Untypical Leicester defying expectations to show one way forward
I wasn’t able to follow Leicester’s game away at Southampton last weekend, so it was with some trepidation that I turned my phone back on at half past five on Saturday afternoon and saw there were 71 WhatsApp messages waiting.
Into my scores app I went and the result glowed back at me.
If the result was something of a surprise then tapping into the match details and seeing the goalscorers and the times of the goals was one notch further up the scale of unbelievability.
We were 2-0 down and came back to win 3-2 with a 98th minute winner from Jordan Ayew?
Well, that’s not very Leicester-like
The fact I later learned - that it was the first time Leicester had ever been two goals down at half time in a Premier League game and won - confirmed my initial feeling that it wasn’t very Leicester-like.
I began the task of consuming more information about the game, starting with that little green phone icon and an onslaught of criticism towards Steve Cooper and his players that began at about 3.07pm and lasted for an hour or so.
Feeling relieved that I hadn’t been available to add to the diatribe, which I certainly would have done, it felt like this might be the best way to follow games you can’t attend - find something else to occupy your time and see what happened afterwards.
Of course, this turned out to be one of those many complex games where you could read it several ways. Were Harry Winks, Abdul Fatawu and Ayew inspired substitutions from Cooper or merely an underlining that he’d got the team selection wrong to start with?
If some of the other fine margins, such as Mads Hermansen’s reflex save from deadly marksman Wout Faes, had gone the other way would we be talking with seriousness right not about binning off Cooper? When you’re in the bottom half of the Premier League table, that conversation is never far away whatever the last result was.
But now we’re as far away from 5th place as we are from the relegation zone. It’s a remarkable turnaround in the space of two games, both of which we could easily have lost either on the balance of play or given the situation in the game.
A few weeks ago, I thought we’d be fortunate to reach our current points tally across the course of the whole season. But then the absolute best way to be wrong in life is for your football team to defy your pessimism.
Surprise, surprise
The idea that it isn’t very Leicester-like to come back from two goals down to win is rooted in the same deep-seated wariness about this football club that makes it feel like every striker who hasn’t scored for 20 games is bound to pop up with a late winner to consign us to defeat.
In fact, speaking to a lot of Leicester fans you’d think we’d never won a game before - and I’m one of the worst for it. But after spending much of the early part of last season saying we wouldn’t get away with the kind of chances we regularly offered up in the first months of Enzoball, Bournemouth’s profligacy in our first win of the league season was another surprise.
In just eight games, we’ve seen lots of surprising things. A point at home to Tottenham on the opening night that was difficult to foretell at half time; Wilfred Ndidi churning out assist after assist; James Justin’s brace at the Emirates to draw us level temporarily; even the promising nature of Faes and Caleb Okoli’s centre-back partnership.
But then surprises can come in different forms depending on your perspective. In the same way that Justin responded to calls for him to be dropped by scoring twice away from home against one of the best teams in the league, Conor Coady was brought on at Crystal Palace to use all his experience to see the game out - and promptly threw away the win with a rash challenge in the penalty area.
Equally, it’s surprising that Cooper hasn’t turned to Ricardo as opposition goals continue to flow in from Justin’s side and that he hasn’t started Fatawu in as many games as possible considering what an undoubted star we have available.
It all adds up to a team we can’t be certain about in any sense. There’s no real telling what will happen each time they take to the field or from one half to the next.
If even going 2-0 down away from home doesn’t mean we can’t win, presumably the stands won’t react to a setback with the kind of collective groan that used to greet conceding first during the latter period under Brendan Rodgers, knowing it likely meant defeat.
That comes from a different feeling about some of the players we have at our disposal, led by Facundo Buonanotte but which also applies to Fatawu and Ayew - all very different and all with their asterisks (one who isn’t ours, one who doesn’t start and one who’s 33 and cost £7.5million) - but also all battlers who won’t give up and work hard to make up for any deficiencies in their game.
And that starts to sound a lot more like the Leicester City we all want to see.
When you’ve scored two goals in seven games, who you gonna call? If you’re Amandine Miquel then you flick through your phone book for defensive midfielders.
It was Ruby Mace at Villa Park. It was Saori Takarada yesterday for the visit of Manchester United.