Tottenham Hotspur 1 Leicester City 2: The accidental triumph
A tumultuous week in LE2 ended exactly as everyone expected: with a come-from-behind win away from home, inspired in no small part by your favourite freebie winger.
Over the course of last season, there were only a couple of games that felt like a meeting of equals. While Leicester may have contrived to lose a surprisingly large number of times in the Championship, it always felt like they were tripping themselves up, or being dragged down by an opponent who was vastly inferior.
This campaign, the opposite has been true. Leicester are completely outmatched by almost every opponent. What points we have gained have been a bit weird; the mad comeback at St. Mary’s, two goals in the last five minutes against Brighton, the xG apocalypse at home to West Ham.
In the Championship season, it was the two games with Leeds that felt like encounters out of another place, Premier League games in all but name, two legitimate sides facing off against each other.
On Sunday we finally got served up the top level equivalent: a clown show that deserved to have pride of place in the Football League midweek hall of fame, accessible only via the red button with no replays and a single, bored commentator with nothing else to do.
These are the sort of games you have to win to have any chance of staying up. When you roll up against a team mired deep in mid-table, with zero vibes and on the brink of civil war, you have to take what the Gods give you.
To their credit, Leicester managed it. They may have only played well for approximately three minutes of this match, but that was enough to get the job done. The Ruud van Nistelrooy era, strange and tense as it may be, lives on.
Dad’s army
After a week that saw the mainstream media descend on the Leicester narrative, the team sheet felt like a big moment in the Van Nistelrooy reign.
With rumours swirling of bust ups between the manager and at least three other people - Jon Rudkin, Facundo Buonanotte, and Caleb Okoli - plus his overall demeanour in the pre-match press conference, this could plausibly have been his final act as Leicester manager.
Van Nistelrooy responded with a selection that prompted a range of reactions, from “er, what?” to the classic fan response to a dreadful, boring team: the manager must be sending a message to the board.
The primary source of ire and confusion was the inclusion of both Jordan Ayew and Bobby De Cordova Reid in the front three, which meant that Leicester fielded an attack that is a combined 102 years old.
RVN clearly likes Ayew, and has lost patience with Buonanotte and Stephy Mavididi. Whatever the truth is of his relationship with the Argentinian, he has never fancied him in away games in particular.
The problem is that while the more experienced heads might be better at following the manager’s instructions, they offer very little threat on an individual or collective level.
For the first 45 minutes, it looked like this was pure Cooperball in the worst possible way. Where attackers are picked for their defensive workrate, only for the defence to ship goals anyway.
While Leicester did win the ball back high on quite a few occasions thanks to the industry in attacking areas (and, it must be said, the sheer incompetence of the opposition), the lack of pace and quality in the final third meant none of these opportunities turned into anything of note.
One breakaway down the left wing saw Victor Kristiansen cut it back to Ayew in acres of space on the edge of the Spurs box, only for him to snatch at the shot and waste it. A couple of times De Cordova Reid and Jamie Vardy were a yard short of pace at this level, and saw the space in front of them disappear, beaten to the ball by defenders who are themselves not blessed with speed.
At the other end Leicester were bailed out a few times by Jakub Stolarcyzk, who saved well in particular from Son Heung-Min, before the Korean hit the bar with a deflected cross out of nothing.
When the ball broke wide, De Cordova Reid failed to get anywhere near Pedro Porro, who put a cross into the classic Leicester death zone, the spot on the field closest to both Wout Faes and James Justin at any given moment, for Richarlison to head Spurs into the lead.
Leicester weren’t particularly bad in the first half, nor were they especially outplayed. But Leicester were behind, on a run of 7 defeats in a row, two and a half games without a goal, and with no real sign of where one might come from.
At that stage, it’s fair to question what the point of it all is. The team isn’t exciting, it isn’t winning, it’s full of older players who you have no real affiliation with and who offer no long term value.
Where earlier in the season this was a team that seemed to be a directionless mob who would occasionally find themselves on the right path and pick up a few points, Van Nistelrooy seems to have turned them into a group who can march in a controlled, efficient manner, but in the wrong direction entirely.
But this is football. And perhaps more importantly, this was football against Spurs.
The comeback trail
Fans often have a good idea of where their club is at, in a big picture sense.
As the people who take the most interest in their own team’s fortunes, they can usually sniff out its overall direction of travel. Such as sensing, for example, that its management have been driving full speed down a road that goes straight off the end of a canyon for the last five years.
On a more granular level, however, we often have absolutely no idea what we’re talking about. So it is that Justin has been the focus of utter rage and fury at a couple of points this season and promptly scored a brace from right back on two separate occasions. And so it was here that De Cordova Reid ended up playing a massive hand in both goals that brought Leicester back from the dead.
After a first half that promised nothing, it took a little over four minutes from kick off in the second for Leicester to take the lead.
First, some good interplay between De Cordova Reid, Kristiansen, and Bouba Soumare saw the latter put the former in behind the Spurs defence. His square ball across the box beat everybody, nearly including Vardy himself, before the GOAT knocked in yet another goal against Tottenham.
A couple of minutes later, Soumare was again instrumental, beating Rodrigo Bentancur to the ball in midfield and feeding De Cordova Reid, who in turn played it to Bilal El Khannouss in a frankly implausible amount of space. He strolled forward and placed the ball into the bottom corner to complete the turnaround.
Soumare deserves a lot of credit for his role in both goals, and his overall performance over the last few months. Gone is much of his ‘bulk’, but he’s maintained his strength while becoming more mobile, so he can now compete at the speed of the Premier League. The idea of him nipping in ahead of opposition midfielders in their own half would have been anathema in August, but he showed his value here.
After that, Leicester managed the game brilliantly, with all sorts of pantomime villain antics from Stolarcyzk and Ayew in particular. The Pole must have single-handedly wasted at least five minutes at goal kicks, and didn’t see yellow until there were less than ten to go. Ayew took hit after hit to his shiny bonce and milked it for all that it’s worth, finally proving that yes, he really is quite good at winning free kicks.
The game effectively ceased to happen, instead we got a series of fouls and injuries and watched a whole bunch of players go through the motions. There was a brief flurry of activity around the hour, when Porro had a free kick deflected onto the bar, then went on a marauding run and shot into the side netting a few minutes later. After the 66th minute, almost literally nothing happened.
This was in some sense testament to Leicester, who put in a decent effort of being as annoying as possible. De Cordova Reid got himself in the way of every quick restart, Buonanotte got booked within seconds of coming on, Harry Winks rugby tackled t-shirt legend Archie Gray. Leicester have been far too nice for too long, perhaps having a manager with a real edge to him can lead to displays like this. Sometimes, you just need to be an arsehole.
More than anything, though, the way this game drifted out felt like a Tottenham story. They looked as bad and bereft as any side we have played all season. They were either exhausted, mentally shot, or both by the end. Even the prospect of 7 minutes of injury time wasn’t enough to rouse them into doing anything.
So Leicester saw it out. And, despite having lost every game since December 8th, clawed their way out of the relegation zone in the process.
Ruud noises
It goes without saying that this was a crucial three points. With an ominous fixture list looming on the horizon and the wolves at the door, the club desperately needed some good news.
Whether it suggests we’ve learned or fixed anything is a different story. Van Nistelrooy has been dealt a near-impossible hand, but it’s not realistic to expect the side he put out in North London to ever score enough goals to keep us up.
Nor do substitutions like the ones he made to protect the result: Conor Coady and Oliver Skipp replacing two wingers, seem particularly different to what Steve Cooper did in the painful collapse to Crystal Palace a few months ago. Only this time the opponent was even more patched up and pitiful than ourselves.
At the same time, we need to believe in something. Another damp squib of a January when the squad is in dire straits hardly gives us any reason to believe in the club as a whole, and this set of players has hardly given any reason to believe in them. So we may as well put faith in the manager, and hope that if nothing else his force of personality can start to turn things around.
If he really has been calling out players in the dressing room, and putting pressure on the director of football to back up the promises made to him when he took the job, then at least someone is prepared to push for accountability.
Maybe this odd win, this flicker of resistance, won in no small part thanks to a controversial call he made in picking the team, is a win in his image.
