Chelsea 1 Leicester City 0: Straight back down Leicester City
Goals? Never heard of them, mate.
Leicester’s battle to avoid the drop exists in two parallel dimensions. In one, they remain in touching distance of 17th place. In a relegation fight in which no one picks up any points, where a late flurry could still drag them over the line.
It is a realm in which valiant defeats against the best teams in the country offer building blocks to work from. Where scraping one or two wins could be the difference. Where the manager’s ability to keep the team together despite the travails of the season is admirable.
In the other, it’s all a complete waste of time. Leicester may as well be a thousand points from safety, such is the sheer lack of any hope that they might score a goal, never mind win a game, anytime soon.
In that realm, the one, I am sorry to say, in which I am writing this and you are reading it, everyone is going through the motions. The Foxes are scaling heights of futility that you never thought possible. Their matches resemble the Waymo taxi that locked its passenger in the car and then drove round and round a parking lot.
We are the poor bloke in the taxi, desperately calling the support line as the life ebbs out of us.
Shuffle shuffle
Ruud van Nistelrooy - belatedly - made some significant changes going into this game. After months of trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, we at last had something new to sink our teeth into.
In came a back three, with Conor Coady nestled in between Wout Faes and the returning Luke Thomas. No, that 6’6” mound in the back garden has nothing to do with last week’s canine kerfuffle, honest kids. Stop asking questions.
James Justin and Victor Kristiansen were sent out to play the role of marauding wing backs. The formation change allowed Patson Daka to start up front alongside Jamie Vardy.
These changes kind of worked. Thomas in particular played well, while more protection in defence meant the wing backs could commit to join attacks. Leicester got more bodies forward than they have in recent weeks.
“The players deserved more (…) an excellent performance” was Van Nistelrooy’s verdict after the game. “We were solid, we were a threat as well”.
This vastly improved Leicester City attacking display generated a total of 0.1 xG. By far the worst any team has achieved against Chelsea in the league this season.
The latest blank means the current scoreless run sits at five games. Leicester have notched four times in the previous 13 PL matches and feel lucky to have got that many.
The closest they came to scoring this time around was a cross - generated by Justin surging forward into the final third - that hit Tosin Adarabioyo on the back, looped up and came back off the crossbar.
Beyond that, there was virtually nothing. A couple of long range efforts straight at Robert Sanchez. A Vardy snap-shot from an impossible angle that the goalkeeper palmed wide.
We witnessed 90 minutes of peak Marescaball, with some beautiful long range passing from the goalkeepers and defenders, some brilliantly-executed midfield triangles, and almost literally zero goalmouth action from either side.
It was all summed up by the closing stages. Stamford Bridge was gripped by a nervous tension as six minutes of injury time ticked by. We saw this film a lot last year, against teams vastly inferior to our own. In our story, there was always some lad up front for Sheffield Wednesday primed to pounce on a mortar shell launched into our midst.
Leicester had three chances to stick the knife in. After 92 minutes, Facundo Buonanotte led a breakaway in acres of space with runners either side, took a long time to do nothing and lost the ball.
A minute or so later, the returning Ricardo Pereira assessed his options, 30 yards from the Chelsea goal, and shanked a pitching wedge out to Bobby De Cordova Reid on the right wing that hit the corner flag.
Finally, Ricardo got the ball on the by-line, looked up to see Buonanotte in space on the penalty spot, and cut the ball back behind him.
It’s getting better, man
Performances like this and the defeat to Arsenal are clearly an improvement on the displays that preceded them.
In both cases, the underlying data does bear out the fact that they were far more defensively solid on both occasions. 1.6 xG conceded at home to the Gunners, 1.7 here - most of which came from Cole Palmer’s missed penalty in the first half. Beyond that, Chelsea themselves generated very few chances.
There were moments in both games where you could allow yourself to dream of a goalless draw. A point gained.
Except you can’t, not really. This team is clinically incapable of keeping a clean sheet, so a game plan built around holding a team to a 0-0 draw, or nicking it late, is a waste of everybody’s time.
The plan could have gone up in smoke after 20 minutes, when Mads Hermansen saved Palmer’s penalty - a penalty that was, for what it’s worth, an absolute indictment of the current officiating standards in the league.
For the crime of having someone tread on one of their players’ feet, in the corner of the box where he had absolutely no prospect of scoring, Chelsea were awarded a near guaranteed goal, and this was widely accepted as the correct outcome.
Hermansen’s save was, at least, the most electrifying thing to happen in a Leicester game since Tottenham six weeks ago. And it looked for long stretches that he might get another opportunity to shock us back to life, such was the procession of handball shouts and flops in the area that littered the first hour or so.
In the end, it was not a soft, avoidable penalty that did for Leicester. Instead it was the next most effective tactic: the one where you draw a circle around Faes and Justin and then give it to whichever of your players is nearest it.
So it was that Marc Cucurella received the ball in a not at all threatening area, walked forward a bit, and then eventually banged a shot into the bottom corner as the professional training cones in Leicester’s defence watched him with an air of total disinterest.
Hope springs eternal
Falling just short against big brand names is a comfortable way to go. No one can raise hell for the crime of losing by the odd goal to Chelsea, a side where every member of their reserve front line cost more than £50 million.
It feels like Van Nistelrooy would, on some level, rather lose like this and be able to wax lyrical about the effort on display, than take off the handbrake and risk something worse.
It wasn’t until there were 6 minutes left that Stephy Mavididi made an appearance. By then, Bilal El Khannouss was long gone. As is the usual pattern on these occasions, nothing happened once Leicester were behind.
The game drifted on until it stopped, and the wild outpouring of relief from the Chelsea bench at full time seemed completely at odds with the reality that there was never any hope of an equaliser.
For a team that never scores and always concedes, we spend a lot of time with a lot of defensive players on, and the vaguely interesting attacking players spend very little time on the pitch together.
There was nothing like the high intensity, all out attack mode of chasing a goal that did for Maresca’s Leicester late on on multiple occasions. There are no long throws, no long balls, no driving runs at defenders. Instead it’s a controlled, organised nothingness that generates no results.
It all speaks to a team and a club that seems resigned to its fate. An exercise in relegation by damage limitation, can we drown slowly and quietly, so no-one questions why we never tried to swim.
Next week, Leicester host the worst Manchester United team in living memory, hoping to complete the grand slam of losing all four encounters with them.
We won’t blame you for finding something else to do.
