Ruud’s riddle: Leicester plunge van Nistelrooy into new territory
What is it about Ruud van Nistelrooy that Leicester City’s decision-makers think will help keep the club in the Premier League? It’s a question many in the media have been trying to answer in the past week.
There have been a lot of references to Manchester United’s two wins over Leicester in the space of two weeks during van Nistelrooy’s brief interim reign at Old Trafford.
In The Athletic last week, Rob Tanner said: “The Leicester hierarchy took note of how his United side played in those games.”
Michael Hincks opened his iNews piece by saying: “Evidently, Leicester City liked what they saw, what they succumbed to twice in the space of 12 days not so long ago.”
And Danny Rust and Ben Jacobs published this for Givemesport: “Van Nistelrooy impressed the Leicester hierarchy with his game plan and attacking philosophy when he got the better of them while at the Red Devils' helm.”
Appointing someone as the new manager of your Premier League club because they took temporary charge of a £300million team and beat your relegation candidates twice in two weeks seems like something a child would do.
We’ll leave that hanging there, but we can only hope the twin United wins didn’t play a huge part in the selection process. And neither could it just be about van Nistelrooy getting a tune out of the attacking talent he had at PSV Eindhoven - a level of talent we could currently only dream about. It’s one thing picking players like Cody Gakpo and Bruno Fernandes and another trying to compile a Leicester back four without any calamitous players.
The idea of having to meet specific criteria such as knowledge of the league, a good win percentage and experience of beating Leicester sounds good in theory but is also reminiscent of Brendan Rodgers asking the scouting team for trophy-winning experience and being handed Patson Daka and Boubakary Soumare.
If the new man had to be someone with experience of playing in the Premier League who has recently outsmarted Steve Cooper, then Leicester could have opted for Mat Sadler - the former Birmingham defender who now manages Walsall, second in League Two. It certainly would have satisfied those who believe van Nistelrooy’s appointment is a punch in the face for lower league managers everywhere.
That’s not a serious suggestion, but Leicester have still gambled by choosing someone who’s accustomed to managing and coaching players who are better than their opponents. Regardless of van Nistelrooy’s overall lack of managerial experience, his specific inexperience in leading a team that loses more than it wins is a concern.
Not being used to losing might seem a strange bone to pick when fans want a successful manager. But Saturday’s game at Brentford quickly acted as a wake-up call for any Leicester fan getting carried away with the prospect of a new manager bounce. Van Nistelrooy will seldom have seen any of his teams lose games in the fashion that Leicester did on Saturday. And that performance felt to Leicester fans like par for the course this season.
Brentford was another reminder that whatever van Nistelrooy’s abilities, this may not work out for all parties. The damage might already be done. Proven managers could fail with this squad.
Hopefully, van Nistelrooy can prove himself by keeping us in the Premier League. Watching Ruud watching on at Brentford, flanked by Top and Jon Rudkin on one side and Andrew Neville on the other, he looked like the right man in the wrong situation - a headteacher brought in to sort out a failing school.
An assortment of players being given the runaround by a mid-table team while advertising an online cryptocasino currently firefighting various claims of impropriety was a fitting introduction to the chasm between a well-run club and Leicester City.
Van Nistelrooy does at least look the part, and from stature alone he should gain more respect from the players from the outset than Cooper evidently did. But for anyone of a certain age, the immediate image of van Nistelrooy is not the suave, rollnecked touchline manager but the floppy-haired, baggy-shirted goal machine of the early 2000s - for Leicester fans, the goal machine of 27th September 2003 in particular.
Scoring a hat-trick against us 21 years ago is even less of a reason to appoint him than beating us twice as a manager. Even so, it does sum up the hard-to-define aura that may work in Leicester’s favour.
Perhaps that’s where working for Manchester United and PSV Eindhoven, not to forget playing for Real Madrid, does help. Knowing what it takes to win. Being used to winning. Believing it’s possible. Our fans have lost that belief and so, in all probability, have our players.
Van Nistelrooy’s PSV side may not have been an all-conquering winning machine, losing out on the Eredivisie title to Feyenoord, but they lost just five times in the 2022/23 league season.
It’s where the majority of those losses happened that’s of interest. They included all three away games against the teams that ended the season in the relegation spots. First there was a 3-0 defeat at Cambuur, then a 4-2 reverse at Groningen and lastly a 1-0 loss at Emmen. For those not familiar with the Dutch top flight, it sounds a bit like losing to a cheeseboard.
It also looks like a pattern of not being able to motivate players for what should be some of the easiest games of the season. Each of those three sides only won three home games that year.
PSV, on the other hand, finished with more points won at home than any other team, but were 4th in the equivalent table for points won away, with 11 fewer than title-winners Feyenoord.
The good news for Leicester is that van Nistelrooy starts with two home games and if there are any away games you’d expect us to win this season, we’ve already had them. Even Cooper, himself notorious for a terrible away record, won at Southampton and drew at Ipswich.
Those results were, of course, indebted in large part to opposition red cards. This is another interesting facet of van Nistelrooy’s time at PSV, which included 3 red cards for his players - Ajax had one and Feyenoord none in the same period - while PSV committed 9.6 fouls per match on average - the 12th highest total in the division (Ajax were 17th of 18 with 9.2 and Feyenoord 18th on 8.9).
Controlling the requested aggression of players who are generally inferior to their opponents could be an issue - the frustration shown by Soumare and Wilfred Ndidi in their robust challenges against Chelsea springs to mind.
Mentality will be crucial and the way PSV bounced back from the first two of their defeats to weaker teams is promising - both were followed swiftly by convincing wins in the Europa League.
The second of those was a 2-0 home win over Arsenal, in which PSV had just 30% possession. We’ve heard a lot about how van Nistelrooy called his former Malaga team-mate Enzo Maresca for advice and may look to follow his template, but most of PSV’s best results came when they saw less of the ball. 42% in the Dutch Super Cup final at the start of the season, a 5-3 win over Ajax; 36% in the 3-0 league victory over the same team later in the campaign.
This is a trait Leicester have shared in recent years even after shifting to a more possession-based side under Rodgers and Maresca.
As Jordan Blackwell noted in the Leicester Mercury in April 2022, a week after Leicester had won in Eindhoven: “In an ideal world, Rodgers would like City to dominate possession – as control of the ball means control of the game – and to move it around with purpose. The problem is that when City have done both of those things this season, more often than not, they haven’t won.”
Think also of the 5-0 win against Southampton under Maresca in April, achieved despite - or perhaps because of - only having 34% possession.
This is where the disconnect between the supposed overall vision of Top wanting us to play like Manchester City and the reality of what’s possible at the top level with the players we have has been laid bare. Now we have a summer’s worth of players recruited according to Cooper’s instructions to either integrate or dispose of too.
PSV’s average possession for the 2022/23 season was 55.5%, compared with 66.5% for Ajax and 58.9% for Feyenoord.
As for what they did with it, PSV’s xG of 82.9 was the highest in the 2022/23 Eredivisie by a distance and their final tally of 89 goals was the most scored by one team too.
This season’s Leicester, in contrast, are clearly shot-shy. The basic stats are damning - only 39 shots in the past 6 games against opposition playing the full 90 minutes with 11 men.
But they still don’t really tell the whole story of what it’s like to actually support a team that barely ever gets into shooting positions. Long periods pass in every game where Leicester look like eleven random blokes thrown onto the pitch for the opposition to practise attacking against. There can be full half hours with zero threat in the other direction.
The lack of balance in the side has meant that even when a counter-attacking opportunity is available, there hasn’t been the pace or technical ability to fashion a shot out of it, or even to get anywhere near the goal.
One frustration is that Leicester do have difference-making players at the top end of the pitch, if the rest of the team can get the ball to them often enough. There are potential creators and the credit Ruben Amorim gave yesterday to van Nistelrooy for the development of Amad Diallo gives hope for the likes of Stephy Mavididi, Bilal El Khannouss and perhaps even Will Alves.
We have the goalscorer too. Jamie Vardy’s shot conversion is a fantastic 33.3% but he averages just 1.1 shots per game - 162nd in the Premier League. For comparison, Chris Wood is 80th on 2.0 with 40.9% converted and Liam Delap is 81st also on 2.0 with 28.6% converted.
The contrast was stark between Vardy and Buonanotte’s rare link-up for the opener at Brentford being so swiftly followed by the sight of all five defenders repeatedly rushing back towards their own goal as the Bees cut through them with ease.
If there’s one positive to take from Saturday’s humiliation, it’s that surely van Nistelrooy won’t be as tactically inept as that disastrous caretaker display.
Even so, the entire defence and the central midfield area both look like problems without obvious solutions. Van Nistelrooy’s first challenge is to find as many as eleven men who don’t cause most fans to tear their hair out. Start to pick your own lineup for the next game and you quickly run up against a name that will have fellow fans venting their fury at you.
As much as the media might not like it, the expectations of Leicester fans has to verge on the unrealistic. The alternative is accepting defeat after defeat. We need a strong manager with a firm idea of how to play the game, who can be flexible when things go wrong and who we can trust to make the team more competitive.
It’s a big ask. Meanwhile, our main hope at present is three of the five or so other poor clubs in the division being worse than us. But our fellow newly-promoted teams are showing more signs of life with lively recent attacking displays and a stronger-looking rearguard, even if wins haven’t followed just yet.
Ipswich and Southampton both have the underrated benefit of continuity. Maresca’s exit wasn’t Leicester’s fault, but the identity of his successor is now widely viewed as a mistake, even by the media. And although many of us tried to kid ourselves that Cooper was the pragmatic manager we needed to compete at a higher level, we were wrong.
Failings in other areas of the club, primarily player recruitment, mean the manager has to be brilliant for Leicester to accomplish their goal this season. Cooper was not that.
So does Ruud have what it takes? As a veteran of sitting down and steeling myself to write optimistically, against my better judgment, about why Dean Smith and Steve Cooper were exactly what Leicester City needed, it would be foolish to make any bold statements about why van Nistelrooy is the perfect appointment.
All we can do is give it everything from the stands and hope van Nistelrooy is up to a tough task. Another new era starts here, and we rouse ourselves to respond to Ruud.
