Unbalanced squad, unused subs: Leicester City’s long-term problem may cost us
There are many reasons for Leicester City’s recent decline in form and momentum - one is a lack of fresh blood waiting to replace those who have played in the creative and attacking roles all season. This problem has been staring the club in the face for years.
While Leeds United and Ipswich Town motor into the final stages of the season with goals flying in from their wide array of attacking midfielders and wingers, Leicester City haven’t got anyone new to turn to. Well, apart from Marc Albrighton.
As nice as Marc Albrighton is, and as brilliant as he’s been for the club for many, many years, and as much as it’s been nice seeing him roll back the years in the FA Cup this season, he’s never, even in his pomp, provided the kind of pace or goal return Leicester City are desperately missing from a first-change attacking player at the moment.
The alarm bells started ringing when the season began and we had Wanya Marcal and Kasey McAteer getting regular minutes - young players with a certain amount of potential but never likely to run up the numbers we needed, even if Wanya scored a great goal against Cardiff and McAteer went on a brief scoring spree.
We got by, because the defence was impregnable, but Leicester City still hadn’t solved the problem that’s plagued us for years, costing us time and time again at the business end of the season as seemingly inevitable achievements continuously fade away.
That problem is hard to distil into one or two words. It’s something to do with pace. It’s something to do with creativity. It’s something to do with goalscoring. It’s something to do with wingers.
The best way to summarise it is to look at what Leeds and Ipswich have available in the positions behind the striker and then look at what we have. The goals for them at the moment are coming from Gnonto, Summerville, James, Rutter, Broadhead, Burns, Hutchinson, Sarmiento.
Where Leeds have relied on their defence to only need those players to score once or twice to win a game, Ipswich have scored at least three goals in five of their last eight games. You have to go back eight games to find the last time we managed it.
Watch those teams and there’s a liveliness to them, which is brought about by these numerous attacking options, and the subsequent ability to shake things up in the final ten minutes. We give the ball to Fatawu and hope something happens. If we haven’t inexplicably subbed him when we need a spark.
Relying on a strong defence is fine until you start leaking goals, or you lose one or two of the players that hold the entire system together, as we have with Ricardo Pereira and Wilfred Ndidi. Leicester don’t have a wealth of creative, attacking options to burst into life to cover for deficiencies elsewhere in the side.
And the crazy thing is how important wingers are to this system. The whole thing is predicated on getting the ball to the wingers.
But this isn’t a new problem. This isn’t a problem created in last summer’s transfer window. This has been brewing for years.
This is where the chickens have come home to roost. In this age of FFP and PSR, where clubs can’t shift players and you end up stuck with a glassy-eyed Dennis Praet flicking through his Turin snaps for the duration of his contract, it seems that every single decision you make about your squad needs to be coherent in some way.
We didn’t sign a winger in January because of financial issues. We have financial issues because we can’t shift our existing players. We can’t shift our existing players because they were signed on huge wages and decisions taken three or four years ago are still weighing us down to this day. The biggest weight of all will be measured in points.
Remember those years when the biggest problem we had was no right winger to complete the perfect team (with Albrighton overlooked then as well as now). When we’d sign a different one on loan to paper over the cracks but it was okay really because we had borderline world class players elsewhere in the side?
The defence was the issue last season but if we’d been able to sign Ademola Lookman permanently, would we have gone down? It seems doubtful.
In truth, even the potential Lookman signing wasn’t nearly enough compared to what we should have been doing. We had Harvey Barnes and James Maddison where we should have had four or five players.
Leicester should have been signing low-risk punts in this area for years (if this sounds familiar, yes, we’ve featured this particular rant before). Even if they don’t pay off at Premier League level, you play them in the Championship - as Leeds did when they signed Crysencio Summerville from Feyenoord in 2020, six weeks shy of his 19th birthday.
Instead, at the close of the most recent summer transfer window we signed Tom Cannon. A fine player and prospect, but we’ve ended up with four strikers. Could we have spent that £7million or so on a winger to challenge Mavididi and Fatawu?
Hardly anything in football is more exasperating than players earning tens of thousands of pounds for doing nothing. Jannik Vestergaard was the prime example under Brendan Rodgers, until it was Caglar Soyuncu.
This season, the striker situation has been ridiculous and the centre-back situation has been ridiculous, with seasoned internationals like Harry Souttar and Kelechi Iheanacho not making second-tier squads.
The goalkeeper situation, until January anyway, was the most ridiculous of all and arguably remains so while Danny Ward’s contribution for his tens of thousands of pounds consists of taking the odd shot at Mads Hermansen and Jakub Stolarczyk before games and showing Jamie Vardy funny videos on his phone.
Of course, in terms of how it’s affected the outcome of the season, the goalkeeper situation has actually been fine. We’ve wasted a few quid in the process but haven’t suffered a jot on the field. That isn’t the case elsewhere.
The centre-back situation was also fine until the guy controlling Wout Faes got a new Xbox for Christmas and handed his old controller to a passing pigeon. The calls for Conor Coady grow louder by the day.
The current talking point, after Chelsea’s speed-laden attack unsurprisingly dismantled our glacial centre-back pairing, is pace at the back. Again, it’s baffling that this should continue to be an issue years after we first adopted a high line. We haven’t been a low block or counter attacking team for any length of time since the days of Ranieri and Shakespeare.
How has there been such a disconnect between our tactical approach and our recruitment for so long?
Somehow, the striker situation probably trumps the goalkeepers and centre-backs - the idea that we can have four players most Championship teams would kill for but only play one at once. This is a by-product of the rigidity with which Enzo Maresca sticks to The Idea. It’s great until it stops working, and then anyone can start picking it apart.
A lot of this comes down to those recent home defeats to Middlesbrough and QPR: similar in the way we went 2-0 down in both and could only score one in reply, different in the sense we created opportunities in the former but didn’t in the latter.
These are the margins when you’re being chased down and overtaken by a team that’s won 12 and drawn one of its 13 league games this calendar year.
In the meantime, the pressure builds to get back to winning every week ourselves.
One current criticism of Maresca is that he doesn’t make enough substitutions, that Wanya and Albrighton are good options and should be handed more opportunities.
In fact, he’s probably continually spooked by the truly awful substitutions he has made. The two that stick out most are Mavididi being withdrawn at Leeds and Fatawu coming off at Stamford Bridge. You’ll have your own favourites.
On Sunday, it was Yunus who made his way into the fray - a talented player, but one who fails the QST test (Is he quick? No. Is he strong? No. Is he tall? Well…)
Leicester swapped an outlet for a ghost at the exact time the momentum was with us, ceded all forward thrust and within minutes, Callum Doyle’s red card turned the game into a training exercise.
Maresca took one look at Yunus on his debut, quite rightly decided he isn’t a winger, then has occasionally played him there anyway even though we all know he doesn’t offer enough - because there isn’t really anyone else.
But there hasn’t been anyone else for years.
