-trick by reassuring us we’re staying up through the medium of interpretative dance.
In Maddison’s defence, if anything he’s just too honest. The issue is more that there’s been a gigantic communication vacuum at all levels of the club for months.
A few weeks into the season I went into the BBC Radio Leicester studio for the Football Forum and said live on air that one problem for Brendan Rodgers was that the fans would never turn against the owners or the players.
That’s merely one of a few things I’ve got wrong this season but at the time, it felt true. The bond created between the owners and the fans felt unbreakable after the high of the title win and the low of the helicopter crash. Only a few months earlier, Top had been greeted like a hero on a pre-match walkabout in Eindhoven.
The players, meanwhile, seemed like a mixture of club legends, local lads and a few likeable others. Even now, who could hate Ricky P and the Seniorman? They sound like an early 90s hip hop duo or WWF tag team.
But no, the man in charge was the one getting all of the heat and, at the time, with absolutely no sign of him being discarded.
Rodgers saw the issue himself, effectively complaining at one press conference that he was the only one at the club who ever spoke. It feels like a similar problem to the one Maddison has faced recently. Nobody else ever says anything, while these two can’t help themselves and always end up saying something that will infuriate the fanbase even more than silence.
The club’s non-existent approach to meaningful fan engagement works an absolute treat when everything’s going well. The moral high ground is occupied. There is no dissent. Everyone is calm. Everything is fine.
But retaining Buster Keaton as your spokesman when things start going wrong has its problems. Everyone starts shouting into the void. You can’t control the message. When you’re not used to even trying to get a grip of things, you end up with Rodgers and Maddison setting everyone on fury mode.
There was a glimmer of hope when Smith and co arrived that the communication would improve. At first, Smith spoke well and there were a couple of nice videos of everyone having a laugh on the training ground. The general reaction was that it was nice to see a few smiles.
But then Smith said he didn’t see a terrible performance coming despite months of forewarning and John Terry set off on a sightseeing 15k round London instead of ensuring the defence shipped fewer than five goals at Fulham.
Already with their communication, it feels like they’ve dropped the ball. Good job the other guy was carrying two to start with.
Concentration
I still have flashbacks to Caglar Soyuncu's mistake at home to Newcastle two years ago. You can point to all kinds of places in time as to where this inexorable decline began but for me it's right there, halfway inside our half at the Kop end of the King Power Stadium when Soyuncu casually let a ball run under his feet and Joe Willock ran through to score.
If we'd won that game, we would have gone on to qualify for the Champions League and everything would be different now.
At the final whistle, after Newcastle had scored three more, Brendan Rodgers said: "Jonny Evans is the brain of our backline and when he came out of the team that was a big blow for us."
I remember thinking: "Maybe we should have more than one player with a brain in our back four."
Fast forward two years and Soyuncu is now the brain, for the three games that remain before he sets off for La Liga.
This isn't just about the back four of course, and I'm not picking on Soyuncu. This is about having tens of millions of pounds to spend on footballers and ending up with the inevitability of Boubakary Soumare losing the ball on halfway and Fulham strolling through the middle of the pitch to score.
It was Soumare that time and Tielemans for another of the goals but could just as easily have been anyone really - Dewsbury-Hall did it at the Etihad. Ndidi against Villa. Maddison against Bournemouth.
The only midfielder I can’t picture needlessly giving the ball away leading to a goal is Nampalys Mendy, and he seems to have been entirely forgotten by the new management team. This is despite being at the heart of the victory before last and, with thanks to the Mercury’s Jordan Blackwell for this remarkable stat, being the only player without a negative goal difference while he’s been on the pitch this season.
If we were going down due to lack of quality that would be easier to stomach. It doesn’t feel like that though. It feels more like a lack of care, or even humility. Once you’re in this situation, and we haven’t really been out of it all season, you’ve got to make teams work to beat you.
Just doing the basics would be a start, because we have good attacking players and all you have to do to give them a platform is to work hard, concentrate and not gift the opposition the opening goal every single week.
Don’t forget we know what a great escape looks like and we know what a fairly limited team making the most of its attributes in such a situation looks like. More specifically, we know how it all has to operate from a solid base. Only from there can you build.
Everton's 5-1 win at Brighton straight after our capitulation by the Thames may have seemed like evidence that we should go on the attack in our own games too but anyone who actually watched Everton on Monday would have seen eleven players - you've guessed it - working their nuts off and getting the basics right. It all came from that. And the commitment and concentration in their display is something we can only dream about.
I often wonder whether I'm asking too much of Leicester City. After all, Fulham have some decent players. And we had no God-given right to qualify for the Champions League in the years we couldn’t get over the line. And we've seen it all and won most of it too in the past decade.
But equally, when do we start to think we should expect more? How low do we have to sink before we're allowed to put a finger in the air and clear our throat and say "erm, excuse me, this isn't good enough"?
The answer lies in the wage bill really. We have the seventh highest in the Premier League after we tried to compete with the elite and came tantalisingly close - but the money is an issue now. Our money deserves the bare minimum at least. And we’re not even getting commitment, communication or concentration in return.
There’s more to it even than all this. More C words. Captains. Contracts. Soon there’ll be another: Championship.
This might not seem like a rant. Maybe I should have written it at some other time, before fury gave way to frustration. But I haven’t actually been angry for much of this gradually unspooling disaster. It’s been more a slow-motion sense of disbelief as our football club has gradually disintegrated in front of our eyes.
But underneath, the anger at what’s happened to this football club does burn away.
It will burn even more when the inevitable happens.
Let it. Burn it all down to the ground.
And start again.
