Bit over 18 months for me. Only Deeney Day rivals the final game of the 20/21 season as the most depressing match I've seen as a Leicester fan.
After capitulating at the end of 19/20, throwing away a 14 point cushion, we'd done the exact same thing again, playing like relegation candidates for the latter half of the season (The FA Cup win was a miracle that I'll forever be grateful for because 99 times out of a hundred we lose that game and had Chilwell started his run half a second later, we would have)
Somehow, we still had a chance of a CL spot if we beat Spurs at home and Chelsea slipped up at Villa. Something that struck me within the first 5 minutes was how unmotivated Tottenham looked. Their fans had already joked before the game that they wouldn't want to do Chelsea any favours and that 7th place was a less than attractive prospect due to the new conference league. When the game started, though, it didn't seem like a joke anymore. They really did look like they were already on the beach.
We were 2-1 up in the 75th minute and Villa were beating Chelsea. All we had to do was see out the game. We had everything to play for. Spurs looked like they couldn't care less. And there's really no explanation for what happened next. We conceded 3 goals in 20 minutes. The last of which involved Bale waltzing through our entire defence in a manner not too dissimilar to Blackburn's second goal just last week.
After Deeney Day, I was devastated but something about that collective pain seemed to galvanise the players and they stormed the league the next year, determined not to leave anything to chance. Under Brendan Rodgers, nobody is galvanised by anything. The same mistakes are repeated over and over. I’ve lost track of the number of humiliations and abject collapses we’ve been subjected to. If anything, the grooves seem to be carved more deeply each time, expediting the patterns of failure leaving us more and more fragile with every passing game.
The response to Southampton's penalty miss was particularly alarming, as in some kind of paradoxical way the players seemed to be aware there was a pressure to respond and managed to retreat even further, conceding shortly afterwards.
The mentality that’s been instilled into this team means we’re only ever going to move in one direction. The best time to remove it was a little over 18 months ago. The next best time is now.