Kicking About: Is the Writing on the Wall For Claudio Ranieri?
We’re into the second half of the season and the Leicester City team that turned water into football wine last year is struggling to stay above the relegation zone.
The thing about Cinderella stories is that sometime after midnight that carriage generally turns back into a pumpkin. That time might be now for Leicester. Sure, they’re still in the running for the Champion’s League (barely) and they’re not in the drop zone yet (barely, again), but it might be time to think of some countermeasures for this squad shall the unthinkable happen. Can Mahrez, Vardy and co. pull off a great escape on the heels of their great success last year?
Serge: Leicester City have today pledged their full support for and their board said they’re standing behind Claudio Ranieri. Which means he’s going to get fired by the end of February.
Cameron: Oh man, if this a La Liga situation… When a board of a Spanish club comes out and says “we stand behind our manager and he has our full support,” the clock starts. You take the under on two weeks until he’s fired.
Serge: I think that happened to David Moyes this year and he’s still around. That’s the outlier here.
Cam: The Premier League is a little bit more reliable in that regard than La Liga. In Spain the moment the board pledges their full support for you, you’re gone. Things are getting bad at Leicester right now.
Serge: It’s bad. I don’t think they fire him before the Champion’s League is over. I think he’s there for that, they’re not going risk any turnover or change of form going into both legs. Moving from there, if they drop out, I can see him being gone. If they focus on the Champion’s League in the next two to three weeks and they lose two more games in England, and they drop into the bottom of the table. It’s plausible that he’s gone in March.
Cam: Well, let’s spell out just how bad things have been to start the year. They haven’t scored a goal in 2017. They’re currently fifth from bottom. They are tied with Swansea and Middlesbrough who on 21 points. They are a point above Hull City who are 18th. So they are one point off of relegation. That’s a problem.
Serge: That’s a huge problem for a team that was so good for so long last year. I think the key thing here is that none of us really expected them to repeat. I think we all expected them upper half of the table, down in the middle.
Cam: I think I had them sixth in our early preview.
Serge: Yeah, but what do we know. Our predictions prove year in and year out that we don’t know what we’re talking about.
Cam: At worst I expected them to be in the lower part of the table sort of in the 11th or 12th range, somewhere where Southampton are right now. But they are well below that.
Serge: On top of that, when we went into 2017, what we said that given that they’re not going to have a run of Champion’s League games, expect Leicester to focus more on their Premiership form. That just hasn’t happened. They seem outmatched in every game they play.
Scoring is a huge issue, especially given the fact that they have… I don’t know.
Cam: That’s the biggest problem. They just haven’t been able to get goals. I also think a lot of that is just down to exhaustion. Vardy has played a lot of minutes. He’s played basically every single minute of last season. Played basically every single minute of this season, plus all their Champion’s League games, plus a number of England games at the Euros and all the prep that went into that. That’s a lot of games and this is not a deep squad. So at a certain point those miles start to add up in the tank.
Particularly for the guys who are expected to run. They play a very pace heavy style attack. Guys are expected to do a lot of running. At a certain point your body can’t do the job anymore. That’s where a lot of the issue is.
Serge: I agree. Especially because they play a very counter-attack style. They’ve missed Mahrez for a bit. They didn’t replace Kante. They did bring Musa and Slimani, but neither of them have really delivered what they expected them to do. Their biggest problem on top of not scoring is that they can’t defend as well as they did last year.
They play the same style of football that they have been, but they haven’t replicated it because they don’t have the players.
Cam: Even with the people they brought in from all their transfer fees from the winter window. It’s easier to talk about this in basketball terms — bringing new guys into the scheme takes time. That can often be a much longer process than we give team credit for. Even if those guys end up being that good, there’s still going to be a period where that’s not necessarily going to be the case right away.
I would be worried if I was a Leicester fan.
Serge: It’s a very serious moment for them. At this point you have to take everything seriously. If in the beginning of the season you can approach the Champion’s League group stage and say “we’re going to focus on this and then make up the Premiership deficit.” At this point you simply can’t let games drop. If anything, you drop in the Champion’s League. Because you know you’re not going that far.
Cam: You cut your losses and you say “this has been fun,” but on the other hand it’s one thing to say that we’re going to do that it’s a whole other thing to tell a group of extremely competitive players that they have to do that. Consciously or unconsciously a lot of it has been that I would certainly put a bit more effort into a Champion’s League game. I would certainly save my energy for a Champion’s League game and that would certainly be on my mind.
Serge: Then it comes down to you as a manager do you sit guys like Vardy and Mahrez in Europe or does that create an additional internal crisis where you have guys that want to play in these games?
Cam: I think the internal politics of that would be too messy. Granted, I don’t have a special view into what’s going on in Leicester, but my sense is that the risk of that creating internal feuds is a little bit too high.
Serge: They need to start winning and they need to start winning now. The rift between the bottom of the table and the middle is too big. It’s between those bottom five. There is not feasibly a team that can drop down and beat them.
They have a very important stretch coming up. They play teams in the relegation zone at least two out of their next three — Swansea and Hull — and they have to win both of those games. Liverpool and Arsenal, who knows, and then maybe they take a point from West Ham. And then Sunderland.
Cam: Barring an absolute almighty collapse from Bournemouth, that is the relegation fight. They have to beat Swansea. They have to beat those teams. They drew Middlesborough in January, but other than that… They have to beat the teams around them.
Even if the Premier League doesn’t do head to head records as the tie breaker. Just the simple fact that you’re denying points to teams around you is critically important.
Serge: And those are the games coming up. They have all four teams below them on the schedule. Some of them are gaining form. Swansea has won two. Sunderland is winning a bit more. Neither of those teams are going to lay down so it’s imperative to Leicester, especially because they get a very difficult stretch during their Champion’s League run. Specifically because they face Sevilla after Swansea, and then Arsenal and Hull before Sevilla. Those are two must win games around your UCL schedule. It’s going to be interesting to see how they shuffle that line-up that as you mention already is not very deep.
Cam: I think you gotta sit guys in the Arsenal game…
