Leicester City’s lack of control: Irrelevant or a little concerning?
Enzo Maresca’s plan all season has been for Leicester City to exert control over their opponents. So does it matter that chaos took over on Saturday, or has the need for performances gone out the window?
Leicester City only gave us about 30 hours to bask in the glow of Saturday’s victory over West Bromwich Albion before unleashing the latest off-field issue to fracture the fanbase.
We’ll have more on that shortly, because at the time of writing there are just 36 hours before Leicester take to the field again. So little time to reflect on a nerve-shredding but incredibly crucial win.
Those nerves were already being flung into the shredder just two minutes into the game when Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall played one of the most inexplicable passes of the season, straight to an opponent’s striped shirt inside our own penalty area.
Thankfully, Okay Yokuslu’s finishing was anything but okay and he sliced the ball over the bar. Within moments, a fine attacking move presented Wilfred Ndidi with an opportunity to play in Abdul Fatawu but he didn’t put enough on his pass and the chance was gone.
To be charitable, these two poor examples of execution exposed the players’ own nerves mere minutes into the biggest game of the season so far. There may also be an element of tiredness creeping in as a 46-game season finally nears its end.
To be brutal, these two examples possibly exposed the fact Leicester are playing possession-heavy football with a pair of athletes in the two box-to-box midfield roles rather than a pair of technicians.
Earlier in the season, Leicester were imperious at home. We were swatting teams aside without a care. This has turned into a grind for the past three home games, desperation at both ends of the pitch for almost the full ninety minutes. And that’s been exacerbated by three successive 1-0 defeats away from home in the same period.
The mantra on Saturday was “just win”. Whatever it takes, just get the three points and move on. The cliche goes that it’s results that matter at this stage of the season, not performances. But Leicester still have to get over the line, and it’s difficult to imagine that underneath the elation of clinging on for victory and the public lauding of Hamza Choudhury, Enzo Maresca wasn’t concerned.
We know Maresca doesn’t like football that looks more like a basketball game. He seemed almost angry at some of the most exciting periods of the season, when we were streaking away to score on the counter-attack before Christmas at The Hawthorns and St Andrew’s.
Choudhury is the ultimate basketball player in a football shirt, constantly rampaging from one of the pitch to the other. All 21 other participants watching on as he snatches the ball, loses it, wins it back, surrenders it. He’s a one-man wrecking ball and a one-man hype machine. He gets the crowd up, appearing from nowhere and flying into tackles.
It’s curious that Maresca is such a fan of Choudhury given he seems the antithesis of the kind of player you need to control a game, but perhaps he’s the Kyle Walker in Maresca’s mini Man City - especially when James Justin, a closer fit for that role, isn’t selected.
Walker is Manchester City’s safety catch, motoring back to cut out danger when the opposition breaks the system. Justin uses his pace to perform that duty from full-back and when he’s not there, Choudhury is a good deputy. Abdul Fatawu shows signs of doing it too, most notably on Saturday when launching into a full-blooded tackle from behind and somehow emerging without even conceding a free kick.
It still seems strange that Choudhury was not selected at Millwall, a midweek game just three days before an even longer away trip. It was the perfect moment to use him. Instead, Maresca is left to manage Ricardo’s minutes after almost burning him out with three games in six days.
Tomorrow evening when Southampton visit, Maresca has one final headache of how to juggle his squad to deal with two fixtures in a short space of time. This time it’ll be the one team in the division that wants to control games arguably even more than we do, so do we bring back Ricardo to exert our superiority or do we make the most of Choudhury’s qualities to help break up the pretty passing?
There could even be a role for both, given Harry Winks is tiring as the season wears on and Wout Faes is potentially not the man you want marking someone like David Brooks, Kamaldeen Sulemana or Ryan Fraser, depending on the Saints’ selection.
The level of nervousness in the crowd will depend partly on the result of tonight’s game between Middlesbrough and Leeds. A home win and Leicester would only need one more victory to regain a place in the Premier League.
It’s been one of the strangest seasons. A cruise and a slog, punctuated by several moments of genuine anguish and, bizarrely, fewer moments of euphoria. People ask for predictions, but this league has shown how pointless they are.
We can never control what happens on the pitch, but this period feels even more chaotic than usual, Southampton showing that just as much as we did on Saturday by surrendering a game in which they were in complete cruise control.
All we can control is what we give to the players and how we respond to the highs and lows of the next 90 minutes and the one after that and the one after that.
Let’s just try not to give the ball away in our own penalty area in the first three minutes. A rallying cry for the Enzo era.
