Anger and inaction: Leicester City are drifting and fans have more questions than answers
Every football fan should be able to go into a game thinking there’s a chance their team will win. Leicester City are making that very complicated at the moment.
Last Saturday, I was resigned to us losing the game before it started, not overly excited by our goals as it seemed inevitable we would concede again, and yet I still managed to be angry at the eventual manner of the defeat.
It’s the worst of all worlds.
Madcap ideas
We’ve spent weeks talking about Leicester’s problems and the possible solutions. Most football fans spend a lot of time outside of the 90 minutes thinking about solutions: New signings. Different lineups. Formation changes. Many of us feel we’ve spotted something the manager hasn’t. That one tweak that’ll turn things around.
Our ideas last longer than the actual manager’s ideas, because we face no consequences for being wrong. My solution to the right wing problem started with Ricardo Pereira and is currently hovering around Kelechi Iheanacho, after a dalliance with Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall. A right-back, a striker and a central midfielder. The actual manager would probably get pelters if he tried some of the stuff I come up with.
Yet now I feel like I’ve started to run out of madcap ideas. Leicester have made football look so difficult for so long that I’m struggling to remember what a good team is meant to look like. Where there were once ideas there are now questions, but there are no easy answers. They’re left to float there, distracting me, for days.
Why do we seem so physically and mentally weak? Have we got enough tall players to mark all the opposition giants? If we’re making multiple individual errors leading to a goal every single game, can a manager really continue to hide behind that or is he asking the players to do the wrong things? Why are we continuing to casually play out from the back when it looks so dangerous? Who at the club truly thought we could go into a season without a proven Premier League goalkeeper? How much say did Brendan Rodgers have in our signings last summer? Can Harvey Barnes defend? Is Luke Thomas actually any good? Is Vardy finished? Is Tielemans still trying? Wout Faes looks okay. Is he good enough? Is he?
It’s exhausting.
The argument against
I can see why, from the outside looking in, all this might sound a bit melodramatic. Looking at it dispassionately, we’re an established Premier League club with recent trophies to our name, some excellent footballers, an exciting stadium expansion in the pipeline and one of the best training grounds in the world.
We’ve also played five of the top seven in our first seven games. We’ve had to play Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham away and we now have an international break to try to reset before a favourable run of fixtures. These facts are not obscured by the blind fury of conceding a hat-trick to a substitute.
The only way I can think to address that is that it feels like there shouldn’t be this many questions for this long. The focus on the poor start to this season clouds the real issue: last season there were clear signs of decline and the defensive fragility is something we were talking about addressing in the summer. Yet no one has done anything to address it. That’s why we feel like a zombie club at the moment - arms out, slowly trudging forward, waiting for nothing, the time for decisive action already behind us.
Of course, the specific moment when a supporter wants a manager out is different for everyone. I, like most others, reached that point a few weeks ago. The post-match interviews tipped the scales for me. The alarm bells were deafening. Even those have rung out now. We carry on waiting for the corner flag to show up on our scrolling screens while the club continues on its path to nowhere, as if it’s normal to concede 22 goals in the first 7 games of the season.
No money, more problems
In a way, Brendan Rodgers has created these problems for himself. He talked up challenging the elite, he made a ridiculously good start to two of his seasons in charge and then he signed a highly lucrative new contract which gave him more control of different aspects of the club.
Each of these have come back to haunt him. Leicester fans became accustomed to challenging the elite to the point where expecting anything other than a top-half finish would have seemed wildly unambitious, regardless of our summer transfer business. His start to the seasons in 2019/20 and 2020/21 gave the impression of a club that deserved to be up there and just couldn’t get over the line.
So much of the recent frailties was put down to injury crises that, injury-free, it seemed logical we could push again. The greater control Rodgers took of matters outside of the day-to-day coaching and team selection - being empowered to put his own people in charge of recruitment and the medical department - seems to have been the biggest mistake of all. Of course, his huge salary rankles with most too.
Credit in the bank
All this feels like a retrospective for someone who’s ploughing on regardless, an obituary for someone who hasn’t died. It’s a surreal situation. It also hasn’t helped Rodgers that he’s never built up a huge bank of credit with supporters, even at his peak.
That would have made a difference, particularly when he started railing against the lack of transfer business. We could have been on his side. It felt like very few were, even from the first rumblings of grumbling.
Some of that is just because of the type of personality Rodgers has. To do the job he does, you probably need an air of self-confidence to a certain degree. Yet he will always be compared to recent, more popular, managers who had more of an air of authenticity about them.
Other reasons were out of his control - there’s been a lot of talk in the media about how we should show gratitude for the FA Cup win under his management, but he had no time to revel in it. Within days, we were losing to the same team to blow our Champions League chances.
Should we stay or should we go?
The longer the current situation goes on, it’s natural to begin to wonder: how much does our opinion matter? There’s barely anyone left who thinks we’re going to turn it around. But it feels like we’ve exhausted all avenues.
Anything the club announces on social media - whether heralding the debut of a defender when we conceded six goals or proudly unveiling a £200 bomber jacket - is met with universal derision.
It’s not just a Twitter bubble, either: one post-match topic of conversation among the fans in attendance at Tottenham was whether it felt better to have left early or to have stayed beyond the final whistle to vent following a sixth straight defeat.
Yet still we drift on. Unchanging. With no hope and no more ideas about how to fix it.