Leicester City 0 Crystal Palace 2: We want Rudkin out
Inconveniently, Leicester City have to start winning some games if they want to stay in the Premier League. After a run of difficult fixtures across the New Year period, along came a “winnable” one.
What do you think happened?
If you believe Ruud van Nistelrooy then Woyo Coulibaly had several options this January. I don’t know what the rest of them could have been for him to have picked Leicester City but he might have been wondering if he’d made a terrible mistake within three hours of being announced as the club’s first signing of 2025.
In that time, his new team had already lost, the director of football who had brought him to England was facing calls to resign and the biggest cheer of the night was for a flag-wielding pitch invader.
Welcome to Leicester.
And this, Woyo, is what a winnable game looks like.
Feeding the GOAT
Leicester had actually started really well, threatening within the first minute when Facundo Buonanotte’s pressing led to a half-chance on Jamie Vardy’s weaker foot. And that fast start continued apace with Bilal El Khannouss linking up well with Stephy Mavididi down the Leicester left and the home side bossing the midfield for the first twenty minutes.
The crowd was up and Palace were offering nothing. There was only one team in it. We watched and we waited and we tried to put it to the back of our minds that we know how this one turns out.
The chances stacked up for Vardy, who first went through but took his shot early and dragged it wide. Then he was sent clear by Mavididi, who was getting into some clever positions drifting in from the left flank. This time the through ball resulted in a marginal offside decision which would have gone to VAR had Vardy finished.
Instead, he shot straight at Henderson. Is the pressure even getting to the GOAT? There were several opportunities Vardy snatched at in this game, which is unlike him and would have led to more criticism had they been missed by Patson Daka.
Palace were doing nothing going forward so we decided to do it for them. To inject some trademark unnecessary danger for ourselves, Jakub Stolarczyk spotted Victor Kristiansen as the spare man while we laboured playing out from the back and lofted a ball over to him.
In a predictable turn of events, Daniel Munoz pressed, the hurried clearance from Kristiansen rebounded off Munoz into the path of Jean-Philippe Mateta and Palace had a clear shot at goal out of nothing. It was less predictable that Mateta blazed the ball wastefully over the bar.
There was still time for yet another Vardy miss, again on his left foot, before half time.
The Spanish Inquisition
Presumably, van Nistelrooy would have told his men at half time that more of the same would see them come out victorious. There were times when the team purred during the first 45 and the final ball and finishing were letting down a fine midfield display.
Which is all well and good and actually anyone who, like me, sat there at half time and predicted Palace would come out with renewed vigour, take our brave boys by surprise and score within five minutes of the restart would have been wrong.
It was six minutes.
Leicester have kept just one clean sheet so far this season. That was against Bournemouth, who missed not just a catalogue but an entire Argos worth of chances (19 shots with a combined xG of 2.16, data nerds). In every other game there has been at least one moment when something went horribly wrong and the opposition scored.
The problem is not, as some fans would have you believe, James Justin. The whole team is the problem. You can probably give Vardy a pass (although that was a waste of time last night). The rest of them: all seemingly seconds away from a collective brain ejector seat at any one point in every single match.
This time, Harry Winks went wandering off to the wing while Boubakary Soumare trotted around thirty yards away and the pair of them left Ismaila Sarr the freedom of the city to run through the middle and slip Mateta in behind Jannik Vestergaard. Mateta rounded Stolarczyk with ease to score.
Perhaps it was simply a brilliant piece of play from both Sarr and Mateta and it would take a truly pessimistic Leicester fan who has seen the exact same player score the exact same goal last time we were in the Premier League to complain about the defending.
Neither Winks nor Soumare seem particularly switched on defensively at this level. Vestergaard, meanwhile, could have stepped up to play Mateta offside, could have made sure he cut out the pass, could have got physical to make things difficult for Mateta. Did none of these things. 0-1.
Every established team in this league has an identity. Everton have, at some point in the recent past, pledged to try to win every game 1-0. Wolves are an endlessly rotating number of Portuguese people. Crystal Palace are physical.
Leicester are not physical. Nonetheless, van Nistelrooy’s side won that battle in the first half. But after the break, they were second to every ball and the ease with which Mateta shrugged off 6 foot 6 Vestergaard to open the scoring summed up how nice it must be to play against this Leicester side.
You don’t even have to be very good. You know you’ll score at some point. Really, it’s quite an achievement to only have one clean sheet at this stage of a season. You would think you’d have at least two by accident, purely from running up against a couple of teams having a bad day at the office. Our opponents could all be furloughed and they’d still score past us.
Plan B
Of course, it wasn’t over at 0-1. With nothing of any substance on the bench in terms of match-changing quality, van Nistelrooy rolled the dice and threw on Daka, McAteer and Oliver Skipp in place of Buonanotte, El Khannouss and Winks. This smacked of trying something different for the sake of it rather than some grand tactical plan B but it did result in a brief surge of chances.
Soumare hit the bar after good work from McAteer. That summed up the “fine margins”, to borrow a Nigel Pearson phrase, that have gone against Leicester recently. Daka shot wide at the near post when played through in the right channel.
For those of you marking your relegation team bingo cards, enter from the Kop the flag-wielding pitch invader who scampered nearly the full length of the pitch towards the Palace end in a non-threatening manner. He then turned round and evaded multiple stewards who slipped and crashed into each other like police cars in an American crime caper from the 1970s.
There was just time for Palace to kill off any remaining hope of a result with a creditable Marc Guehi finish from an Eberechi Eze free kick. In response, Palace withdrew their stars to rest up for the weekend and Leicester brought on a 33-year-old signed from Palace for £7.5million and that summed up where this club finds itself.
A bunch of players who aren’t quite good enough, still a small gap to safety at this stage but with fans starting to question exactly which games we’re going to threaten to win when we keep losing must-wins at home by more than one goal.
The team does look better than it did under Steve Cooper, with the paradox that we got a few results under Cooper without playing well. It was the same story in Van Nistelrooy’s first two games in charge but since then, it’s six straight league defeats for the fearless Foxes.
With the stands rapidly emptying, there were loud chants from the Kop for Jon Rudkin to be held accountable for the slide from elite challengers to yo-yo club. There can be a debate about who to target for protest, when and how but this was pitch perfect in that the team had been backed for the vast majority of the game and you have to vocalise your desire for change at some point.
And the crucial point is really that the team actually didn’t lose any backing throughout another frustrating home game. There was a short boo at the final whistle but this felt more like a release than anything more venomous. Because there’s a constant hum of discontent under the surface.
In a parallel universe, Jamie Vardy takes one or two of his chances and Leicester win this game. Out of the bottom three. Another home game to come. Things start to look different. But there would still be an underlying infuriation that we’re in this position, scrapping for points against mediocre teams, from where we were just a few years ago.
With nobody held accountable, you’re asking fans to accept this kind of mediocrity and keep coughing up to watch Victor Kristiansen telling you to calm down when you’re not happy about how long it’s taking for them to play out from the back or Jordan Ayew spending thirty seconds composing a corner when the team is 2-0 down. These are our heroes now and it’s going to take some time to readjust.
“There’s the job, enjoy”
Our newest potential saviour is Woyo Coulibaly. And last night he would have seen in the flesh what it will be like having to play the right back role in this team. The centre-backs are no good, the right winger can’t get back to support quickly enough and there are no truly defensively minded midfielders.
Meanwhile, when the team is in possession, the entire plan seems to involve getting the ball to you to create something and when you do, there’s one player in the box to attack your cross. And he’s 38.
If the cross is cleared and the opponent attacks down your side, you’ll be blamed. If the opponent attacks down the other side and the goal is scored from your side, you’ll be blamed. There’s been a fixation on James Justin this season but this is a collective failing in the balance of the team.
Ultimately, what looked obvious when van Nistelrooy was appointed is now transpiring. To be competitive this season, Leicester needed to ace the transfer market. That only two new signings started this game tells you all you need to know about how that went and why the continual lack of joined-up thinking and intelligent planning means supporters are desperate to see some competence at executive level.
After the game, Ruud van Nistelrooy said this was how this team has to play. It was all he could do not to chuckle and say you should see us if we actually tried to keep a clean sheet. Months into his tenure, it still looks like an impossible job.
And so the week rolls on towards another must-win game. The question is more whether Leicester have any can-win games.
