Drop Maddison and bring back Vestergaard: How to solve Leicester’s defensive crisis
How do we fix the Leicester defence? With 16 goals conceded already and Brendan Rodgers trying to plug the gaps with any old bits and bobs he can find lying around the house, it’s become the pressing question that needs solving to save the season.
A team that concedes more than two goals a game has no chance to stay up. When we opened up the problem of how to turn things around in our Big Question last Tuesday, the answers reeked of panic. Try something, try anything.
What most of them had in common was a change in personnel. Some people are calling for Cags, some are talking about Timmy, and others are jawing for Jannik. But I think the issue is far more fundamental than that.
Right now, Leicester seem to be set up to emphasise the weaknesses of the team instead of the strengths. This is manifesting itself in a horrendous defensive record but it’s not purely a defensive problem.
So, how do we solve it?
Obligatory mention of the title win
Let’s start with the radical idea that all our players aren’t terrible. This might seem to fly in the face of all available evidence so far, but it seems more likely that they are being set up to fail than they have all suddenly forgotten how to play football.
One of the biggest lessons from the title win is that you don’t have to have great defenders to have a good defence. Defending is as much organisation, experience, and coaching as it is about talent. Back yonder, the last time we were bottom of the league by miles, we signed Robert Huth on loan and turned into the best team in the country.
Without wanting to drive-by Robert Huth, I don’t think he was necessarily the best defender in the world at that point. But he did know what he was doing, and the defence was organised in a way to cover for the fact our central defenders had the turning circle of an ocean liner. Again, in the nicest possible way.
2022 Leicester do the exact opposite of this. We set up in a way to isolate the lack of pace of our aging centre back and generally just give the opposition as much space and time as possible. The Athletic ran a piece on the defensive woes that highlighted Brighton’s second goal, where James Maddison - nominally the right winger - gave the ball away in a sort of left midfield position, and suddenly Leicester were overrun.
The issue is less that Maddison gave the ball away, than the fact that giving the ball away immediately leads to disaster. The reason it did is the insistence on committing the full backs forward, without any obvious attacking benefit, and playing our defensive midfielder at centre back. In trying to patch up a few holes, we’ve ripped apart the structure of the house and now it’s crumbling down.
Right wing radicals
The most obvious example of the issue is on the right side. While abolishing the right wing would be an extremely progressive move in many walks of life, for a football team to do it is an example of trying to be approximately a thousand times too clever for our own good.
This pass map, from the Manchester United game, pretty much sums it up. I like these pass maps because they show us lots of things at once: how involved a player is, the most common passing patterns, the average positions of the starting XI.
Obviously, you don’t really want your main passing triangle to be the goalkeeper and the centre backs, but the glaring issue is the hole on the right wing. While James Maddison and Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall try to play in the same space.
Similarly, it’s pretty obvious why our right back, in particular, has to push up so high up the pitch. He effectively has to play a wing back role because we don’t have a right winger. But the problem is that the rest of the team isn’t set up to cope with that. There’s no third centre back to move out and cover when he’s caught up the pitch. Hence, Justin is caught way up field for Brighton’s aforementioned second goal. He was similarly far up field for Manchester United’s goal a few days before.
The pass map from Brighton again highlights how discombobulated Leicester have become. Here, by taking out Dewsbury-Hall, the left side connection has disappeared and the front three are more or less disconnected from everybody else.
Addition by subtraction
The problem, then, is not so much ‘the defenders’ as it is the entire structure of the team. This is, on the face of it, bad. But it can be fixed.
The first thing is that Leicester need to drop deeper and keep more men behind the ball. In the first 18 months of the Brodject, we could afford to be more aggressive because we knew our players would win individual duels. The likes of Ndidi, Ricardo, Tielemans, and Justin, whether the result of injuries, motivation, or just a lack of form, are far less dominant than they once were. The system needs to be more cautious.
The second point is that we need to get people into more space more often. We need to give the defensive players options so they can play balls forwards, rather than fall into the sideways routine. Part of the problem now is that there are too many players in the same areas and too few in others. That’s too easy to defend against, so our own defenders end up passing it around endlessly between them. Or everyone gets dragged out of position trying to fill gaps on the pitch that we’ve just left vacant with our team selection.
The third is to play players in their actual positions and play to their strengths. Radical stuff.
We need to start from the beginning: we need to pick a formation or two that fits the players we have. That is going to involve some tough decisions, in a way that playing a million central midfielders does not.
So with that said, there are two ‘balanced’ ways Leicester could play: a 4-3-3 or a 3-5-2.
Ayoze does it
Nobody likes Ayoze Perez. But he has the double bonus of offering a legitimate option on the right wing and acting as a lightning rod for all the fury that is currently being directed elsewhere. He often links up well with overlapping full backs, and would be a devastating threat if we draw Sheffield United in the FA Cup.
The point here is to force other teams to defend the whole pitch, rather than only have to worry about a tiny slither of the left wing. It offers a threat on the right while giving the right back more protection, and keeps the Dewsbury-Hall - Barnes connection on the left that routinely looks dangerous. This is more or less how Leicester played against Southampton, which was probably the most controlled performance of the season (for 50 minutes and it’s a low bar).
Put the band back together
The other option is three at the back, which is probably better suited to dropping deeper so Leicester can use Castagne and Justin as proper threats from wing back. We saw this a bit against Brentford, and even Arsenal, where it was arguably the only threat we carried. The big advantage of it is that it gives the team an outlet where they can go long wide and gives them a striker who can hold up the ball.
In theory, this set up is more solid. The problem with Vestergaard, other than being a six foot six man who is four foot tall when he jumps, is putting him in a defence with a high line. If you play deeper, then you can hide his glacial lack of pace. He’s also a good passer, which Daniel Amartey, who played that role earlier in the season, emphatically is not. Like with Perez, he also gives us a hate figure that could prove useful as a uniting force.
The final point is that this formation puts the Vardy-Iheanacho pair back together. Their record together is excellent and playing them both means Kelechi can do the bits that Vardy isn’t very good at: getting the ball with his back to goal, dropping back to connect midfield to attack, finding space in between the lines. While Vardy is free to keep making runs in behind and mugging off opposition fans.
The absent friend
The rather glaring absentee of both projected teams is Maddison. He is a tough one, as he’s produced goals regularly this year. The thing is, though, that the team has been rubbish this year as well. His goals and assists can be a bit random, rather than as the result of good team play.
Floaty number tens are awkward to fit in. Realistically, the choice has to be two of him, Dewsbury-Hall, and Tielemans. He could play as a genuine midfielder, or he could play on the wing, or he could play up front, but he’s not naturally suited to any of those roles. The first priority has got to be fixing the organisation and balance of the team, then we can think about being more positive.
Ultimately, ‘fixing the defence’ at this point is not about just picking different players. We’ve tried that. Since the start of last season, we have tried almost literally every combination of defensive players it’s possible to try. There needs to be a more fundamental change to save the day.