The joy of football

Monday evening. I took my seat in the strange April evening sun. The stadium felt pale, drained of hope, bleached of purpose. So few people in that we could still read ‘Leicester City’ in white seats in the east stand opposite, 20 minutes before kick-off. It filled up but even once the whistle had gone the stadium was not full, not rocking; it was barely twitching.

No changes to the team, again. It’s hard not to feel that manager Ruud, out of his depth, has run out of ideas. I feel a bit sorry for the club’s social media admins and stadium announcers, who have to maintain their grating corporate cheeriness when they must know.

The pre-match rituals, going through the motions. The ‘Fearless’ poem, ‘Foxes Never Quit’, always felt like a hostage to fortune, and now it mocks us mercilessly in its sheer absurdity. I had seen us score no goals and concede 22 in the previous eight league matches, including the one away at Everton, and I don’t know what bit of ‘never quitting’ inspired that miserable record. Then the usual video of past glories, trophies, Champions League goals, competing at the top end of the table - not that long ago, but those memories might as well be mocking us from another century. Filbert Fox pretended to be cheerful walking round the flag bearers in the centre circle, as they waved with whatever enthusiasm they could muster. And we mostly ignored them. Then the usual flame throwers started, with a new variation with puffs of blue smoke which I don’t think I’ve seen before. The lights went off; darkness for a bit, which at least felt appropriate, and a light show. I don’t know why; it doesn’t seem to do any good. A team that was doing well wouldn’t need all this.

Newcastle: plenty of smiles as we remembered this fixture. The one in the Great Escape, ten years ago, when we scored in the first minute and they were pitiful and had two men sent off. The one the following season, when I parked next to an away fan and we walked to the stadium together - we were heading for the title and they were heading for relegation, so there wasn’t any animosity - and in Benítez’s first game as Toon manager, Okazaki scored that overhead kick from nowhere. Then in 2019, a few weeks before the 9-0, we beat them 5-0, for a brief period our biggest Premier League win (the goalscorers that day - Ricardo, Vardy and Ndidi - are all still with us). Two seasons later it was 4-0. They must have dreaded coming to the KP. No one does now.

Harvey Barnes was announced, his first return to play here, and there was a smattering of cheers. The Countesthorpe lad left when we last got relegated, and we don’t begrudge him that. I’m surprised to discover he scored 45 goals for us and is now aged 27 - he seems like one of those players who’s perpetually 22 and should be really good in a few years.

We knew that we were going to lose. I did hold out a faint hope that we might break the habit of the last few months and score a goal, though that would deny us the perverse triumph of becoming the first team in the history of the entire football league to lose eight consecutive home games without scoring (and duly we ticked off that record). For a team managed by a striker and captained by a striker, that’s astonishingly, extraordinarily, laughably bad.

Even if we somehow scored, or even more implausibly didn’t lose, we knew we’d be relegated. This is not the Great Escape of ten years ago, when we suddenly remembered how to be good late in the season. Or even the relegation of two years ago, when we had a much better team than now and some hope right until the end. We are just bad, in many ways, whatever happens now.

Sometimes, the end of ‘When You’re Smiling’, when the whistle’s about to go, can be inspiring. A stadium united in song, getting behind its team. This time it was dutiful; ‘the whole world laughs at you’. The players took the knee, and a few fans ritually booed, for whatever reason.

Then we almost scored in the first 15 seconds, Vardy saved from a tight angle. And we had nearly two whole minutes of thinking we might be pleasantly surprised before Murphy scored in front of the Kop, so early that the chap behind me hadn’t even started coaching (‘time!’). Another ten minutes and Murphy had scored again (at least he was in my FPL team), putting in the rebound after an audacious and nearly brilliant strike by Schär from the halfway line hit the crossbar. The empty bathtub of hope emptied even more; a few desultory boos echoed. After half an hour Barnes, the returning near-hero scored a third, and ostentatiously did not celebrate, and got some applause for that, though I don’t think we’d have minded if he had.

We had a few chances - at one point the ball pinged between the posts, somehow failing to cross the line, and was then flagged offside, just in case - but it never felt like we were actually going to get on the scoresheet. Any Leicester player who gets near goal these days must feel a sense of dread, like they know they’re not going to finish, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it struck me on Monday more than it has before that this looks like an under-coached team: there is no coherence or pattern to the play in midfield. So many times the Leicester players tried and failed to find each other, without the ability to predict where their team-mates were going to be. Sometimes they don’t even try, and pass the ball backwards. Partly that must be a lack of quality and/or confidence, but it’s also a group of players who don’t really seem to know where they’re supposed to be or how they’re supposed to get the ball forward. And those problems magnify each other: don’t score, lose confidence; lack confidence, don’t score.

So we get the ball into midfield, then lose it through some error or another, and then at will the Newcastle players cut through us, showing what a confident, skilful, well-coached team can do, pouring forward. Our defence is scrambled, and Van Nistelrooy stands there looking elegantly helpless. I’m sure he’s doing his best, but it’s plainly not good enough, and he must know it. The players must know it too. I don’t get the sense they’ve given up but this must be professionally grim for them.

I thought RvN was a risk worth taking when we appointed him in November, and until recently I wasn’t sure how much of this was his responsibility - it’s tempting to let him off the hook given the state of the club when he joined - but on Monday I reflected that even after several months there are simply no green shoots visible to tantalise us about what he could do in better circumstances; it’s really hard to see what he’s brought to the team beyond being chiselled and articulate. He seems to be playing a bad hand badly. The rumours that are starting to swirl about new managers being considered for next season (Russell Martin? hmm) suggest the club have come to the same conclusion.

Of course this is what taking a risk means: when a club appoints an unproven coach they might get an Enzo, like we did last season, or they might get a Ruud awakening. You win some, you lose some. Or rather, at the moment, we lose some, we lose some more. On the whole I still think I’d prefer that to us getting on the merry-go-round of usual managerial suspects, who have lost count of the number of clubs they’ve previously failed with, but when it goes wrong it really goes wrong, as we can see.

Half time approached, and some home fans made their way early to their beers: ‘cheerio!’ mocked the away end, but mostly they were enjoying life too much to try and rile us (and they know well what it’s like to support a club when it’s in a bad way). A pathetic half-time notification arrived on my phone from the club’s app: ‘Plenty to do in the second half’. Well, yes.

After half time, there was a formation change, with Daka replaced - he had been the subject, again, of much frustrated fan-ire for his wayward habit of passing to non-existent team-mates. He’s fun when the team’s in form and he can nick some nice goals, but his effervescent smile and sometimes eccentric choices now seem out of place. Kristiansen was hooked too, perhaps on the grounds we didn’t really need two left backs.

The second half was - these things are all relative - a bit better. We didn’t concede again, and if we didn’t score either we looked almost lively at times and exerted some pressure, with endless corners to fail to do much with (though in injury time Vardy came close with a chance he’d once have put away in his sleep); but every time a Leicester player got near the goal, the weight of everything still seemed to bear down on them. Apparently we had 58% possession overall but only seven shots, and only two on target, and that sums things up.

There was one bright moment in the 74th minute when 15 year old Jeremy Monga was brought on for his first senior appearance, to become the second youngest player in Premier League history (his number 93 shirt-front had a blank front - he was too young to advertise whatever it is our sponsor does). He’s clearly an exceptional talent, and had the confidence to show us some of his skills as he played with the Newcastle defenders from the right wing. The fairy-tale goal didn’t come, but he gave us something to cheer, and I’m sure we’ll see a lot more of him in the years ahead, hopefully at Leicester at least for a while.

I stuck it out to the bitter end, as usual, despondent as this team makes me; though many had understandably left before the final whistle, which brought boos for yet another lacklustre defeat. So now that’s 25 goals I’ve seen conceded to none scored in the last nine league games. As we left, the announcer warned us of a coach fire outside the stadium, which seemed like a horribly apt metaphor. Relegation was certain before and now it’s even more certain, if that’s possible. In the next few weeks it will be mathematically certain. I’ll be back next season, for certain, feeling broadly pessimistic, though I’m hopeful we will at least be able to score some goals in the Championship, even if - as I expect - it will be harder than last time.

There are three more home games to endure this season, against the champions and the other two relegated teams (Southampton are already down, Ipswich will be soon), so we may even get something from those matches. But the end of the season can’t come soon enough. Then the summer. Then we go again.