On Thursday 25th Februrary, Leicester City faced their second leg in the round of 32 in the Europa League. They lost 0-2. Join FoL as we unpack the result.
My fellow inebriated Foxes, how are we all doing today? Nothing particularly the matter, I would hope. Of course, there is the general feeling of ‘what just happened’ in the Leicester City forums and social media pages.
On a happy note though, we did see the debut of one of Leicester’s best prospects: Sidnei Tavares! Welcome to the fox pack Tavares!
Leicester City: an ungracious exit
That is what I am going to write about. How Leicester City exited the Europa League at the hands of Slavia Prague in a 0-2 defeat. Before going on to try and unpack what happened, I do want to make clear that I have already gone through the five stages of grief.
First there was denial. ‘How could we possibly have lost this match?’ and ‘we can still win this?’ These thoughts whirling around my head at the 70th minute. I thought we had the better team, regardless of injuries.
Next there was anger. The result was unacceptable, intolerable, the fight was too little too late in the match to mount a successful comeback, and our lack of an away goal only further frustrated me. We should have done better.
Then was bargaining. ‘At least Leicester can focus on the Premier League now’. Next depression. The feeling of sorrow of no longer fighting on three fronts to win silverware or the like. Finally, there was acceptance. That is how I feel now. Foxes supporters, Leicester City must now accept what happened, accept the result, and push onwards on the other two fronts we still fight.
My acceptance does not – although I would love it to – change the facts of the matter. The flying Foxes lost at home to Slavia Prague, and we did not even manage to score a single goal across 180 minutes+ of football.
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.
Leicester City: Focus on the League
I want to make one last remark about what we saw. I was impressed with almost every individual performance. Choudhury was physical and energetic, Under was lively and threatening, Albrighton made clever runs, and Tielemans performed the advanced role well enough.
Some fans have said Under was poor. I don’t know about that. When he was getting involved in play, it always appeared like something could happen, maybe with a little bit for luck things would have been different. Partly, the lack of someone making a supporting run with Under (Amartey does not do cutting inside runs) meant he was alone in attempting both outwards and inwards penetrating plays.
Under was also fine defensively. He would often have to rush back and either steal the ball – which I loved to see – or just stand in the way of passing lanes. Though his tackling must be improved.
Nevertheless, Leicester City can now refocus on the Premier League and the FA Cup. Hopefully we might see the return of Ayoze Perez to play the Maddison role for a bit.
The Foxes still have a very good squad, but do need to be more flexible with the system they implement. More so, they need another system they can play when players like Maddison – integral to the system – are absent. We saw this flexibility at the beginning of the season, that being said we did still have Dennis Praet at that point, which we don’t at the moment.
I would say we need to return Tielemans to a deep role, and give Tavares a run in the advanced role if Perez remains unavailable. This should return at least the cohesion of our defence from turnovers, though it may not fix the creative void.