Leicester City 0 Wolverhampton Wanderers 3: The Ward Supremacy
Look at the free beer! What a beautiful fan park!
Some people have an aura to them. When they speak, people listen. When they act, people copy. Their mere presence inspires others to perform above themselves, to scale heights of greatness hitherto hidden inside them.
One such player wears Leicester City blue. But, unfortunately, he uses his powers for evil.
If Danny Ward were born a couple of hundreds of years ago, he might have been one of those sailors that other men of the sea refuse to get on board with. Someone with a name like 'Shipwreck Steve', whose career record has seen him sunk 15 times off the coast of Madagascar, his vessel repeatedly boarded by pirates, and once caught in the ice trying to traverse the northeast passage, when he was left to guard the ship while the rest of the crew went off in search of food and were promptly devoured by cannibals.
Yet still he drifts on from place to place, convincing naïve young captains to hire him as First Mate, only for their pride and joy to disappear into the Bermuda Triangle, no survivors.
Except one.
This defeat was not all Danny Ward's fault. Defeats like this have many fathers; the recruitment that has left the team devoid of quality at every level across the pitch, the decision to hire one manager in the summer then replace him after an international break so that the new man has had no time to do anything, the endless cycle of injuries that have drained the team of the few bits of Premier League talent it has.
But this game would have turned out completely differently if Danny Ward was not in goal.
Bad things happen when he is between the sticks. It can be difficult to track the source all the way back to him. Like painstakingly mapping out which people in your neighbourhood keep dropping dead of cholera, before being hit by the sudden realisation that the source is one water pump on the corner of Wrexham that’s been pulling its sweet nectar straight from the sewage pipe.
Eventually, though, you connect all the pieces of string and they lead back to the same person.
The case against the defence
Leicester's defence makes a lot of mistakes. At best, it's a group completely devoid of confidence. At worst, every player in it is damaged beyond repair. They have been conceding awful goals for years.
Yet there was something different about this. If they were self-aware, you might wonder if this was a piece of performance art. The footballing equivalent of selling a painting for £100 million and then putting it through the shredder.
We can be pretty sure by now, however, that this isn’t an exhibition. These are genuine attempts to play football that keep ending in humiliating disaster.
The first 45 minutes of this encounter saw three of the worst defensive mistakes you're likely to see at this level. Collectively, they showed a complete inability to do the basics right that transcended the usual incompetence of the Leicester back four.
Until the third of these, it was difficult to specifically blame the goalkeeper for it.
Is it really his fault that Jannik Vestergaard inexplicably failed to deal with a simple straight ball into the box, allowing Goncalo Guedes to take a brief break from falling on the floor to knock in the first goal?
Was it his fault that James Justin inexplicably chose to let a cross-field pass go past him, straight to an entity called “Rodrigo Gomes” to score - you guessed it - his first ever Premier League goal?
No.
But also… yes?
Because we have seen this again and again with Ward in goal. Game after game in the last relegation season, these sort of things would happen. Players making strange decisions, awful mistakes. Goals, goals from everywhere start flying in.
On one level, it's down to the simple fact that he doesn't make any saves, so any mistake, anywhere on the pitch, is magnified. It took 85 minutes for Wolves to have a shot on target that didn't go in on Sunday afternoon, a save that was greeted with wild, sarcastic cheers by the people who'd bothered to stay that long.
But it goes deeper than that. Ward's presence infects everyone with doubt. A creeping, sinister doubt, that causes them to hesitate in key moments, or to try to do things they wouldn't normally attempt. When in normal circumstances they might calmly knock the ball back to Mads Hermansen, with Ward’s presence behind them they blink, they freeze, they experience a split second of agonising doubt.
They don't trust him. They know.
Just out of time
By the time that second goal went in, there was a near mutiny in the stands. The frustration of watching the same players making the same mistakes erupted in a howl of furious derision at what we had just witnessed.
For all that Ward is a problem, it's also become completely untenable for Justin to continue starting games for Leicester. There is a good footballer in there somewhere, but right now he is a shadow of the man who said he had England ambitions a few months ago.
Instead of taking him out of the firing line, the club’s horrible injury record and lack of strength in depth means he has been forced to face his demons in public again and again. Unlike Ward, he has had more credit in the bank, there’s been more sympathy for him from the crowd. No longer. Leicester have allowed him to be humiliated and broken rather than just dropped for a while.
This has happened before, with Luke Thomas, a player left to be exposed over and over again at the top level. He has never recovered. Perhaps Justin is a better footballer who can come back, perhaps not.
It took until a few minutes into the second half for Justin to eventually be replaced, a substitution that felt like an inevitability simply to protect what remained of his pride. By then, things had gotten worse.
The third goal from Matheus Cunha, arriving shortly after the second, was an unambiguously terrible piece of goalkeeping. It was the classic Ward concession, complete with another of his superpowers: the ability to shrink two feet in height simply through the act of diving.
That prompted a mass walkout that continued throughout the rest of a tepid second half, a tedious exercise in box-checking that was notable only for the huge sarcastic cheers whenever Ward touched the ball.
Firing on no cylinders
It is difficult to analyse this game outside of the defensive mistakes, because in truth there was hardly any of it. The first 20 minutes were appalling before Wolves took the lead, and the first half was defined by those two shambolic goals in eight minutes before half time that blew the lid off the simmering anger around the club.
There is some irony in the fact that the xG was largely even, that Leicester actually created some good chances for Jamie Vardy. The problem all season, however, has been that these seem to come about at random rather than through any concerted plan.
A long ball here, a ricochet here. The best chance came on the brink of half time, when the game was still alive, when Wolves attempted their own penalty area calamity and handed him a free shot from a few yards out that was ultimately cleared off the line.
A couple of opportunities came thanks to Boubakary Soumare in midfield, using his body to receive and shield the ball, and getting the team forward. Beyond that there was barely a moment of attacking quality on display from blue shirts across the entire 90 minutes.
Ruud’s awakening
Van Nistelrooy spent most of the game looking on in absolute disgust from the sideline. For whatever he thought he was getting into when he took on the job, he must now realise the scale of the task in front of him.
The decision to keep Steve Cooper as long as they did looks worse with every passing week, as Van Nistelrooy has been given virtually no time to install whatever plan he might want to run with.
Vibes were enough for a week or so, now we are back to what we saw under Cooper, and in the brief foray with a ChatGPT manager against Brentford: A team that looks mentally shot to pieces, with no coherence to what they’re doing.
Both Justin and Victor Kristiansen, for example, have the ability to fly down the wing, offering width and numbers in attack. But Kristiansen spent most of the game tucked in as a third centre back, and when Justin moved forward he routinely got the ball on an island, with no help anywhere near him.
Is this a Van Nistelrooy plan? Is it leftover from the previous regime? A lot of the team selections and tactical plans look like some kind of needs-must, we don’t think they can do anything else approach, rather than a genuine tactical vision.
Last season’s team, built on strict foundations where everyone knew their jobs, and there was always width and bodies in attacking areas, come what may, looks a million miles from whatever this is supposed to be. Jordan Ayew tucking in, Oliver Skipp roaming around to no obvious purpose. Jamie Vardy isolated up front.
Even the substitutions had the air of a manager in full panic mode, trying to avoid an earth-shattering disaster, rather any real plan of action. And most of those were bleak in themselves: the reintroduction of Wout Faes, who was fired into the sun a fortnight ago. Bobby De Cordova Reid.
With such difficult fixtures coming up over Christmas, before the club has any chance to do anything in the transfer market (stop laughing at the back), this was the end of the honeymoon period.
Afterwards, Van Nistelrooy offered some qualified backing to his goalkeeper, urging the crowd not to single out one player for abuse.
He is right, to some extent, and he is not responsible for the sins of his managerial ancestors. But he will rapidly lose the credit he has in the bank if there are not significant changes for Liverpool on Boxing Day. We have been here and seen this before.
No manager can look supporters in the eye and claim to be giving his team the best chance of success if he continues to include Ward in goal. Every game he starts is a near-guaranteed defeat - he has played in 13 league games since the Qatar World Cup: Leicester’s record from those encounters is 2 wins (Tete, remember him?), 1 draw, and 10 defeats.
At various points over that period there have been three goalkeepers ahead of him in the pecking order. He has been replaced by Hermansen, by Daniel Iversen, and by Jakub Stolarcyzk. It is inconceivable to have him still at the club, never mind in the team.
The options in other areas are much more limited. None of the defensive options look particularly good, there are at least four players in Hermansen, Ricardo, Wilfred Ndidi and Abdul Fatawu, who would be starting if they were fit.
But the fans need to have something to believe in. If we can’t believe in the players, at least we need to believe that the manager is going to change things. That has to start with cutting out the most egregiously poor performing players.
If there is to be any kind of silver lining from this result and performance, it’s that it gives Van Nistelrooy the evidence he needs to make wholesale changes and to demand serious action from the club in January.
Otherwise things are only going to get worse from here.
