Premier League Hangover: Man City Caught in a Fox Trap as Leicester March On

Danny Drinkwater looked like a wet dog too exhausted to fetch another stick from the sea. Sprawled across Manchester City’s slick green canvas while the heavens opened above to Biblical proportions locals would call a shower, it was as though Muhammad Ali had caught him unawares with a right-hand lead.  

The game was only 13 minutes old. Leicester City were 1-0 up against a Manchester City side that had won seven of its previous eight games at home.

When midfield anchor Drinkwater stole possession on the edge of his own box, he’d done his job. In any other side, he would draw breath, maybe sneak a furtive look over to the bench in the hope of an appreciative gesture from his manager. 

This Leicester City side is top of the Premier League because it’s not like other sides.

Instead, after giving a simple pass to Riyad Mahrez, he kept running. First he drew level with his team-mate and then ran past him and then past his marker and then past City’s back four. By the time he reached Mahrez’s return pass on the back of a 90-yard dash, he was in possession of a teetotaller’s legs after a night on the ale with Oliver Reed.

Joe Hart smothered a lethargic prod for goal easily at his near post. Drinkwater collapsed in a heap.

It’s the type of incident that might not have even made the game’s highlights reel. It certainly won’t make the cut when the most anomalous of seasons is condensed into a montage, even if Wes Morgan has his hands on the Premier League’s finest silver in the final shot.

It should, though.

Sure, Leicester’s 3-1 win on Saturday that takes them five points clear at the summit with 13 games remaining owed much to Mahrez’s bandy-legged brilliance and Jamie Vardy’s willingness to chase bigger lost causes than a diving party searching for Titanic survivors, but just as important as either leading man is a supporting cast ready to sacrifice themselves for the bigger picture. 

On Saturday, every facet that has made Claudio Ranieri’s side the story of the season was in perfect order. Like a watch stripped back to its mechanisms, it was possible to see how each cog works in unison.

Without the ball, there’s a militant discipline to their shape that makes finding gaps between the lines a needle-in-a-haystack job. They sat so deep at times at the weekend that one Manchester City supporter had to get a steward involved as N’Golo Kante had taken his seat in the stand. Ultimately. though, the home side’s 65.8 per cent possession and 267 more passes counted for the square root of nothing.

Leicester’s condensing of space certainly stumped Raheem Sterling on his recall, as Manuel Pellegrini reverted back to his trusted 4-3-2-1 formation after using a 4-4-2 in victory at Sunderland in midweek. The England man has now gone six games and counting with neither a goal nor assist to his name.

When they win the ball back, there’s almost a pathological intensity to the way Leicester plough forward on the counter-attack. It’s as though the whole side has hopped on a magic carpet made from a giant lung. It looks exhausting. As an asthmatic, my doctor has advised to have an inhaler and brown paper bag on hand whenever I watch them.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that football is a squad game these days. Winning the league using 14 players as Liverpool did under Bill Shankly in 1965-66 surely belongs to a bygone era, when players smoked Woodbines and pie and chips was an acceptable pre-match meal. Ranieri has other ideas.

The Tinkerman now no longer tinkers and Leicester are all the better for it. To date, just 17 Leicester players have started in the league. No side has made fewer changes to its starting XI than Leicester’s 21 this season. The team that started at the Etihad Stadium was the same for the fifth successive game.

Much has been made of the shallow pool available to Ranieri in comparison with his managerial counterparts at the top table, but just as you can’t wear all your jewellery at once without looking a so-and-so, having a cellar full of sprightly full-backs primed for action can only get you so far.

Pellegrini’s call to replace his more staid pair, Bacary Sagna and Gael Clichy, with two of a more attack-minded persuasion in Pablo Zabaleta and Aleksandar Kolarov seemed a little foolhardy against the best counter-attacking side in the league. As did his decision to not bother with a holding midfielder. Mahrez made a mug of both the Serbian and the similarly recalled Fabian Delph to win the free-kick that led to Robert Huth’s opening goal.

Delph is the prize for any Manchester City supporter who can correctly identify what his role was at the weekend.

Pellegrini insisted post-match, per BBC Sport, that his midweek decision to announce his impending summer departure to make way for Pep Guardiola did not have any effect on his players. If that’s indeed the case, then his big-game management capabilities again come into question.

With four games in four competitions over the next 14 days, it’s a fortnight that will define both Manchester City’s season and the Chilean's own legacy at the club. If he’s not to leave out of the back door, they will have to significantly improve on Saturday’s performance.

In short, save for a period in the first half when they bossed possession to a degree even Leicester may have been uncomfortable with—and had penalty appeals rejected—they were slipshod to the point of being embarrassing.

To observe Leicester in comparison: The way they defended as one, hunted possession as one, broke as one and celebrated as one was like watching ants work together to haul food heavier than the sum of their parts back to the colony.

Manchester City’s queen ant, Yaya Toure, was given the hook when Mahrez’s magnum opus of an immaculate afternoon’s work gave Leicester a two-goal lead shortly after half-time, following on from Huth’s third-minute opener.

When Drinkwater and Kante found the perfect mark in an advanced Zabaleta, they pick-pocketed possession with City having overcommitted in Leicester’s half. A starter’s pistol was fired, and they were off with a trademark razor-sharp counter-attack.

What Kante lacks in stature at 5'6", he makes up for in drive, as he snapped into action with a surging run to start a move that saw a rapid transition conclude with him playing the ball through to Mahrez.

First, Nicolas Otamendi was sidestepped with a shuffle before Martin Demichelis, who lost Huth for Leicester’s first goal, was given twisted blood via a dummy so outrageous it’s auditioning for the remake of Mannequin. Next came the eyes as the Algerian hoodwinked Hart before lashing home from 20 yards.

Toure was on the edge of Leicester’s box when Zabaleta lost possession. By the time Mahrez was reeling away in celebration, he had just about made it back to the halfway line. The groan from Munich was audible in Manchester when Guardiola cast his eye over the game’s stats: Toure made no tackles, no clearances and no interceptions.

While Drinkwater is the type of character who would volunteer to go over the top first, Toure would be sulking in the trench as no one had bothered to bake him a cake for his birthday. "I bet they will in China," he’d mutter to himself, while bombs went off all around him.

Still, he should make a few quid having been snapped up as a brand ambassador for a new anti-perspirant line. His beaming smile on packaging will complement a "Guaranteed no sweat" slogan perfectly.

Huth made it three with a towering header that recalled his winner at Tottenham earlier in the season, when he lost Demichelis at a set piece for a second time. Manchester City’s Argentinian centre-half did not cover himself in glory for any of the three goals his side conceded. City without Vincent Kompany are like Linus without his blanket.

Since keeping five clean sheets in the opening five matches, they have managed just six in the subsequent 20. Pellegrini would be wise to heed the words of Jimi Hendrix: "Castles made of sand, fall in the sea, eventually."

A 14th goal in the league, when added to his 10 assists, makes Mahrez the standalone most creative player in the division. The Premier League’s engravers may have to wait a while longer before getting to work on the main prize, but there’s nothing to stop them getting cracking on with the Footballer of the Year trophy.

Mahrez can’t be described as a flat-track bully either, having assisted or scored against Manchester City, Chelsea, Everton, Liverpool, Southampton, Tottenham and West Ham United over the course of the campaign.

After the game, Mahrez insisted he didn’t know if Leicester were now in the title race. The broadest of smiles was plastered all over his face as he said it. He was like the Oscar winner who says they would never have even dreamt of writing a speech before delivering a pitch-perfect, anecdote-filled, laugh-a-minute oration.

The £400,000 required to convince Le Havre to sell him to Leicester in 2014 is less than the fee Manchester City pay every day to have heated toilet paper in the home side’s dressing room or something like that.

It seems reductive to boil everything down to filthy lucre when talking about Leicester, but it’s just so much fun pointing out the fact six of Manchester City’s starting lineup cost more than Ranieri’s XI in its entirety.

"

Jamie Vardy with a perfect reply to the jeering City fans after a Joe Hart save https://t.co/9vSX5Ys5s7

— Premiere Football (@PremiereFootbal) February 6, 2016"

When Hollywood makes Leicester’s season into a movie, Tinseltown’s money men will first need convincing that their audience will believe a sports biopic about a team of misfits brought together for £22.25 million, that went from 5,000-1 no-hopers to being 7-4 favourites for the championship in little over six months. Rocky Balboa beating a Russian cyborg is one thing, but everyone has his or her limits.

Ranieri would likely blush at the prospect of his work being played on a silver screen. An unspoken appreciation of one another’s jobs that appears entirely intuitive between Leicester’s players may seem organic. Make no mistake, though, this is Ranieri’s team. And he deserves all the credit in the world for it.

The Italian is playing the avuncular clown to perfection as he looks to deflect pressure from his players, but Ranieri will be acutely aware that something remarkable is getting closer and closer with each passing game.

It’s a journey they can navigate at a fairly leisurely pace, too. While their rivals concern themselves with a backlog of games between now and the season’s end—as they compete on various fronts—Leicester will play just one more midweek fixture. And it’s at home to West Bromwich Albion.

For the moment, Ranieri’s advice to his players is simply don’t look down, per the Guardian:

"

Of course the bigger clubs are nervous but it doesn’t matter to me, it’s not my problem.

For Leicester the pressure was at the beginning of the season when we started out because our goal was to maintain our position in the Premier League but now the pressure is on the other teams who have spent a lot of money to win the Premier League, the Champions League. We are enjoying it.

We have to play like we have this spirit – then the result is not important. If our performance is good I am very happy.

"

In a career that has spanned seven countries and 16 clubs, this would be its apex. Should he pull off a 5,000-1 shot at 64, it would be an achievement that would place him and his players in the company of Brian Clough and his 1978 Nottingham Forest team in the annals of English football greats.

He’d not get a word in edgeways, but they’d make a great comedy double act.

Football may be a team sport, but in an age when Cristiano Ronaldo’s rivalry with Lionel Messi seems to fascinate many more than Real Madrid’s with Barcelona, it’s hard to argue the individual isn’t celebrated more than the collective.

Leicester City are the antithesis, better still the antidote, to this murky mode of thought.

 
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