Disco 2000: Sunderland 0 Leicester City 1
Leicester City love a clean sheet at the Stadium of Light. This one brought back memories of a similar scenario - not in 2016, en route to the Premier League title, nor a year earlier when we sealed the greatest escape, but back in October 2000 when a far-from-vintage display nevertheless kept us top of the league.
This season has few parallels with that haunting decline under Peter Taylor. The comparison is more about how you can be happy with a result while also being worried about what the performance means for the immediate future.
On Saturday morning, I described the home game against QPR as a massive game in disguise. It didn’t have the feel of a televised Friday night top-two clash at Elland Road, but there were still three points to play for - three points which would have extended our lead over Leeds and maintained the gap to Ipswich and Southampton.
Instead, surrounded by another trademark King Power lunar atmosphere, we lost.
Every game now is massive. There’s no disguising it any more. Every game is a battle to prove we are where we deserve to be and that we have what it takes to stay there until it counts for something.
All that counts is the three points, then forgetting about that instantly and focusing on getting the next three points, and the next, and the next, and the next, until it’s done.
We got the three points here and, as so many fans were saying afterwards on social media, the performance at the Stadium of Light wasn’t important in the context of three league defeats in a row.
But we have to acknowledge how bad this was. Although we finally got that vital win, the performance did nothing to prove we are where we deserve to be or dispel the worries that we’re slowly being reeled in by the chasing pack.
In fact, Leicester City played so poorly in this game that the usual post-away win scenes of the players clenching their fists to the travelling fans and looking defiant in the corridor on their way into the dressing room felt surreal. They were celebrations completely at odds with how it felt to actually watch the game.
It’s different when you’re not there, and in the days when I used to travel the length and breadth of the country following this great football club, I would get extremely annoyed by fans watching or listening at home and criticising performances. The negativity from people who hadn’t spent a huge amount of time and money to support the team used to wind me right up.
You’re not allowed to say it for some reason, but some fans are better than others. So if you went all the way to Sunderland on a Tuesday night and you were happy with the three points or the clean sheet or the supposed battling qualities we showed to secure both of those things, I’m in no position to argue with you. All I can convey is how I felt watching the second half in particular, no matter how unpopular it might be with some people.
After the game, Enzo Maresca said he was falling more and more in love with this team. That’s great to hear, especially after what’s happened in recent weeks. It’s not exactly how I felt watching this team last night though.
What I saw was a team that appeared complacent, sloppy and sulky. Perhaps, as someone who has never played at a level above Thursday night five-a-side, I don’t appreciate how difficult it is to play (a long way) away from home in the Championship in midweek. Maresca said his players might have been tired.
Perhaps. But this doesn’t feel like a style of play that saps the energy. Flicking over to watch Ipswich’s latest late turnaround, the dynamism in their display showed a huge contrast with what we’re seeing from our players at the moment - especially in the dying stages of games.
We’re not like Ipswich. We haven’t been surfing the wave of promotion, we have a style that’s been successful without being particularly energetic and we’re largely indifferent to tractors and massive horses. We also won’t be sticking around past 80 minutes if we’re 2-1 down. Nevertheless, the contrast with how they’re ending games at the moment is stark.
It was how we started at Sunderland that ultimately won us this game but, to continue the theme of the turn of the millennium, we were swiftly reminiscent of Chris Tarrant wafting a cheque for thousands of pounds in front of a gameshow contestant. In the first 13 minutes, have a glimpse of some fast-paced, attacking football that garners chance after chance and threatens to blow the opposition away.
“But we don’t want to give you that!”
Instead, as soon as Jamie Vardy scored an already overdue goal before the quarter-hour mark, this newly baffling Leicester side whipped the cheque from under our noses and reverted to Serie B mode - taking hours over throw-ins without bothering to check if the opposition are any good. Is there a need to resort to shithousery if the other team are shit? Claudio Ranieri, whose tears were so memorable the last time we won at the same venue, would probably have appreciated it. Italian managers will Italian manager.
The Y2K era references don’t end with Chris Tarrant. In the second half, the contrast between Leicester’s performance and the positive end result brought to mind a song I haven’t thought about or heard for over 20 years.
Mads Hermansen chipping the ball straight to Sunderland players from successive goal kicks?
It doesn’t matter.
Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall unable to retain possession in injury time?
It doesn’t matter.
Stephy Mavididi having a strop because the referee won’t give him a free kick?
It doesn’t matter.
The narrative dictates that the way we “saw out” this game didn’t matter because it resulted in three points. There were so many worrying signs though, if you were hoping to be reassured that this team has what it takes to get over the line.
Play like this, and we won’t be fine.
The most alarming aspect wasn’t so much the downward spiral of technical quality but the body language and attitude. The lack of care. The needless timewasting. The way some admittedly terrible officiating clearly rattled them.
Leicester have two very reliable ways to win a game while 1-0 up in their armoury: keep the ball or kill it off. For some reason, we currently keep getting stuck in between the two, a situation summed up by Hermansen’s lofted chips to just shy of halfway.
This was the Sheffield Wednesday second half all over again, a poor opposition team made to look good by an alarming drop-off in our own quality and then passed off as game management. We ended with 51% possession and very few chances created after taking the early lead, which surely can’t be the plan.
Sunderland’s interim manager Mike Dodds described his side’s second half efforts as “sensational”. There was nothing sensational about this game really and that description just shows how far Sunderland have fallen since they played us off the park for long spells in the home game.
We won that 1-0 too, but we were lucky. We didn’t face the same threats in the return fixture, with Jack Clarke and Patrick Roberts both injured. It seemed strange back then that such an exciting young team had lost half their games. Now they’re losing all of them.
So now we hit the final ten fixtures. And perhaps we won’t see a revival of that pre-Christmas form, when Mavididi was unplayable, Dewsbury-Hall ruled the division and Patson Daka exploded into life. As this game showed, and as Leeds taught us at Elland Road, in this crazy division it’s entirely possible to win without playing remotely well.
But the past two games have not been vintage Leicester. We’re going to need Mavididi and Dewsbury-Hall in particular to step things up on a more consistent basis. Thankfully, they have someone back now to help.
The clear positive, other than the way we started the game and the end result, was the calming comeback of Wilfred Ndidi, who enhanced his points-per-game record even further. On average, we’ve racked up a whole extra point per game when he’s been on the pitch this season.
Wilf understandably looked a little rusty on his return but his physicality in midfield was still a sight for sore eyes. This is one comeback we desperately need to get right and it could be the difference between you know what and you know what.
The second one still doesn’t bear thinking about. Thankfully, we can delay those concerns until the next time Leicester City put us all through the wringer again in… three days. These next few weeks are going to feel like agony. Tell you what. Let’s all meet up in June 2024. Won’t it be strange when our fate is fully known…
