Walsall 0 Leicester City 0 (0-3 on pens): A tale of two Welshmen
Back in the halcyon days of 2023 and the past beyond, if your unimportant football club was drawn away from home against even less glamorous opposition in an early round of the least prestigious competition, you had so many outs.
There’s no way a game like that would be televised. You could make other plans, feeling superior in your well-rounded life as you snuck the occasional glance at your phone during the 90 minutes.
Now, with the advent of Sky Sports Plus, all that has changed. There is no excuse. It’s there for you to watch.
So, like a cat in a bag waiting to drown, I find myself scrolling down the list of games and selecting WAL v LEI, suitably feeling like a wally as I do.
In truth, this exact type of game is one of my guilty pleasures. And for all its faults, this specific example of the genre contained two genuine laugh out loud moments when Leicester’s defence was bailed out by the ref doing the splits and accidentally touching the ball, followed later on by a penalty Diana Ross would have been ashamed of.
Photo: Helen Thompson
The bomb squad
But the real reason I love this type of game is that it doesn’t really matter what happens. Long gone are the days when anyone other than Manchester City or Liverpool would win the League Cup. These games are now a chance to see the second XI. And when the first XI aren’t up to much, that can be an enticing prospect.
Unfortunately, then the game starts and you remember there’s a reason why the members of the second XI aren’t in the first XI.
Consider the Leicester lineup for this trip to the Poundland Bescot Stadium (that’s a sponsorship deal in action, it’s not a worse alternative version of Walsall’s ground): a bunch of misfits, no-hopers and players we’ve been trying to sell every transfer window since we bought them. Oh, and two of our best players from last season who can’t get a game.
That brings us to the main topic of the day: Steve Cooper, a man who apparently got the job because he wanted it when everyone else was having well-founded doubts.
Cooper’s decision to sideline Ricardo Pereira, as poor as he was in this game, is almost as baffling as his sudden withdrawal of Abdul Fatawu from any kind of meaningful Premier League action. Both of which are nearly as head-scratching as his use of Oliver Skipp for just ten minutes across the past two games when the midfield has been struggling to impose itself on a League Two team and Everton.
Halfway through the second half at the Poundland, a pitch invader of the Leicester persuasion started yelling at Cooper. There were also boos at half time and full time, after Walsall had outworked their top flight visitors and enjoyed the far better chances.
For some reason, Cooper has decided that the formula for success this season is to shoehorn an ageing utility forward into his team at the expense of one of our two creative and destructive wingers. This time it was Bobby Decordova-Reid who stepped in and, even against League Two opposition, made no discernible impact.
Attack, attack, attack
This is a team with problems going forward. At half time, the stats showed Leicester with 74% possession and no shots on target. Facundo Buonanotte was reliably busy, which made him stand out, but he also repeatedly gave the ball away in poor areas. Boubakary Soumare and Hamza Choudhury played as a double pivot and largely lived up to that name, turning round and round in circles without being able to progress the ball in any meaningful way.
This second string implementation of Cooper’s roving left-back masterplan saw Luke Thomas become the key man in attack, which probably makes the shot tally more understandable. It’s unclear how long he’ll persevere with this system that feels either too clever for its own good or so lacking in attacking merit that it makes you question what you’re missing.
The only flashes of inspiration across the past 180 minutes of football have come from Stephy Mavididi and Abdul Fatawu, both in the second halves of these otherwise alarming past two games. The Emirates Stadium might not be the place to start them together for the first time this season but once that’s out of the way, there’s little excuse not to see it.
The other thing Cooper could and should have done for this particular game was to play Will Alves. One of the best prospects Leicester have owned for years is in danger of letting a vital time in his career wither away to nothing. If a suitable loan couldn’t have been found, he either needs to start games like this or go back to play in the Under 21s for a period.
There’s absolutely no excuse for him to be an unused substitute in a relatively meaningless competitive game like this, especially when there are veteran free transfers and no-option loanees starting ahead of him without impressing.
That may seem harsh on Buonanotte, who has shown genuine fight and glimpses of creativity in his time in a blue shirt so far. But we learned nothing new from his appearance here. It was another missed opportunity to give Alves a platform. It’s the kind of decision that’s giving Cooper a reputation for playing it safe.
Photo: Helen Thompson
From Edouard to Ward
And now to Odsonne Edouard. There are two ways to approach this, and you can pick the one you prefer.
On one hand, we could be charitable and say it’s early days. We shouldn’t be judging him or writing him off or making any grand predictions about his likely contribution for the rest of the season. We can say he isn’t match fit, it’ll take a while to get up to speed and he didn’t have the first choice team around him.
On the other hand, that was quite an impressively bad first start and with our recent track record for signing strikers it will have rung a few alarm bells already. He looked like a centre forward version of Soumare at his worst, lumbering around while forgetting to affect the game in any way.
Major improvement needed and we’ll draw a line under it there because it’s only the beginning for him. But maybe these are the kinds of players you can get on deadline day.
Two other players merit a mention. The first is Caleb Okoli, who looks as though he has potential albeit with worryingly erratic spells. After a solid first half against Walsall, he really struggled at times in the second and could have been punished for some dismal distribution.
The second is, of course, Danny Ward. In some ways the unlikely hero of the hour but in fact, this was always his role. The penalty specialist. It brought back memories of another League Cup win not far from the Poundland at Molineux. Those were the good old days before we found out that penalty shootout heroics wouldn’t necessarily translate into being able to replace one of our greatest ever goalkeepers.
But we are where we are with Ward. It was our club’s choice to dish him out a long contract on big money. All you can say here is that he excelled in a shootout right in front of our fans, a decent number of whom would have abused him on social media and messageboards over the past couple of years. Is this the start of a redemption arc that would top even Jannik Vestergaard’s? Probably not, but it was a good night for him and someone needed to do something at some point to ensure we won.
The gruesome details
Ward’s first telling contribution had actually come much earlier, in the 17th minute when Leicester failed to deal with a rare Walsall attack and our number one was forced into a good save from Charlie Lakin.
It was Lakin again who had a chance to open the scoring on the half hour but couldn’t force the ball past Ward at the back post. Meanwhile, Leicester laboured at the other end. There were one or two good bits of approach play, usually involving the busy Buonanotte. But that was it, save for someone putting some batteries in Soumare for about thirty seconds before the break when he threatened to burst into life.
At half time, Cooper had the chance to either lay into his players or change some of them. This is one of the key concerns about his management. He did neither of those things on this occasion, so Walsall, clearly emboldened by looking at us for 45 minutes and thinking we weren’t all that, decided to press us more vigorously.
Our players reacted as though that wasn’t on, old sport. For a good 15 minutes we gave the ball away in poor positions as if it was the aim of the game. The nadir was a really nasty period of play which saw Ricardo and Choudhury play Fatawu into trouble, who in turn gave it away really sloppily, while Coady backed off incomprehensibly. Walsall should have scored.
After a fine minute’s applause from both sets of fans for Craig Shakespeare, it took until halfway through the second half for Leicester to show signs of life. It was no surprise that the injection of pace and drive came from Buonanotte and Fatawu, combining to remind everyone that football can be a simple game.
For so long in this game, every game so far this season and many games like this in the recent past, Leicester make football look so difficult. As though it’s the hardest thing in the world to get the ball from one end of the pitch to the other and create a good chance. For all Edouard’s lack of spark we didn’t actually stick him in front of the goal with the ball in a decent position. It was fired into him at knee height or launched just over his head.
The same thought occurred on Saturday watching an almost entirely different eleven players try to break down an Everton side everyone else has been putting three past. It all looks to be players making things up on the spot rather than having their talents coached and coaxed out onto the pitch.
Fatawu ran the show for the final 25 minutes without quite fashioning that clear chance. One nutmeg on his marker was particularly delicious, only for the sour aftertaste of a wasteful shot into the side netting to spoil the sensation.
So it was left to one Welshman to save the day. Our other one already needs to act to save himself.
