Playing with fire: Leicester City lost the battle

I’d known from that moment although in all honesty, I hadn’t anticipated quite so much quietly competent play, hope and cruel despair over the course of the ninety minutes.

You see, although we’re bona fide Leicester City supporters (myself since the last desperate days of the Pleat era in the early ‘90’s, my son, due to the slightly unfortunate timing of his birth, since the 2016/17 season) we live in Yorkshire – slap bang in the centre of a Leeds United supporting heartland.

Jack’s friend Archie and all his family are Leeds fans. The U14’s Sunday league football team he plays for is run by a Leeds supporter and around half the lads in the team support the Whites – as do a good proportion of his school mates.

So, I’m sorry everybody. I know I shouldn’t have allowed this to happen. I know by the rules of football supporterdom that by not insisting Jack hunker down and watch the match in a hermetically sealed bunker at home, under siege with only me for company, I am as culpable for our loss last night as any combination of visually challenged linesmen, profligate chance spurning and after you Claude defending.

I also blame Carley by the way – one of the Leeds supporting mums from Jack’s football team Whatsapp group who decided to take her dog for a walk after 75 minutes of the match because, in her words, “Leeds never win when I’m in the house.”

Of course, I’m sure like many of you on Saturday morning, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I’ve seen this before. “Yes”, I hear many of you cry, “against Middlesbrough last week!” Or what about in both the recent matches against Ipswich?

But even this doesn’t quite get to the nub of it. Friday night didn’t just feel like a cruel bolt of gross misfortune inflicted upon us from nowhere. It felt far more systemic than that.

It felt, in the words of Agent Smith, somehow inevitable Mr Anderson. Like the streets ahead capacity of Leicester City to manage and control the midfield and consequently the tempo of the match for the first 80 minutes, the insouciant ease with which we carved out gilt-edged chance after chance to bury our opponents in the second half and the team’s casual acceptance (admirable though this was) of the catastrophically bad linesman’s call for Daka’s disallowed goal, were actually all just part of Leeds United’s grand masterplan to take Zion for the umpteenth time this season.

It was only later that I started to piece this together. (should I say, took the red pill?) It came after a text exchange with another mate – a Toon-supporting Geordie called Baz who used to manage Jack’s Sunday league side. “Why did you take your left winger off?” he quizzed. “How many chances do you need to finish them off?” he wondered. “Totally incompetent linesman!” he opined / empathised. “Oh well”, I responded eventually. “I suppose there’s no panic – we’re still six points clear.”

And that’s when it hit me. That thing about having seen it all before.

I’d just texted a 55-year-old Newcastle United supporter to tell him I remain relatively unconcerned about my team’s dwindling lead at the top of the table heading into the final couple of months of the season. Oh, God….

But the truth is that even this wasn’t what I meant really.

I remember once watching a programme with Doctor Robert Winston talking about the role instinct and intuition play in keeping us safe. One of the examples he gave was that of a senior fireman (in Leicester coincidentally) who had saved his crew by the skin of their teeth by insisting they pull out of a burning building in the nick of time before it exploded in a fireball. “How had he known the danger they were in?” the viewers were asked to ponder. Especially since the firefighting crews on the ground inside the building had protested over the radio that they’d got the fire under control.

What Winston explained was that as the senior fireman monitored the situation from outside, he was subconsciously comparing that fire with every other fire he’d attended. Based on his experience, we were told, he’d concluded something was wrong – this fire was not behaving like any other he’d encountered and it made him feel uneasy – so uneasy in fact that he insisted his crew pull out of the building thereby saving their lives.

Winston later explained that what the fireman had sensed without fully understanding the implications was that the fire was burning very quietly and with a funny colour flame and, perhaps most crucially, the smoke was pouring into rather than out of the windows: all apparent precursors to what the British fire service term a Flashover, perhaps more commonly known by its American term Backdraft. An explosion. Of sorts.

I got to thinking that subconsciously, we were all comparing Friday night’s match with every other football match we’ve watched. In my case it led me to one particular match – within which there was one particular incident that I recalled.

It was the game against Manchester City in December 2016 that we won 4-2 having been 4-0 up after 80 minutes. This was the Manchester City of early Guardiola.

Forget the result, forget the four we scored and the two we conceded. Forget the fact that this was Manchester City playing against us, the reigning English champions – actually no, don’t forget that. Don’t ever forget that!

The incident I’m referring to was the spectacle of John Stones becoming so flustered whilst attempting to maintain Guardiola’s possession doctrine that at one stage he gently passed the ball out of play for a corner rather than simply smash the thing up field.

Wow, I remember thinking at the time, these are the lengths to which Guardiola insists his players should go to maintain possession. Even when struggling and boxed in on your own byline. Nay, scrub that: especially when struggling and boxed in on your own byline.

And this is when it properly hit home. That’s what we were doing last night. That’s what Vestergaard’s strange non-clearance was all about for Leeds’ equalizer (okay perhaps I’m being slightly generous there – but you get my point). That’s why James Justin didn’t simply outmuscle Summerville and lump the ball out of play for a throw during a second half tussle, thereby allowing Summerville the opportunity to turn him and afford Leeds a half chance.

Maresca’s mantra is not just to maintain possession when we happen to have it or fortuitously obtain it, it is to proactively seek possession in the tackle and in the most challenging areas of the pitch. It looks, and at times is, incredibly risky and sometimes we’re not getting the balance of when to revert to smashing it into the stands quite right. Maybe this is because with the way we play and players at our disposal, doing so and shutting up shop would be easier said than done?

But Maresca’s bet (and as former assistant manager of an Under 12’s Sunday league side I feel I’m well qualified to say this – I’m with him) is that by affording us opportunities to break defensive lines, even when 100 yards from the opposition’s goal, the overall risk reward balance of his approach is more than a little favourable.

The table suggests that he’s got a point. On the many occasions it goes well our team purrs like the smoothest of Rolls-Royces and on occasions our play is a sublime, irresistible ballet. At other times our attempts to play this way remind us of our own abject inability to screw and spoon the ball clear of our penalty area during primary school matches.

Perhaps last night was so frustrating because it was both – a lot of the former and just enough of the latter to turn an evening of real promise into a minor disaster. We’d completely outthought and outplayed the newly self-anointed “best team in the league” (as Leeds have rather fancifully become known round these parts having recently beaten Rotherham, Swansea and Plymouth to draw within nine points of the league leaders – whoever they are).

We ground them pretty much to an impotent standstill. But then following hot on the heels of the sublime comes an unfortunate and slightly predictable dose of the ridiculous. Tell you what Leeds, let’s make this a bit more interesting, have an equaliser. Enjoy that? Why not have another?

So congratulations Leeds: to win 3-1 having been 2-0 down midway through the second half is no mean feat. You won both battles this season but, perhaps just like Guardiola knew on that night in December 2016, I remain convinced Maresca and his men are still winning the war.