The fall of Steve Cooper - Leicester City’s Autumn surprise is the only logical decision
Twelve Premier League games. Three months of competitive football. Autumn has seen the fall of Steve Cooper and although it may be a slight surprise Leicester City’s decision-makers have swung into early action, you’d struggle to find a fan that disagrees with the move.
On one hand, it means a handful of people losing their jobs and perhaps we shouldn’t be gleeful. On the other, they’ll be well remunerated for their troubles and warmly welcomed at a Championship club at some point in the near future.
Meanwhile, Leicester City fans have to see this as an opportunity to seize. If the manager doesn’t look good enough and the players don’t look good enough, it doesn’t give you an awful lot to get behind. For those of us who enjoy taking the temperature of the fanbase, it’s been hard to get a reading in the past few weeks because people have been disappearing. There are fewer reactions online, fans drifting away before the final whistle. Now that can change.
The news acted as a jolt of energy across the fanbase on a blustery Sunday afternoon - the kind of energy we haven’t seen enough in recent weeks on the pitch.
It also came between Sunday’s two Premier League games - a thrilling 3-2 win for Liverpool at Southampton and Ruben Amorim’s first game as Manchester United manager at Ipswich. Saints, for all their hilarious concessions, looked dangerous on the counter and had seven shots.
Ipswich had six shots in the first half, scored a stunner minutes before the break and generally pinned United back despite conceding after 90 seconds to a team high on an exciting new manager. At half time in the Sky Sports studio, Jamie Redknapp’s one-word summary of Ipswich’s display made the contrast with today’s Leicester side unavoidable: “Fearless”.
Yesterday, Leicester looked, by all accounts, like a team practically trying to lose 2-1 and duly did. While Ipswich may not have illustrious players, they’re still able to look in control of games for long periods. That’s something Cooper never quite managed - unless the opposition was in the relegation zone and down to ten men.
No wonder the players weren’t enamoured with him after the control they were accustomed to enjoying under Enzo Maresca. The opposition may be far stronger these days but it doesn’t mean you have to be passive. Even in such a short space of time, there were baffling hills Cooper chose to die on - Ricardo Pereira sidelined, Abdul Fatawu benched, Will Alves forgotten - some of which he had to row back on.
He was also, of course, unlucky to see Fatawu ruled out for the season. That’s somebody else’s problem now and we have to hope they are bolder in their response than Cooper was yesterday. The team news for Chelsea’s visit was demoralising, when an easy lift would have been given by a place even in the squad for Alves or another young talent.
Not only have Leicester sacked Cooper but they’ve done it at exactly the right time.
Surely the club have learned from the Brendan Rodgers debacle two years ago. You let the fall guy burn through the game you were probably going to lose anyway and you make the most of the new manager bounce with a series of more promising games. It’s what they got wrong with caretaker management at home to Aston Villa and Bournemouth 18 months ago.
So if we ignore the fact they appointed Cooper in the first place then kudos, for once, to the club. Having acknowledged that, this is also a club that briefed Owynn Palmer-Atkin that “this has been a situation monitored for some time”. Sometimes the phrases aimed at reassurance can be the most alarming. What else did we expect they would be doing, and how early did the monitoring begin if he’s only had twelve league games?
To be charitable to those in charge, their new manager search in the summer must have been constrained by the widely expected points deduction. The situation then made an intriguing job look like a hospital pass.
This decisive action also shows that the club do have ambition. In Cooper’s post-match interviews there have already been second-hand glimpses of this. After Ipswich, he said we should be winning games like that. Cast against the backdrop of a match in which we had barely strung three passes together for the hour prior to Kalvin Phillips’s red card, his reaction seemed laughable.
Set it instead against the backdrop of a board that feels we should be mid-table with the players we have and maybe it makes more sense. Harry Winks has said similar. Have they all been overrating this squad? Thankfully, we now get to find out.
There are two ways you can stay up in our position. You can either look capable of keeping clean sheets, particularly at home as Cooper’s Forest did two years ago, or you can pose a consistent threat going forward.
What you can’t do is what Cooper’s Leicester have done: implement an unusual tactic, stick rigidly to it despite all evidence showing it’s not working and hope for it all to magically come good.
Two more consistent themes of Cooper’s public speaking have been his insistence we would improve and an attempt to pin the blame on poor or biased officiating. The former created an expectation that didn’t chime with the reality of what we were seeing. The latter hadn’t been earned in the same way that, for example, Nigel Pearson had us right behind him when he called Mike Dean the most arrogant man he’d ever met.
A lot has been - and will be - made of Cooper’s history with Nottingham Forest. In truth, it all comes down to quality. Competence can consign any previous time spent Trentside to the bin of irrelevance. Martin O’Neill did that. Wes Morgan too. Cooper made a difficult job look impossible and rarely looked capable of becoming, like O’Neill and Morgan, a Leicester legend.
Sacking managers after 12 games used to be something Italian clubs did while we looked down our noses at them in horror. The Premier League has been accustomed to those kind of timescales for a while now though and this doesn’t feel early. The national media may brand Cooper unfortunate but they’re also quick to describe our paltry efforts on the pitch so they can’t profess to be that disappointed in the decision.
For Leicester fans, it’s a pleasant surprise. It’s necessary. It’s exciting.
There have been precedents. Leicester have had permanent managers for even shorter periods in the 21st century. Martin Allen lasted four league games before he was sacked by Milan Mandaric. Gary Megson took charge of nine before he was lured by the bright lights of Bolton.
The closest parallel though is Paulo Sousa, who also managed Leicester for 12 league games. It just never felt right and though they had their differences, both seemed like they were overthinking the tactical side of the game and failing to change when their approach didn’t work with the players at their disposal.
When Sousa left, we had one game - and one win - under the Powell-and-Stowell dream team before Sven swept into town.
That felt like a gigantic coup at the time - a big name with experience of managing at the very highest level. Sven also, despite not being ultimately successful, forged a strong relationship with the fans. This is an important bond at any club, a lack of which has clearly played a part in the decision to dismiss Cooper now.
But it was the subsequent return of Nigel Pearson that suited Leicester City perfectly. It took a few seasons but Pearson built the basis of the club and the identity we still cling onto today with an ever-diminishing grip. Fearless, competitive and always capable of putting the big clubs’ noses out of joint.
We don’t have the luxury of time now. If Cooper’s replacement fails then he might not see out the season either. This evening, though, we can savour a moment of possibilities. The question “Who next?” had become an inevitability.
