Leeds United 3 Leicester City 1: The late, late horror show
15 minutes of madness at Elland Road saw Leicester hit with a sucker punch, and means the Foxes’ lead at the top has been slashed in half in the space of a week.
Stop us if you’ve seen this one before.
It’s one of the great ironies of this season, which will probably still end with Leicester hoisting the Championship trophy aloft in May, that almost all of the most memorable moments have been brutal punches to the gut.
Two late equalisers against Ipswich, a collapse at Coventry, a damp squib of a home loss to Leeds, and now this, probably the worst defeat of the lot.
When people wonder aloud what the fans expect, and why there’s so much grumbling and muttering about a team that’s top of the league, this is why. Seven games against the rest of the top six so far and only two wins. And four goals conceded in injury time.
When Enzo Maresca made his, admittedly funny, jibe in the week about this being a big game for Leeds and just another game for Leicester, he was right. His team can, in all likelihood, still lose a few more games and win the title.
But it’s worth wondering if he said that in part to try to calm his own team down. Leicester’s record in big games is so bad that perhaps he was trying to play mind games with them as much as with the opponent.
Spoiler alert: it didn’t work.
A brief summary of the nice bits
It is worth starting with the fact that for stretches of the game, Leicester were excellent. Both games against Leeds have felt like Premier League encounters in all but name, and for the an hour in the middle, Leicester were completely dominant.
After a start that resembled the sort of basketball game Enzo Maresca hates, the Foxes had a one goal advantage, courtesy of Wout Faes, and about four almost-equalisers against their name.
That sort of performance isn’t sustainable against the attack Leeds have. Leicester were too open early on, allowing Crysencio Summerville and Wilfred Gnonto to get in behind the defence, and there’s only so many times you can rely on Joel Piroe blazing opportunities to all corners of the ground, or on Jannik Vestergaard’s giant telescopic legs to get there in time.
What was impressive, though, was the way that Leicester calmed things down and regained control after a mad start. For the last third of the first half, they snuffed Leeds out, and in the second half they took them to pieces, right up until the moment they didn’t any more.
By that stage, the game should have been out of sight. Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, Stephy Mavididi, and Patson Daka linked up brilliantly all night, combining again and again to drag Leicester forward and turn the Leeds defence around. Daka was, probably, man of the match, until his horribly miscued shot with the goal at his mercy.
It took Leicester a long time to find the right striker for the system, but it clearly is the Zambian now. His link-up play when dropping back was fantastic, and his little one-touch lay-offs created wave after wave of attack. Mavididi, meanwhile, is very good at knowing when to slow the game down and when to drive at his defender.
He took over the second half, with one shot well saved by Illan Meslier before he too miscued a shot horribly wide when clear through on goal.
It is easy to focus blame on those players for missing those chances, but if you’re going to do that you also have to accept that they were the primary reason Leicester were so good for so much of this game. Their excellence is not negated by a couple of poor shots in front of goal.
It is true though that the second miss, Daka’s, did seem to shift the momentum of the game. By that stage, Leeds had been let off the hook twice by Leicester players and once by a dismal piece of refereeing. There’s only so many lives you can give a team before it comes back to get you.
Hello darkness, my old friend
In a way, the last few minutes live in their own universe, separate from the game that preceded them. And this is the problem with the emotionless way in which Leicester play. In the controlled environment, the Foxes dominate.
In the dying stages, though, when everything’s grubby and emotional and weird, the carefully constructed experiment falls apart.
There’s now a pattern of games in which the team has caved in late on. This defeat mirrored the loss to Coventry last month in the way that the equaliser brought on a complete capitulation. Then it was three goals in 15 minutes, this time it was 3 in 14.
A lot of the time these late goals have come away from home. Ipswich, Coventry, West Brom, Sheffield Wednesday, Leeds. The clock ticks down, and the crowd gets up. It’s emotional, there’s thousands of people screaming at you, urging the other team forward, or snogging their cousins in the stands. And you have to be able to deal with that, regardless of what the Plan was before you started.
When Connor Roberts took advantage of some slapstick defending to drive Leeds level, Harry Winks threw his arms wide in exasperation, as if to say ‘of course’. When Archie Gray’s meek strike took two deflections on its way past Mads Hermansen, there was Winks again, throwing his arms wide in an expression of sullen inevitability.
It’s one thing for the fans to do this. For many of us, as the missed chances mounted up, we knew what would happen in the end. It’s quite another for one of the leaders of the team, a man who hasn’t even experienced that much Leicestering, to react like that already.
For long stretches of the game, Leicester’s senior players were excellent. Winks, Faes, Ricardo, Vestergaard. In the closing stages, they all let themselves down. Vestergaard’s strange non-clearance let Roberts in for the first goal, Faes was far too slow to close down Gray for the second. More than that, though, they all completely lost their heads.
When Leeds equalised, and even when they went ahead, there was still ten minutes to go. Instead of trying to get back into the game, though, Leicester got so emotional, falling into the trap Leeds laid for them, and became so distracted by the referee that they failed to do anything of note.
Ricardo, gently goaded by Dan James, tried to fight him while on a yellow card. Vestergaard, after months of cleverly steering clear of a two game ban, hacked Georginio Rutter down to get himself booked and suspended. Faes charged around like a furious headless chicken, usually in the direction of the ref, and Winks’ body language betrayed him.
A genuinely elite team would have reset after the first or second goal, and understood that a point was still a much better result for Leicester than for Leeds. They could have looked ahead to another joyous week spent watching a rival take a victory lap after slipping further behind in the race. Instead, they got wrapped up in the emotion of the moment and watched the final minutes disappear, before conceding yet another deflected goal to seal it.
Sub par subs
We can’t let Maresca off the hook either, because the manager let himself down as well. This is not the first time Leicester have lost points in big games in part because of bad substitutions. As bad as Mavididi and Daka’s misses were, their all round performance was superb. Along with Dewsbury-Hall, they formed a trio that kept carving Leeds apart.
Yet when it came time to change things, it was those two who came off, and they took Leicester’s attacking threat with them. Like against Ipswich when Maresca replaced Dewsbury-Hall and Wilfred Ndidi with Yunus Akgun and Cesare Casadei, only to watch his team cede any control of the game, we don’t need the benefit of hindsight to say these were poor decisions.
These big games might not matter in terms of whether Leicester get promoted or not. What they might be doing is throwing up potential problems of the future.
The deep-rooted weakness under pressure, conceding late goals, poor squad-building that has offered up a squad the manager doesn’t really trust, a manager whose record making changes is extremely iffy.
Likewise, a style of play that is based around controlling games with possession seems not to work at the times when Leicester most need it. Every time they have a lead late against a good team, they stop controlling the ball.
That middle period, after the wave of emotion in the first few minutes dies down, and before the emotion of the last few minutes kicks in, Leicester are excellent. But that’s not enough if you want to be a successful team. If you’re going to be this dedicated to a single idea, you have to be able to carry it out under difficult circumstances.
We shouldn’t overreact too much to the last week. Leicester should have beaten Middlesborough and they should have beaten Leeds. The rub of the green went against them badly at Elland Road, with the disallowed goal and the fact they, implausibly, conceded yet another goal from a double deflection. But it’s clear that there’s also a mental problem late on in close games like this that they have to overcome.
Southampton are the one remaining game Leicester have to prove they can do so. But this defeat means that they’re going to have to feel the pressure in every other game as well. With 15 minutes to go at Elland Road, the title was done and dusted. A 12 point lead with only 12 games to play would have been insurmountable.
Once again, the Foxes let that chance slip away. And so now the question is which version of Leicester is the real one. Is it the team that, in another world, would have hammered their closest rivals by three or four goals to seal the promotion deal? Or is it the stroppy, weak-minded one that collapses under the first sign of pressure and has slipped up at every big moment?
Stay tuned to find out.
