As Leicester gear up for the biggest challenge of the season, James Knight ponders a question he never thought he'd ask: can you win every week and still be a flawed team with lots of room to improve?
Leicester's win over QPR on Saturday was the 13th out of 14 games this season. We are top of the league, both the real league and the all-important xG edition. Enzo Maresca is, according to no less an authority than the Times of London, in the middle of the greatest ever start to a managerial career in the history of English football. We are, by pretty much any objective measure, good.
Yet for stretches of the past couple of games we've felt...not that good. Leicester were fortunate, in the end, to beat Sunderland and relied on a deflection and a long-range screamer to beat QPR. In neither game did we really dominate in the way you would expect. In both we were often slow and sloppy playing out from the back, we gave up numerous opportunities that the opposition squandered.
I've been struggling all season to get to grips with this contradiction. My experience of watching the games is a team that still has a way to go before it's the complete package. At the same time, the results suggest we've already reached that level. Perhaps the healthiest approach is to simply sit back and enjoy the points as they rain down upon us. To enjoy the season for enjoyment's sake, without thinking of the bigger picture.
That, though, isn't really my way. For one thing, I can't view the performances without thinking about how this team would fare in the Premier League. Seen from that higher plane, we're keeping the opposition in the game far more than we should. More than that, my sensory system for working out what a great team looks like in the Championship is off. I don't know how good you have to be. I just feel in my bones that we aren't playing as well as the results suggest.
Despite all the possession and all the wins, the results of the final, conclusive exam, the Eye Test, are still to come in.
The ministry of truth Reading between the lines, Maresca knows this. Managers from the Guardiola school are masters of doublespeak, so the volume of enthusiastic praise tends to be inversely related to performances. When the manager says insane things, like that scraping past Sunderland was the performance he was "most pleased with", our spidey senses should be tingling. When he's slagging everyone off after 5-0 wins, that's when we're in a good place.
Which is, in many ways, the point. There haven't been many opportunities for that. Almost every game has been live going into the latter stages. Our two biggest wins this season have been Southampton, who essentially committed hari-kari in front of us, and Blackburn, a curious game in which the two teams pretty much created the same number of chances and all of ours happened to go in. The Friday night trip to St. Mary's is the only time all season that we've been ahead by multiple goals going into the final 15 minutes. QPR on Saturday was the sixth time we've been losing or drawing at that stage.
There are a couple of ways you can view those stats. On the one hand, scoring so many late goals is obviously a sign of the mental and physical improvement Maresca has brought with him. Leicester are wearing teams down and finding a way to win. But at the same time, the experience of watching games where you're only a goal up with five minutes to go is quite different to how you might imagine the raw fact of winning 13 out of 14 so far to feel. Particularly, say, for an anxious watcher who's desperate for a comfy win or ten.
Such a reliance on the last 10-15 minutes feels fragile and a bit unnecessary for this team. It's almost as if we're inviting close games, so that the opponent is always in with a sniff of a random set piece or something out of nowhere. Perhaps this fear is just lingering trauma from the Rodgers era, when that sort of event always ended up in the back of our net. But even the Marescalator feels like more of a bumpy ride in reality than the impression the results might give.
Defending in numbers Leicester's defence is twice as good as anyone else in the division in terms of goals conceded. No one has even managed to breach it twice in the same game yet. We are rarely carved open or played through, our resistance to set pieces is now as good as it's ever been.
What these remarkable stats don't convey is that it doesn't feel as if our defence is as good as that. Our defenders still pass the ball out of play or directly to opponents in their own half a lot more often than you would hope. There are still more lingering traces of Brendanball than we like to admit. Against Sunderland, the defence-by-possession plan broke down completely under pressure towards the end, which ended up gifting chances for the opposition to equalise. This is something of a pattern, where these flaws don't show up in the data but stare you in the face when you see them play out in front of you.
That few of those mistakes have been punished so far is as much down to the opposition's failures as our own brilliance. The Championship often reminds me of the time I took a patriotic trip to Wembley to see England play San Marino. At one stage in this sleepy affair, a San Marinese forward suddenly broke through the England lines and emerged, alone, deep inside our half.
As he moved towards goal, you could sense his rising panic as the enormity of the moment became clear to him. The blood rushed to his head, and despite the complete lack of any defenders, he unleashed his shot so early that he was barely able to see the goalkeeper, never mind look into the whites of his eyes. Inevitably, his attempt sailed hopelessly over the bar. Events like that disappear into the data void; a long range effort, off-target. May as well never have happened.
This, essentially, is what seems to happen in every Leicester game. Last week, Mads Hermansen's proclivity to wander around outside his area goaded QPR into unleashing wild attempts from 35 yards every time we handed them possession in our half. Had they shown any semblance of composure they might have caused a lot more problems. We've seen variations of the theme from almost everyone else: the striker runs through and misses in humiliating fashion, they elaborately overplay it and fail to even shoot, or Hermansen comes to the rescue.
This is fine, as long as you're playing San Marino every week and your luck holds. But it hints that there's more danger lurking than the raw results suggest. Though it goes beyond the data, even the numbers backs this up to some extent: Leicester, Watford, and Leeds would be expected to concede roughly the same number of goals from open play so far, according to the Opta boffins, but the Foxes have conceded three fewer than Leeds and four fewer than Watford. Similarly, from set pieces, Leicester are the only one of the three to have conceded fewer than expected so far.
This is a small difference, though when you combine it with the fact that we tend not to put teams away until late in the day, we might be due a few muggings. Even more so given the next couple of games, with this week's encounter with Leeds looking like the closest thing to a Premier League opponent we've had so far.
Some touching stats The contradictions continue as you edge forward. Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall is a good example of the confusing experience of watching a Leicester game at the moment. He's the joint top-scorer with a batch of assists. If you asked Sky Sports, or anyone with a passing interest in the Championship, they'd probably suggest he's the best player in the league. Yet at times his execution of basic tasks is inexplicably poor. The number of occasions on which Leicester have broken forward into space and he's hammered a simple through ball out of play as if the person controlling him hit the wrong button on the controller is extraordinary.
Similarly, almost all of Leicester's attackers spend most of their time on the periphery of games. Jamie Vardy has never been one to bother with getting involved very much, but there's not being very involved and then there's being a complete afterthought. If you'll excuse some rather granular stats, according to FBRef he averages a shade over 26 touches per 90 minutes. This ranks 537th out of 565 players in the entire division. Despite the brief suggestion a few weeks ago that he'd suddenly transformed his game under Maresca to become a link-up player, he hasn't. Sometimes when he starts Leicester are effectively playing with ten players.
To some extent this is a feature, rather than a bug. The #9 is the finisher. The wingers and number eights are the creators. But Leicester are still learning the system and rely too heavily on the wingers winning their 1v1 or 1v2 matchup. If the 'eights' don't help them out with runs in behind, the wingers get isolated with no genuine full back behind them. So they turn back and recycle possession. Which is what Maresca wants them to do. But it can be frustrating to watch. For all the goals, there aren't that many spells of relentless pressure in the final third, the likes of which you'd, frankly, expect to see. We haven't waltzed in and blitzed anyone.
It's why I come away from so many games at a complete loss over who should be man of the match. It's why everyone has had to fully commit to the Vestergaard-Harry Winks double act, shouting the number of completed passes from the rooftops, because none of the attackers ever get the ball. It's also why all our games are so close. The possession-first approach is a defensive measure as much as an attacking one. It's about strangling the opponent rather than going in all guns blazing. But it surely doesn't have to be as cautious as it's proven to be at times.
My overwhelming feeling is that there's a grain of truth behind the thoughts of the idiot who seems to sit behind everyone at the King Power. Like most caricatures, the man yelling at them to gerrit forward is still tethered to reality, even if he's a few degrees removed. A part of that person lives inside all of us, because we watch football for the goals and excitement, and we all experience the twinge of disappointment every time a promising attack slows down and goes into reverse.
The truth is that we do spend too long knocking it about slowly at the back, we could look for that forward pass earlier, we could try to keep possession in the opponent's half, rather than our own. We play with our prey too much, when we could and should go more aggressively in for the kill. The evidence that we're a long way from a well-oiled attacking machine is obvious to the naked eye.
The next big test Right now, it feels like the league table reflects a level of dominance that we haven't quite seen on the pitch. Maybe my need for more and better and bigger is nothing more than a reflection of a deep-rooted psychological problem with supporting a successful team. At every turn, I've found a new challenge for Leicester to pass to prove that they really are legit, and every time they have passed it.
The next couple of games are the latest bar to clear. Constantly playing it close isn't going to cut it when the opposition stiffens, which it is about to do with Leeds and then Middlesbrough on the schedule. Any moments of madness at the back that have been let off before will be punished by top level attackers on Friday night.
If we really are one of the best teams in Championship history, let's stick it to a few of these mugs on the way out to prove we deserve to be at a higher level.
We're here for a good time, not a long time. So can we make it all a bit more convincing, pretty please?