BORO V Leicester City

Riverside Stadium

3.00pm, Saturday 11th November, 2023

2.00am, Sunday 12th November, 2023 (Sydney time)

It has been fascinating to see the different approaches that have taken by the various authors of the previews. When I wrote the Southampton preview, I was attracted by their transfer activity in recent years and that led into the article. Other previews have roamed far and wide from a decision to investigate the history of our opponents shirts, to information about the town or the seductive quality of mountain-climbing and it is getting quite intimidating to have to follow such great stuff.

When it comes to Leicester, I believe that most of the readers of the blog are well aware of Leicester and their recent successes in winning the Premier League in 2015/2016 and the FA Cup in 2020/21. You do not need me to go over this well-trodden ground except to underline that this recent record of success at the highest level does, of course, make everyone ask the obvious question; ‘what the hell are they doing in the Championship?’ There may be some interesting answers to this question but I do not really see it as relevant to our match and, instead, I have decided to dig into this match from three different viewpoints: -

1.       Leicester’s squad, how good is it, how has it changed from last year and how should we put their start to the season into perspective

2.       How are Leicester playing and what can BORO do to best give themselves a chance of getting something from the Leicester game and, realistically, what should they be trying to achieve.

3.       What is the relationship between the Premier League and the Championship and how should that be approached by clubs hovering between the two

However, having said that I am not going to dwell on the past, there is one element in our history with Leicester which still tears at my soul even after 26 years. I am, of course, referring to Sunday April 6, 1997 when Emile Heskey stole the League Cup from us. To allow us to move on to current events, I am just going to borrow a brief extract from Wikipedia which succinctly describes the game as follows

The 1997 Football League Cup Final was played between Middlesbrough and Leicester City. The first game, at Wembley Stadium on Sunday 6 April 1997, ended in a 1–1 draw after extra time. Fabrizio Ravanelli opened the scoring only for Leicester's Emile Heskey to equalise in the last minute of extra time. Heskey was fortunate to be on the field, having committed what was a bookable foul on Boro captain Nigel Pearson after already being booked. Leicester won the replay, and their second League Cup, in the game played at Hillsborough Stadium on 16 April 1997 with another extra-time goal, this time from Steve Claridge.

Given that most of the readers of this blog are ‘of a certain age’, I apologise for bringing up the annus horribilis of 1997 but almost any encounter between two sides brings up echoes from the past and it is hard not speculate on what might have happened if we hadn’t lost two Cup Finals and been relegated on an unfair points deduction. This final was the first foot to fall – assuming that you can find an appropriate comparison with three feet. The main comfort is to remember that a League Cup Final victory was in our future and now this year we can look forward to a pre-Christmas quarter final with a trip to Port Vale standing between us and a place in the semi-final.

Leicester - The squad, the summer changes and their first fifteen games

Plenty of people are saying that Leicester has the best squad ever seen in the Championship. I’m not going to go back years to check this out but I will set out some numbers that show how strong the squad is. Again, I am using Transfermarkt and apologies again that the figures are in Euros. However, 1 Euro = 87p so it is getting nearer and nearer to 1:1 which will make it easier for comparisons if not for shopping on holiday (unless you happen to be one of our Europe-based bloggers). In fact, as I am heading to the UK for Christmas, a declining pound should save me a few bob….if the Australian $ can stop going down as well.

Transfermarkt today (or last week to be precise) values the current Leicester squad at Eu252 million. Included are the following players at Eu10 million or more.

Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall  30m   Most valuable in division
Wout Faes              20m
Kelechi Iheanacho      18m
Wilfred N’Didi         18m
James Justin           16m
Patson Daka            15m
Callum Doyle           15m   Loan from Man City
Cesari Casadei         12m   Loan from Chelsea
Harry Winks            12m
Harry Soutar           12m
Ricardo Pereira        10m

This is a pretty impressive group of players with masses of Premier League experience but it gets even more overwhelming when you add in the following players valued between Eu5.00 and Eu9.00 million

Stephy Mavdidi         9m
Conor Coady            8m   Current England squad
Dennis Praet           7m   Current Belgian squad
Mads Hermansen         7m   Current Danish squad
Yunus Akgun            7m   Loan from Galatasary
                            Current Turkish squad
Issahaku Fatawu        6m   Loan from Sporting
                            Current Ghana U-23
Hamza Choudhury        5m
Danny Ward             5m   Current Welsh squad
Daniel Iversen         5m   Ex-Danish squad

I could go on to list the ex-internationals who, whilst valued at lower levels (Vardy, Vestergaard to name just a couple), would walk into most Championship squads. So, how does this rank them?. Well, here are some comparisons

1.       The next highest valued squads are Southampton at Eu218.8 million and Leeds at Eu204.9 million.

2.       The most valuable of the non-relegated teams are Norwich valued at Eu73.05 million and Sunderland valued at Eu71.00 million

3.       Middlesbrough are ranked 7th at Eu66.75 million. That means that Leicester’s top three players are said to be worth more than our whole squad and they have 16 players valued as equal or more valuable than our top-valued player, Hayden Hackney. Some good news for us is that one of our next most valuable players according to Transfermarkt is Sam Greenwood, at Eu5.00 million. That Pds1.5 million option looks to be pretty good value.

To round up their finances, over the summer they received transfer fees of Eu106.05 million (Maddison, Harvey Barnes etc) and offloaded from their salary expenditure five highly paid players (Tielemanns, Sayuncu, Amartey, Perez and Jonny Evans). Their expenditure on new players was only Eu43.6 million plus the salary cost of four incoming loan players (who have a current market value of Eu40 million).

So, what has this squad of stars delivered? So far, in their first fifteen Championship games they have W 13 L 2 F 29 A9. They have also won two Carabao Cup games before going down 3-1 to Liverpool. Even with their loss to Leeds on Friday night, 39 points out of a possible 45 is the best start ever in the Championship in its current structure. Second and third are Sheffield United (05/06) and Bournemouth (21/22), both with 37. Worth pointing out is that Ipswich will move to 38 points out of 45 and second spot all-time if they win their game in hand against Rotherham.

Leicester have won their first seven away games and no team prior had even won their first six. If they were to continue at this pace they would achieve close to 120 points. The current record is Reading with 106 points in 2005/2006.

You will also notice that they have conceded 0.6 goals per game and never two or more in one game and are one goal away from scoring 2.0 goals per game.

My conclusion is that YES, they have a fair claim to be the best squad/team ever to play in the Championship and have up to twenty players who would be playing for any other Championship team. However, there are some interesting angles for us to look at.

Leicester – how do they play and what should BORO do against them.

Leicester has a first-time manager Enzo Maresca who comes from the ‘Guardiola academy’ of possession football and given that pedigree and with so many quality players it would seem reasonable to expect them to have a lot of the ball. It is, however, interesting to look at the three games that they have lost; Hull and Leeds in the league and Liverpool in the Carabao Cup.

The game against Hull seems to support the possession theory and looks like the classic ‘smash and grab’ story. Leicester had two-thirds of the possession and 21 shots to Hull’s 7. However, out of those 21 shots, only one was on target. Hull scored with a deflected shot.

The game against Liverpool seems to have been a different pattern. Liverpool had 57% possession and 29 shots to just 4 from Leicester. The Leicester local reports say that Leicester tried to play out from the back and fell foul of Liverpool’s very effective high press. Maybe that suggests one way to approach Leicester; press them as they play out. However, basing your approach on Liverpool may not be the wisest course and we know that there is a big risk doing this as once the press gets beaten the pressing team can be very vulnerable to teams who carry the ball well. Leicester are full of those. We also know that Boro are susceptible to players driving through their midfield. The prospect of Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall and others running wild is not a pleasant one.

My suggestion is to consider another approach and, surprisingly enough, we have the evidence of the QPR game. Ainsworth-ball may give a hint to a vulnerability. In the QPR game, Leicester had 79% possession but only 16 shots with just 5 on target. QPR with just 21% possession managed 9 shots with 3 on target. To give a feel of the game, Leicester completed 762 accurate passes to just 142 by QPR. Did anyone say windscreen-wiper football?

These numbers give a hint that Leicester are not quite as potent in possession as their stats suggest. Are they perhaps susceptible to the kind of tactics that Coventry or Millwall have used against Boro? In support of this, I found an article in The Athletic that was published last week, before the Leeds game. I’m attaching the link below and am hoping that everyone can open it. I tried at home with different email identities and it seems to work. Please let me know if it doesn’t.

https://theathletic.com/5002004/2023/10/28/leicester-defence-excellent-press/

This article suggests that Leicester’s strength comes from their ability to defend rather than their ability to score and they do this by exerting a very strong high press even to the extent that central defenders such as Vestergaard can be seen pressing midfield players deep in the opposition half. Using this method – which is not a million miles away from Pep’s tactic of winning the ball back as quickly as possible – Leicester force teams to play close to their own goal and vastly reduce the chance of conceding goals. Here is a quote from Maresco.

“(The press) is not just about the defenders,” he said. “We changed for Southampton. You can see in all the games that we have played since we are always trying to press high and play in the opposition’s half and to recover the ball there. We haven’t had to drop deep often but when the opponent is good, we need to drop and be solid and defend.”

So, what does this mean. We know that Boro like to play it out but can be vulnerable to losing the ball and having a team run at them. Is this a game in which we try to ‘play our way’ almost as if we are taking an exam to see how good we are. The alternative is to bypass the Leicester press by waiting for them to push up and then playing longer balls into the channels. This is not our usual style but may turn Leicester round. Of course, giving away possession will make it harder for us to score and we must ask ourselves what we want from this game or, more importantly, what we feel we can realistically achieve.

I wrote this paragraph last week and we now have the evidence of their second home loss to Leeds, last Friday night. Leeds are a very good team as can be seen from their position in the table and the value of their squad. However, they too chose to play some ‘rope-a-dope’ and sat back when Leicester had the ball. They created a Millwall/Coventry style mid-block and very rarely allowed themselves to be caught in possession in such a way that Leicester could use their powerful high-speed counter-attack or their high press to win the ball in dangerous positions. The result was a game in which Leicester had 65% possession but only 1 shot on target (9 off target) and that was a header from a deep cross in the last minute of added time. Leeds managed 6 shots on target (5 off target) from some carefully selected forward moves.

In fact, both sides had extremely good wide players and because of the Leeds low block and the Leicester press, midfield was congested and so the battle between the wide men was key. Leicester were forced wide but do have two real live-wires in Mavdidi and Fatawu and Boro have to find a way to cope in an area that has not always been one of our strengths.

 So, do we want to see how good we are in midfield or do we want to play more carefully in the hope of upsetting their rhythm. To put it another way, do we believe that Hackney and the rest of our midfield can hold their own against the quality that Leicester can put out. I’m interested to hear what people think but there is clearly an option to play it conservatively – at least in the first half - and then see where we are. Maybe even start with a three at the back, three in midfield and wing-backs to give some cover in the wider spaces.

Relationship between Premier league and Championship. What is our target?

Leicester’s domination when put together with Leeds in third and Southampton in forth does seem to underline the strength of the relegated sides. They have much more valuable and deeper squads and must be considered favourites for promotion. However, Ipswich who have a squad valued at only Eu35 million are playing brilliantly and have the second best start ever to a Championship campaign. In fact, there appear to be different factors at play. Watching squads struggle at the start of a season is an illustration of the dangers of having too much squad turnover. Ipswich, on the other hand, have maintained a lot of their squad and they appear very comfortable playing under the instruction of a top-class manager. Whether they can maintain this pace will be evident as we get into the tough winter months but we should not forget that they have had the benefit of a full season playing together to hone their system. What would happen were they to get promoted is another question.

On the other hand, we should also be aware of the terrible results of the promoted sides this season. Everyone thought that they might struggle but not to this extent. Last time they were promoted under Chris Wilder, Sheffield United surprised everyone. This time round they have 4 points. Burnley have the same. Luton are one point better with only Bournemouth currently keeping them company. Is this another example of the Norwich/Fulham approach which involves not overspending, banking parachute and other income until a club is strong enough to make the jump and hang on. Luton seem to be following that pattern and maybe it makes the most sense for them to repeat the yo-yo a few times.

A bigger question for me is whether there is any fun in being one of the five worst sides in the Premier League. Is that what the supporters want or is it always a case of saying ‘this time we’ll make the transition and become a successful Premier League side”. To put the question another way – would we prefer to win the League Cup or get promotion?

There are some questions here to be considered but, coming back to the Leicester game, what is the consensus. Are we good enough to take them on or do we practice defending and counter-attacking?

I’m thinking of a 0-0 draw but I’d love to see us do better.