Fliers have always been my favourite players. Whether out wide or up front, it’s been Julian Joachim, Lloyd Dyer, Jamie Vardy, Riyad Mahrez.

Players who get the crowd going, injecting pace into the game and enthusiasm into the stands.

Leicester City have neglected this quality in recent years. It’s not just that we haven’t signed a right winger to replace Mahrez. You’d struggle to find anyone who fits into this category as a permanent signing since Mahrez was signed, never mind since he left.

In that time, our permanent signings of attacking players with genuine pace have been Patson Daka, Rachid Ghezzal, Fousseni Diabate, Ahmed Musa, Demarai Gray and Tom Lawrence. And some of those are possibly a reach.

If you take out Daka and Musa as strikers and Diabate and Lawrence as low-cost punts, the list is even more dismal.

And if you go along with the argument that Brendan Rodgers wants us to play like a low-rent Manchester City, dominating possession and strangling the life out of the opposition, it seems bizarre that we wouldn’t be focused on the same end goal as them - working space, creating overloads and getting the ball wide to move past the opponent.

Whack-a-mole

Obviously, writing about Leicester City’s problems at the moment is like playing whack-a-mole. As soon as you think of one issue, another pops into your head. Then another. Then another.

There’s no quick or easy fix to any of this and signing a winger isn’t going to solve it all overnight. We’re still flailing around for the identity we’ve been clearly lacking for a while. We still lack mental and physical strength. We still need both quality and quantity all over the pitch.

But when you have as many problems as Leicester do, it becomes even more important to have a way of keeping the fans onside.

We are the ones who will help generate an atmosphere, but it’s clear we’ll need something to happen on the pitch first. We haven’t got the just-got-promoted feel of a Forest or Brentford, or the wealth of exciting players of a Brighton or even Leeds.

Fans want players they can identify with or who keep them coming back. With academy graduates coming under real scrutiny and the best players at the club either seeing out their contracts or seeing out their careers, Leicester are running out of both. Malaise is setting in and it’s easier to drift away when there are no players to get excited about.

The only hopeful or exciting thing about this season has been the thought that Maddison or Tielemans might fire one in from 25 yards. That’s not something on which you can base Premier League survival.

The failure to have a single shot after falling behind at Forest on Saturday brought the problem into focus. Once the opposition have Leicester where they want them, there doesn’t seem to be anything that can be done about it.

There have been zero points from losing positions. Leicester have scored two equalisers this season - in a 5-2 defeat and a 6-2 defeat.

You can point to spirit and fight but you can also look specifically at the inability to get past your opponent when they’ve retreated to the edge of their area and passing it between the back four isn’t getting you a goal.

Stat attack

Without looking at the stats, it feels like Leicester don’t have many players who can go past an opponent.

So let’s look at the stats.

Plotting the percentage of successful dribbles in the Premier League so far provides an interesting picture.

Dribble success rate - Premier League 2022/23

Unsurprisingly, Manchester City and Arsenal lead the way.

Crystal Palace are an understandable third with a number of creative, quick players out wide and between the lines.

Southampton are a surprising fourth, but their team is packed full of youngsters.

At the other end of the table, you might not expect to find Newcastle but they try a huge number of dribbles and take-ons (335 to Leicester’s 244). They have 5 players who have attempted more than 40 dribbles (Leicester have one) and all 5 have double figures for successful dribbles (Leicester have 3).

The number of dribbles attempted gives you more of an idea of each team’s approach. Picking out three teams towards the bottom, you can see the differences.

Team	Attempted dribbles	Successful dribbles	Dribble success %
Leicester City	244	85	34.8%
Everton	296	105	35.5%
Nottingham Forest	251	101	40.2%
Southampton	334	143	42.8%

Everton’s success rate is similar to Leicester’s but they attempt far more and have more successes as a result.

Nottingham Forest have attempted a similar number to Leicester but are more successful.

Southampton, meanwhile, attempt a huge number and are successful to boot.

Forest are the most obvious comparison to draw at the moment, having beaten us at the weekend with goals from their flying homegrown winger while our more established equivalent fluffed two chances and is quickly becoming a scapegoat.

Morgan Gibbs-White and Brennan Johnson have both completed 16 dribbles with 47% and 44% success rates respectively.

Harvey Barnes, on the other hand, is perhaps suffering from being Leicester’s only real outlet. He isn’t being helped by Ademola Lookman’s supreme form for Atalanta. The question is whether you take Barnes out of the team when he’s the only available player capable of providing the spark - even if he’s not providing it at the moment.

Whether you place the blame for that situation at his door, with Brendan Rodgers or with the club for not providing competition and other similar options, his numbers don’t stack up with other wingers in the country this season.

The three players at Leicester who have attempted the highest number of dribbles are Barnes, Dewsbury-Hall and Maddison.

Player	Attempted dribbles	Successful dribbles	Dribble success %
Harvey Barnes	48	11	22.9%
Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall	35	15	42.9%
James Maddison	26	7	26.9%

Without both Dewsbury-Hall and Maddison for two key games, the burden of expectation has fallen almost completely on Barnes and Tielemans. Take two of the best midfielders at any Premier League club out of the starting eleven and they’d struggle, but with Leicester there isn’t any depth to start with.

The comments Rodgers made after the more recent of the two defeats without scoring to Newcastle should have set alarm bells ringing for any Leicester fan.

‘Our first proper passes of the game came when Papy Mendy came on,’ he said. ‘He took it and passed it like a midfield player should. Apart from that, we didn’t pass it quickly, they did. They passed it with more quality.’

They also had, particularly with Miguel Almiron and Joelinton, the ability to go past players.

So at Forest, Mendy was back in for his passing and Barnes was again the only outlet. But when you haven’t signed any good wingers for nine years, what do you expect?

When plan A isn’t working and plan B doesn’t exist, you’re going to have problems.

This is just one of many at Leicester City.