Leicester City 0 Arsenal 2: Trying to score a goal, is it time for a minor?
Sadly, it is hardly headline news these days when Leicester City lose. This is a football club that badly needs someone to make a bold decision.
It is understandable that much of the focus on Leicester City's struggles this season has been the almost complete inability to keep a clean sheet. With ten minutes remaining of a fairly uneventful game against Strikerless Arsenal, Mikel Arteta brought a random midfielder off the bench and that was enough to fox Leicester.
But the narrative is starting to shift, on the pitch to the attacking threat posed and off the pitch to the woeful mismanagement of this football club.
Because Leicester have now played five home league games without scoring and have built themselves a storyline that this is the result of acceptable performances. As enjoyable as Ruud van Nistelrooy’s fury at the terrible offside decision at Old Trafford was, it masked Leicester’s desperately poor attempts to put together attacks that took advantage of the weakest Manchester United side in living memory.
Top's programme notes referred to a "mixed period" that included "a fine win at Tottenham, a disappointing day at Everton and an FA Cup performance at Manchester United that promised and deserved more".
In fact, other than a five-minute period in north London and one attack at Old Trafford, Leicester offered nothing of note in front of goal across even those three games, not to mention the four previous home games that brought no goals - nor this one, when any kind of threat was sporadic at best.
Leicester don't have the injuries that Arsenal do, so this is actually our current plan and the consequence of our transfer activity over the past few years. You can blame Van Nistelrooy for the former and Jon Rudkin for the latter - whoever's to blame, the impact on supporters is that watching our team has become tedious.
How it played out
Taken in isolation, you could argue this was a heroic defensive performance for 80 minutes, limiting Strikerless Arsenal to very little attacking threat of their own. And Leicester did look impressive in midfield at times. One of the first occasions resulted in a Wilfred Ndidi volley from the edge of the box.
Arsenal were posing few problems at the other end. Ten minutes before the break, Ayew's horrible square pass to Soumare generated an opportunity for Raheem Sterling to run at Wout Faes. Thankfully, Sterling was carrying on where he left off with his performance in the FA Cup at Stamford Bridge last season. His weak shot was deflected behind for a corner, a situation where Arsenal looked most dangerous for much of the afternoon.
The turning point, if we are being generous, came with twenty minutes remaining when - shortly after Arsenal had brought on Mikel Merino - Ayew's low cross was turned behind by Myles Lewis-Skelly with Decordova-Reid waiting for a tap-in. Shortly after, the impressive Ethan Nwaneri hit the post.
Five minutes later, Arsenal led through the substitute Merino. If anyone was to blame, it was the senior centre-back Faes for passing on responsibility for marking Merino. Leicester pushed for an equaliser, leaving the counter attack on for Merino's second.
There were positives if you looked hard enough. Caleb Okoli's return to league action made everyone wonder why Van Nistelrooy has favoured Conor Coady and Jannik Vestergaard for so long. Woyo Coulibaly made a good impression after replacing the injured James Justin minutes before half time. And the midfield looks stronger with Ndidi in it.
There was also plenty of commitment and a determination to put a foot in on Arsenal's players, particularly Jurrien Timber who lived up to his surname by falling to the ground on a regular basis. This Leicester side have been accused of a lack of effort on occasions this season but this couldn't be one of them.
The problem is that the games meekly surrendered to other poor teams have rendered matches like this unnecessarily important. To stay up, you need to be able to write off some games having garnered points in others. That's a luxury Leicester can't afford any more, but neither do victories look forthcoming.
Call for the kids
Numerous times throughout this game, Leicester won the ball well and attempted to drive forward only to have to turn back. They are not functioning like a proper football team. They need to do something bold. Something dynamic. They need to prove they are capable of such a decision in the first place.
On Friday night, Leicester's Under 21 side won 6-3 away at Newcastle thanks largely to a hat-trick from Jake Evans.
Evans is the joint top scorer in Premier League 2 with nine goals in eleven games. He is one of only two players under the age of 18 to score more than five goals in the division this season. The only other player under the age of 18 to score the same number of goals at PL2 level in the past three seasons is Ethan Nwaneri.
Evans is a natural goalscorer and despite his young age, surely it is time to try him at senior level. You could, of course, say the same of Jeremy Monga, the 15-year-old who played in Leicester Under 18s' 5-3 win at West Ham at the same time as Arsenal were winning on Filbert Way.
In an ideal world, Leicester wouldn't have to resort to kids in a relegation battle. The reason players like Evans and Monga should come into contention is because Leicester's transfer business involving senior players has been so pathetic. Because instead of picking a system and buying players to fit it, we lose one winger to injury and suddenly there is no way to score a goal. Because we still haven’t found a successor to Jamie Vardy.
Project Reset
Which brings us back to the Local Hero at 11.30am yesterday morning and the first organised protest against Leicester City Football Club's current leadership.
But first we go back a little bit further to Friday evening and the club's decision to publish Top's programme notes on the official website. Unwittingly, they summed up the reasons for the protest: empty words, written by a comms person and published in the chairman's name, which failed to take any kind of accountability for the decline of the club.
It was too little, too late to prevent the protest, while also too weak to truly bring anybody sitting on the fence across to the King Power way of thinking.
It should be abundantly clear that organising Leicester fans to protest is a thankless task and there has been plenty of criticism of the protests. It's easier to criticise than mobilise.
This was never going to be welcomed or agreed by everyone, nor was it going to result in the removal of any of the club's decision-makers overnight. But the primary objective for day one was achieved: widespread national media coverage including live television discussion of the issues we've been debating among the fanbase for years.
Whether it will go anywhere remains to be seen. Meanwhile, there's only one place Leicester City are going. So what are they going to do about it?
