Change at Leicester is too little, too late but give us something to celebrate
Cole Palmer steps up to take a penalty against Leicester City. He has scored all 12 of his Premier League spot kicks up to this moment.
Palmer strikes the ball low to Mads Hermansen’s left and Hermansen dives full length to keep it out. The scores remain goalless. Hermansen’s team-mates leap all over him in jubilation.
Leicester City are six points from safety with ten games remaining after this visit to Stamford Bridge. In any other season, in any other circumstance, this should feel like a massive moment. A chance for redemption.
For a split second, though, I feel nothing.
Then I conjure some hollow, artificial celebration of Hermansen’s achievement. My thought process is that there has been so little to celebrate recently and so little prospect of celebration in the near future that I should make the most of it.
This is what Leicester City have reduced me to. For someone who has travelled all over this country and several others following this club in the past, it’s a bit of a shock.
I think back to my description of how I experience supporting Leicester, from the FA Cup final:
“I’m completely aware how stupid it is that I get so nervous and obsessive about the fortunes of Leicester City Football Club. Not all fans get nervous and I envy those that don’t.
There’s really little to recommend it. My shoulders tense up hours before games, sometimes days if it’s particularly important. I shiver and shake.”
For so long, I could never have imagined not feeling like that. But it contrasts sharply with my experience of watching last Sunday, even when Hermansen prepared to face Palmer’s penalty kick.
Of course, Leicester go on to lose for the eleventh league game out of twelve. The grim inevitability has become routine. We always concede. We never score. It’s hard to win matches when nothing works.
After the game, there is an outburst of restrained positivity about the supposedly improved performance. This essentially seems to come down to a few tackles from Conor Coady and Luke Thomas. There had been absolutely nothing from an attacking perspective to merit any optimism.
Nobody has ever seen any evidence that Patson Daka and Jamie Vardy can play together and, predictably, they largely stood around up front waiting for a non-existent creator to deliver the ball to them, while Facundo Buonanotte and Stephy Mavididi remained on the bench.
This season feels like a complete outlier in my Leicester-supporting history. Even in the dismal Taylor years, there was genuine emotion and investment. But I was 16 then. I did things like travel up to Newcastle to watch a team that had lost seven league games in a row. When Carl Cort struck in the final minutes to make it eight in a row, I was devastated.
Our current losing run is five. Lose to the two Manchester clubs and Newcastle could make it eight again. But that won’t bring the same devastation. I’ve been resigned to this team’s fate for so long that it’s hard to imagine feeling energised by a Leicester City team again.
Logically, of course, I know the enthusiasm will return. Things have been bad before. The buzz always comes back.
It could even happen this season if Ruud van Nistelrooy continues to tweak his new setup and bring more creative or younger players into the picture.
But really, most of us are already looking to the future.
I’ve been watching every Cardiff City game Will Alves has been involved in since he moved there on loan. Alves is a wonderful player to watch, an unpredictable dribbler who twists and turns and excites the crowd.
He still has to learn how to turn his talent into the kind of thing that wins matches. He’ll be measured on impact and influence rather than how many full-backs he leaves embarrassed on the halfway line. And at the moment, it would be a stretch to say he’s doing anything at Championship level that makes the decision to loan him out a wrong one.
But watching Alves is a reminder that football can be joyful, even when the team as a whole is struggling. The thrill of watching a player full of potential and possibilities is so fundamentally important. Even in what was generally accepted as an improved performance at Chelsea, there was none of that. We were just waiting to see if Chelsea scored the goal that would settle the contest.
Like many others, including some of the players and arguably even the manager and board, I’m just seeing out this season.
On reflection, it actually feels worse that van Nistelrooy changed formation for the Chelsea game. It was so obviously what we needed to at least try for so long.
When nothing changed, we could reassure ourselves that van Nistelrooy, like the club in the January transfer window, had settled for relegation. He was simulating until the end of the season. Stuck on cruise control and snoozing at the wheel. Now it turns out he was willing to try something different after all and we’re alarmed to find out he was actually driving on the motorway at 20mph on purpose.
Moving to three at the back won’t have the same effect as it did in 2015, but I’d settle for a plan of attack, some shots on target and a real attempt to break this season’s hoodoo against such a horrific Manchester United team. That would be something worth celebrating.
