Two crowd moments sum up Leicester City plight as Ruud van Nistelrooy exposes transfer disaster
Talking points from Leicester City’s 3-0 defeat to Manchester United, looking at their survival hopes, the defensive woes, the lack of goals, transfers, and season tickets
When Leicester City lost their sixth straight home match to nil, against Brentford last month, Ruud van Nistelrooy said they had a “huge mountain to climb”.
At the time, they were just two points behind Wolves. Now, after their seventh straight home defeat to nil, they are nine points adrift and with three fewer games to claw back the difference.
The mountain’s getting bigger and City are stuck at base camp. They’re not getting to the summit.
While van Nistelrooy said he and his team would not give up until survival was mathematically impossible, his voice was drained of belief. He sounded like a beaten man.
And with good reason. City have only claimed seven points in his 16 matches, and, with their goal difference, they now have to get 10 in nine fixtures and hope Wolves lose all of their remaining games.
Winning matches means scoring goals and not conceding them. But City have only managed to find the net in five of van Nistelrooy’s 16 outings and have not kept a single clean sheet.
Their next four fixtures are against three sides hoping to qualify for the Champions League in Manchester City, Newcastle, and Brighton, and then a side hoping to win the Premier League in Liverpool.
This club has produced miracles in the past, at both ends of the table, and everybody has that small part of them that wants to believe something remarkable is possible.
Collapse in confidence sees defensive instincts forgotten
After the defeat to Chelsea, van Nistelrooy said City looked like a “proper” team, something he’d not described them as before then.
And so it wasn’t a surprise that, for the first time, he named an unchanged line-up to face Manchester United.
Unfortunately, City stopped looking like a proper team. No proper team concedes the first goal like they did.
It was a compendium of errors. Conor Coady, as the man at the heart of the back five, can’t rush forward, he has to be the reliable stalwart that’s always got the game in front of him.
If he does rush forward, he can’t lose the ball and Luke Thomas can’t go with him. City were then two defenders down.
Boubakary Soumare had shown the awareness to fill the gap but had not done so urgently enough so as to set his feet. He failed to intercept.
It left Wout Faes to defend Rasmus Hojlund by himself. Instead of trying to stop him, he rolled out the red carpet for the Dane, allowing him to waltz in and end his 21-game goal drought.
It was a disaster from Faes. It seemed he was guarding against a cut-back from Hojlund, but that only exposed his lack of awareness, as there was no other United player around.
But even if there was a United player in support, Hojlund is still the dangerman. He’s the one on the ball running into the box. He’s a number nine too. They don’t pass often.
Yet Faes’ defensive instincts completely deserted him. When a team has not kept a clean sheet for six months, perhaps defenders overthink those situations.
