The Fosse Way’s End of Season Awards 2024: Disappointment of the Season
Although this was a season that gave us a lot of good moments and memories, it wasn’t perfect and so for balance, we have considered our disappointments of the season.
What disappointed you this campaign?
Paging Customer Service
Matt Jedruch
The unforgivably bad communication output from the club to the fans. I could pick out individual annoyances relating to the general ticket sales / season cards / the Club's reaction to the PSR charges, but the consistent theme across all of this is that the club is totally out of touch with the fan base.
What makes this even more infuriating is that it often appears to be a wilful decision - to the Club we are just customers with supporter numbers. If we don't like it, there are plenty of people on the season ticket waiting list. This has to change.
The price of loyalty
Becky Taylor
The club continuing to alienate fans.
With no visible outcome to the post-relegation 'internal' review it was inevitable some of the underlying issues would crop up again.
The £25-gate and how that has been handled is a real eye opener for how the club think they can treat the fans, and a worry for me for the precedent set of what else they'll implement without caring for fan opinion.
The arrogance from some decision making considering the complete mismanagement, shown no more so by the extent of our financial breaches, has been laughable.
Panic in the stands of the King Power
Iain Wright
It feels a bit wrong to write about disappointments after a successful season, but I think I do have to call out certain sections of our home 'support'.
We all have our grumbles, this site for a start wouldn't be what it is if everyone was happy-clappy all the time, and my own articles certainly aren't, but come on, there's a difference between constructive criticism, genuine concern for the club and the actions of a sizeable number of home match-going fans who seem to have stopped enjoying a day out at the footy.
Of course everyone is entitled to their opinion, of course there were things to be unhappy about, even in an ultimately successful season, but some of the negativity and apathy in the stands has been well out of sync with what's actually been happening on the pitch (e.g. winning 17 out of 23 games).
Next season, we'll need the support more than ever, therefore I appeal to anyone who's constantly exasperated, 'bored' or wants to viciously berate players all game, to have a break over the summer, get your enthusiasm back and let's all start afresh next season with some encouragement and love for the team.
Misfiring strikers
Helen Thompson
Given the success, this was a little harder this year and others have done an excellent job of addressing the off-pitch disappointments.
I toyed between calling out our inability to move on players generally that left us bloated in the wrong positions or to focus on our first team strikers and that despite having four of them, most of the goals we scored came from other outfield positions. I’ve landed on the latter.
Sure, Jamie Vardy had excellent output for his match minutes to goals ratio bagging 20 across the season, but it’s less than impressive for the others. Patson Daka got 7 goals, Kelechi Iheanacho 6 and Tom Cannon 3.
For a team that scored 103 goals in total, this wasn’t a huge problem because goals came from virtually everybody else. But it was disappointing given the pedigree and number of strikers. Take out Vardy’s stats and it looks poor. Play back the games where we found ourselves in double figures on shots taken but looking entirely incapable of scoring and it could have been more worrysome.
Pre-season I fully expected us to see Iheanacho ripping the Championship apart but between some incredibly off the boil outings and him not really fitting into Maresca’s desired tactics, it’s been a disappointment and ultimately ruled out any chance of us renewing his contract. Add in that we signed Tom Cannon whilst injured, and Maresca’s faith in Daka despite fan pressure to drop him and it’s been a strange year up front for Leicester.
Falling apart at Leeds
David Bevan
Others are right that the biggest disappointments of the past season have been off-field matters, but one other thing stands out when I think about what still nags away at me a bit.
Elland Road.
It would have been a truly iconic Leicester City night had we gone there and condensed our superiority over the season into one evening’s worth of terrific football and a decisive victory.
We got one but not the other. Some of the stuff we played that night was magnificent. The way we crumbled at the end was not.
The disappointment was exacerbated by the two late equalisers conceded against Ipswich, defeat at the Ricoh and the home loss to Leeds. It felt like we failed in every big game. That’s not true of course. We beat Coventry on the opening day and thrashed Southampton twice.
But it would have topped things off nicely if Patson Daka’s goal had stood or his infamous shot hadn’t skewed bizarrely wide. It didn’t matter in the end. Still…
