How Leicester City pathetically exited the Europa League

What happened against Slavia Prague?

There are two issues I have singled out as the most important factors affecting the King Power side’s performance. Those are understanding and involvement. Let’s have a look at what this means.

First of all there was the line-up. Kasper Schmeichel, Daniel Amartey, Jonny Evans, Caglar Soyuncu, Luke Thomas, Wilfred Ndidi, Hamza Choudhury, Youri Tielemans, Cengiz Under, Marc Albrighton, and Jamie Vardy.

On face value this is still a very good team. It should not matter about the absence of James Maddison, Harvey Barnes, or Ayoze Perez. Further still, it should not be too harmful to have Timothy Castagne and Ricardo Pereira on the bench.

This is not a bad team. The issue is understanding. When you have a coach as good as Brendan Rodgers at formulating a system and training the players for that system, you tend to get a near fixed starting XI playing the same positions, roles, and overall system constantly.

This builds understanding – the crucial element of cohesion. The individuals may or may not be simply superb or subpar, but they are cohesive and coordinate their movements because they understand four things. They understand the system, their role and position, others roles and positions, and the oppositions system.

What Brendan Rodgers did by forcing Tielemans further forward seems like an alright and perfectly justifiable plan. Tielemans is a star, he is creative, technical, and pacey. He could play the ‘Madders’ role.

However, because he would never usually play there, the cohesion vanishes. He may perform well individually, but he is not part of a system. The same is an issue with Choudhury having to take on Tielemans’ transitional role. Choudhury was good, but could not do that role very well.

They did not understand their roles. Nor did their fellow players. When Under would spray a pass out wide, he expected a Barnes run, what he got was a late run from Thomas (a definite England international in the future) and an Albrighton staying further inside not making that run.

When passes were played, they expected a Maddison, they expected a Tielemans, but they did not have either. Therefore, to get involved and to help the team progress, Tielemans had to start dropping deeper to fulfil his usual role on top of an advanced role. Thus, Leicester lost the spark which would have been there if an actual No. 10 was there.

What could have been done differently? Play Sidnei Tavares in the Maddison role from the get go. This keeps most of the team in their usual expected roles, and can be changed if needed later.

The second primary issue was involvement. More acutely, the lacking involvement of Amartey, Albrighton, and Vardy. When all three were more involved, engaged, and actually doing something off the ball to get into positions for passes or runs, the team was dangerous.

The three were not getting more involved in the game off the ball, the ball was stuck on the wrong side of Slavia’s low block. Vardy has the potential to come deep and progress the ball quickly with runners up either end – be that Thomas or Under. When he did this, it was potentially lethal.

This simply did not happen enough. These three players were simply not getting themselves involved enough. When marked, they have to move.