The miss
At various points throughout the past weekend, one in which I felt extremely relaxed and I enjoyed enormously, I nevertheless kept getting momentary flashbacks to what happened in the 72nd minute of Leicester City’s game at Elland Road on Friday night.
This is the lot of the obsessive football fan.
On one level, it feels unfair to single out a specific failure of one player. I’ve never done it before, and I have nothing against Patson Daka. Quite the opposite.
On another, I’m Steve Carell screaming no god why no no nooooooo and it feels important to share that. A problem shared is a problem halved - and I’d love to cut the Daka miss replays in my head by half.
My immediate reaction to Stephy Mavididi’s missed chance ten minutes previously was to thump the ground in frustration. Just stick it away and make things easier. But my reaction to Daka’s was simply to stare into the distance, something Daka himself later replicated from the bench as if still haunted by what he’d done.
Stared because in that moment, I knew what was coming next. You knew what was coming next. We all knew. Perhaps, although it’s not the done thing, Ricardo and Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall knew too, both incredulous to see the ball skewing wide of the post.
It crystallised the question of what’s the point of all the pretty football if you don’t put the ball in the back of the net at the end of it? If The Idea, on the evidence of recent games against Ipswich, Coventry and Leeds, might as well be to do virtually nothing for 80 minutes and then start taking potshots from 25 yards while aiming for various body parts of opposition defenders? That seems to be how you win a big game, not by repeatedly carving the other team open and laying chances on a plate for your attackers.
It was the worst fear encapsulated: that it doesn’t matter how well Leicester play, that they’re somehow doomed to fail in a big game, a big atmosphere, a big moment.
Because this really was a sliding doors moment of getting on the train and virtually guaranteeing promotion or seeing the door slam shut and making things awkward for ourselves again.
Nonetheless, there are two reasons it feels like scapegoating Daka. Firstly, because you could just as easily say the sliding doors moment was his wrongly disallowed goal. Secondly, because, as many people have pointed out, he played extremely well, assisted our goal and generally played the role to almost perfection.
But the moment keeps replaying. The nagging feeling that if you’ve got a £23million international striker keeping three other good attackers out of the team, he should tuck away the chance that makes the difference.
It’s remarkable that this moment would come so early in the season, but Leicester haven’t been top dog in a big four for a long time. In the context of a season, we now have to find out whether this is the Vardy sending-off against West Ham or the Maddison penalty against Everton. It’s either costly or it’s not. In this case, Daka and his team-mates have plenty of time to ensure it’s the latter.
There are other moments that spring to mind from recent seasons - Timothy Castagne’s chance at Southampton, Ayoze Perez blazing over at Stamford Bridge, Castagne again at St James’s Park. These were more like opportunities not taken than scarcely forgivable misses though.
It’s always worth bearing in mind that Daka is trying to follow in the footsteps of the most extraordinary footballer this club has ever known. Not only that, but he’s trying to do that while those footprints are resolutely refusing to fade away. He’s walking alongside greatness and every time he fails to live up to those standards, it’s abundantly clear.
Jamie Vardy missed a comparable sitter against Middlesbrough, but quickly summed up why he gets more slack for things like that by burying the next chance that came along. Daka had already put a presentable headed chance off target in the first half and these missed chances are racking up now.
It doesn’t help that there are no natural goalscorers anywhere else in the team. The Mavididi chance goes in and everything’s fine, but of course it didn’t because he, like Fatawu on the other side, is not a reliable finisher either.
In some ways, they’re victims of their own excellence in other areas of the game. Another recent Daka miss, the shank wide against Swansea, was the result of his pace. Most players wouldn’t have got there to miss it. His pace is the reason he’s in the right place at the right time so often, and perhaps he got to the chance at Leeds a fraction too quickly, or the ball was marginally underhit, or the furiously retreating Leeds players had an effect.
But then your mind goes back to Moscow, as it so often does with Daka, and you wonder how someone who can score four times away in Europe can somehow garner a reputation, among some supporters, as a terrible finisher.
In fact, his goal record is still good, despite the fact lots of fans would be happy never to see him in a blue shirt again. That simply sums up the Leicester paradox at the moment: as James said on Saturday, we’re having a season to remember but what sticks in the memory are all the bad bits.
It’s up to Leicester City now whether this one fades away or looms ever larger in the weeks to come.
