Assessing why defending champion Leicester City has skidded so close to the relegation spots may start with the loss of N’Golo Kante, but many more factors are in play.
WatchingKante storm about midfield as current leader Chelsea racks up points surely stings Foxes’ fans and compels pundits to point in his direction. Leicester sold him for $40 million and that islooking like an outright steal; the Foxes also spent $75 million to upgrade their squad, but while advancing to the Champions League round of 16 they have stumbled badly in the domestic race.
Perhaps Kante was the antidote his teammates needed for their errant ways; since his departure Jamie Vardy and Riyad Mahrez can’t find the net, Shinji Okazaki can’tseem to dribble past anybody, Danny Drinkwater looks lost, and defenders Wes Morgan and Robert Huth are missing tackles and misjudging aerial balls game after game.
Inother words, Leicester looks much the same as it did two seasons ago, when relegation seemed a certainty until then-manager Nigel Pearson steered the Foxes to seven wins in the last nine games.Still, regressing to the mean — if that is what’s happening — would apply in the Champions League as in the Premiership, and even if manager Claudio Ranieri and his players are focusingon the European matches, one would think enough points could be garnered domestically to lodge Leicester City in the middle slots rather than in the bottom third.
A story in The Guardian
Yet it’s hard to imagine Leicester falling apart last year had Kante beeninjured for a short time. (A long-term injury to any of the players cited here or keeper Kasper Schmeichel could have cast the season in a very different light.) So Kante can be regarded asvital cog in the Ranieri system in its storybook championship season but so can many other players.
Leicester didn’t get a creampuff draw in the Champions League yet was given a decentchance to finish at least second amongst Porto, Copenhagen, and Club Brugge. Any other Premier League champion would have been expected to negotiate this route rather easily and the Foxes did justthat, winning four games and tying one to top the group and move into the knockout phase against Sevilla against which, again, they won’t be regarded lightly.
So Leicester has shown itcan beat good teams without Kante despite its domestic struggles. And there’s no question Premier League teams are gunning for the Leicester as they would for any other defending champion. TheFoxes’ collective drop in performance, an inevitability for a club so modest, and ramped-up opponents has slammed shut the narrow gap in drive and edge by which Leicester claimed so many PremierLeague points last year.
And if Kante had not left, would Leicester have been projected among the leading contenders? The fairy-tale, one-off sheen of last season didn’t burnish the clubbadge into that of a superclub, or an ambitious climber ready to take its place among the giants. Quite the opposite.
Ranieri insists the squad are still bonded and determined but amiserable 3-0 home loss to Burnley — its fourth straight league defeat — last week edged Leicester City closer to the bottom three, and if results go against it this week it will enter the dreadeddrop zone. Leicester City is in 16th place, one of three teams with 21 points. Sunderland and Crystal Place are on the bottom with 19 points and Hull City, in the highest relegation place (18th) has20 points.
Much the same group of players clawed their way out of a similar hole two years ago but one man who was not part of the heroic accomplishment is not around this time either:Kante’s only season at Leicester was its stupendous championship run, and now his former teammates have another steep hill to climb without him.
The only difference here is that the team is two years older than the team two years ago. Morgan, Huth and Fuchs are showing their age, and the back line breaks down more often without Kante in front. The rest of the clubs are on to Vardy now, too, sticking closer to him and making it more difficult for him to snag through balls. I suspect that Ranieri will find a way for them to squeak through. After that, the Thai owners will have to spend some of the $40M they got for Kante and then some to ensure that Leicester can stay somewhere in the middle of the back. With more skilled targets at Chelsea, Kante’s passing looks sharper and is a more frequent threat than last year at Leicester.
Problem with Leicester is their high end strikers are not scoring and their backline has gotten slow.. Ben Myers is on the money with this..
Agree that his absence is far from the only problem, but was it PG who was trying to “debunk” the importance of the defensive midfield role by specifically pointing to how LFC were fine without Kante and CFC were not much better with him? Another head-scratcher from Gardner.
History repeats itself. Many successful teams of the past underestimated their defensive midfielders and suffered after selling them. Examples: Vierra at Arsenal, Mekellele at Real Madrid, Alonso at Liverpool and now Kante.
And by the way, I am afraid the Red Bull New York also might suffer after sending Dax McCarty to Chicago.