Jamie Vardy is finished: It’s time Leicester accepted it
This international break we asked our writers to deliver their hottest Leicester City takes. Today, James Knight grasps the third rail of Leicester fandom to ask some hard questions about Jamie Vardy’s place in the side.
There was a moment in the first half against Leeds a fortnight ago where I knew for sure it was over.
Leicester did everything right. Wout Faes was aggressive to win the ball back in midfield, we broke forward quickly, giving it to a wide player on the run in space. Stephy Mavididi got to the byline and whipped the ball across the face of goal.
All it needed was someone to ghost into the six yard box and tap home. Instead, there was nothing. There was no one there. The cross sailed harmlessly away.
The invisible man
For at least a year now, we’ve all been trying to pretend that Jamie Vardy still looks like a real striker. Our fear of saying goodbye, of having his time here drift away into the night, has made us convince ourselves that he’s got something left.
He’ll go on a run when James Maddison’s back. A relegation fight will fire him up. He’ll go on a run to keep us up. He’ll be an asset in the Championship. He deserves another year at the top.
All of this is fine in theory. It sounds legit, it sounds possible. This season, we’ve been winning every game. We could all have a nice laugh. The JV9 Championship tour is lovely banter. Your local provincials turn up, sing about his wife, and lose. Then they head home to X about how he’ll be running scared when he experiences the volcanic atmosphere at Ashton Gate.
Where the theory runs into trouble is when you stop winning every game and you have to sit back and watch him play. At which point, it’s apparent that he stinks. He’s lost his speed, he doesn’t touch the ball, he can’t link the play, he doesn’t get on the end of crosses, he hardly ever scores.
And yet on and on he plays. When we’re winning, it’s possible to squint at all the elaborate pointing, as he directs other players to press while he hovers, hunched, in the centre circle, and see Leadership and Presence. When we aren’t, it’s very apparent that he doesn’t really do anything.
This sort of inactivity has long been a Vardy trademark, but the thing that made him great before is that it didn’t matter. He’d suddenly explode into life, his output made everything else irrelevant. Nowadays, we get the complete lack of involvement without the goals at the end.
Since the start of last season, Vardy has played 1,431 more league minutes than Patson Daka, the equivalent of 16 full games. He has managed a grand total of three more goals than the Zambian. Daka, implausibly, scored more than him in the Premier League last season. If we were to hypothetically wonder whether Jamie Vardy is better than Patson Daka, there would be uproarious laughter from the peanut gallery. But…seriously though, are we sure?
xGee whizz
As Leicester have stuttered over the past few weeks, it’s become increasingly clear that Vardy shouldn’t be playing as large a role as he is. When it goes, it goes. And it’s gone. Even at this level, you can only hide it for so long. It’s entirely possible he’s the fourth-best striker at the club these days.
The counter-argument, perhaps, is that successive managers have chosen to play Vardy ahead of the alternatives. There must be some footballing magic behind his invisibility that a pleb like me doesn’t understand. But if there’s one thing the long years of adulthood have taught me, it’s that a fancy sign on the door doesn’t mean you know what you’re doing.
It’s possible to appreciate that Vardy is perhaps the greatest player in the club’s history while also believing he should be nowhere near the starting XI, let alone still the first choice. We could use him like a mascot, wheel him out when we’re winning to wind up the crowd. We certainly shouldn’t be using him in all seriousness as our starting number nine.
I often wonder what it must be like to be Kelechi Iheanacho. He may be the current villain of the piece after a few missed chances against Middlesbrough, combined with committing the cardinal sin of displaying Poor Body Language, but it must be weird to still be the backup to a man he’s so clearly better than.
Iheanacho might miss more chances than Vardy. The much more important point, however, is that you notice that he’s playing. He does things that you expect a footballer playing up front in the best team in the league to do but which you miss when they aren’t there, like touching the ball, or trying to score. And when you compare their numbers over the last year, he absolutely blows Vardy out of the water.
Last season, Vardy started 8 more games than Iheanacho, and played 700 minutes more. Yet Iheanacho had more touches, more assists, and more goals. Iheanacho beat him on expected goals as well. His expected assists were more than twice as many.
This season, it’s the same story. Now we’re in a time share: eight Vardy starts, eight Iheanacho starts, although Vardy has actually played the equivalent of an extra game in terms of minutes on the pitch. Iheanacho has scored more. He’s beaten him on expected goals and assists again. His expected goals, in fact, rank ninth in the entire division, despite the fact only he’s played less than everyone inside the top 20 except for Aaron Connolly, who ranks 18th.
Fire the Cannon
Jamie Vardy is obviously a Leicester legend. But that doesn’t mean he has any right to play now. Any criticism of him is often seen as a sacrilegious attack on the past, as if he can’t simultaneously a) have been amazing and b) now be rubbish. The truth is that they are very clearly both true, and we’re deluding ourselves if we think the old Vardy is going to come back.
That means it has to be time to cut bait. A couple of defeats and an international break give the manager and the team a chance to reset, to review our performances this season with a clear head and without the emotion that the fanbase has towards the main man up top. There are still 30(!) games to go, we can’t keep up this charade week after week until May.
Maybe Tom Cannon’s imminent arrival on the first team scene is the fresh blood we need to start to move on. It is an uncomfortable truth that we would probably still be a Premier League club had Iheanacho been given the minutes Vardy had last season. The same approach this time around might cost us our chance to get back there. Let’s not make that mistake again.
12 Days of Christmas at The Bridge
For the past 10 years, The Bridge Homelessness to Hope has served a 3-course Christmas Dinner with all the trimmings to hundreds of people in Leicester who are experiencing homelessness.
This year, they want to go one better and offer their guests (service users) not just one day of celebrations but 12 days of festive events over the month of December.
If you’re enjoying The Fosse Way, please consider donating to The Bridge’s Christmas appeal:
