Leicester show they lack the stomach for a fight as Liverpool inflict more misery at King Power
Leicester 0-3 Liverpool (Jones 33′, 36′, Alexander-Arnold 71′)
KING POWER STADIUM – Throughout the entirety of Leicester City’s 3-0 home defeat to Liverpool, foreboding storm clouds gathered above the King Power Stadium.
Some of us prefer our symbolism to be a little more subtle, but perhaps the time for understatement is over anyway. Leicester are not a poor football team, but a football team playing desperately poor football. Unless those clouds clear in both of their next two games, they will be relegated to the Championship seven years after the greatest moment in their history. Anything else seems unlikely.
There are other symbols of this great discontent. At half-time, two tracksuited gentlemen walk around the edge of the pitch and throw free t-shirts into the home end; this time at least two of them were returned to the pitch with feeling. Home supporters chanted “We’ve had a shot” with a few minutes of normal time remaining.
For 20 continuous minutes after half-time, the away end bounced and sang Robert Firmino’s chant in honour of his impending departure because there was nothing else to worry about. The only thing that paused that repeated loop was Trent Alexander-Arnold curling home a free-kick routine before a Leicester player had even noticed that it had been taken. They waited a good three minutes before the Firmin-ode continued.
A lot was made of the mistakes Leicester committed last summer, with enforced austerity making transfer market improvements difficult and the club’s own lethargy making it non-existent. But for this, the club’s biggest home game in at least half a decade, all three of their January transfer window signings were left out of the team. Apparent solutions to obvious problems are now not deemed fit for purpose. The only summer signing, Wout Faes, has been more hindrance than help of late.
“The time is now,” tweeted Leicester’s official account to accompany one pre-match warm-up routine. With the greatest of respect, guys, the time was about three months ago. Leicester have not suddenly tumbled into this nightmare. They started badly and have got worse. They arrived at a period of the season when they needed to pick up points and have won one of 13 matches. They have lost all nine of their matches against teams in the top five and they account for a quarter of all the points that Southampton have gained.
And at clubs such as these, when everything feels as if it is broken or breaking, bad news arrives more quickly than good. A bright start, at least in comparison with the bare minimum expectations, is replaced by a two-goal deficit in the blink of an eye. And then the boos reign down from the stands and nobody really remembers when they felt like doing anything else.
Leicester’s slight misfortune is that they faced a Liverpool team that has shed its skin. They made do with possession in the first third of the match but scored twice in four minutes to kill the contest and the mood. Both times, Curtis Jones produced a smart, composed finish. Both times, he was aided by defenders who failed to track, close down, spot the danger and held a squiffy offside line. The returning Jonny Evans, his first league start since October, was intended to be the magic elixir. Evans knows they are miserable now.
Jurgen Klopp will continue to stress that Liverpool are the underdogs in their late push for a pass to the Champions League party, and he is right: they are relying upon results elsewhere. But that misses the point. It is only a month or so since Klopp looked weary and thoughts inevitably flickered with the concern that the next era of Liverpool may be beyond his energy reserves. Instead, he and his players vowed to make the best of the worst and the freedom to attack the schedule free from pressure. They have now won seven consecutive league games and you bet they are keeping an eye on Newcastle vs Brighton this Thursday.
Leicester losing is no shock; Liverpool have better starters and better substitutes. But that misses the point too. There are ways that relegated teams, even those who have underperformed abjectly between August and April, can suffer their fate. If there is heart, fight, battle and any other synonym for spirit you can muster, forgiveness comes quickly and love and loyalty lingers on.
But Leicester have displayed roughly none of that over their last two games, when a pressing situation became an emergency. They shipped five goals at Fulham and then crumpled to the floor after the first punch against Liverpool. When Alexander-Arnold’s goal curled a foot away from Daniel Iversen’s glove, many hundreds of people stood up and turned to leave. They will come again, no doubt. But sometimes you just need a break for the doom.
Every one of those season ticket holders understands that the squad needed refreshing and the delays were motivated by recruitment mistakes of the past. But that presents every player with two choices: fight doubly hard to show that relegation will break a small part of you or acquiesce to your fate. Unfortunately, even the most understanding of match-going fans cannot defend that.
