Leicester 1-1 Ipswich Post Match Thread

[pmcla26]

Definitely highlights the need for a creative midfield player. 

 

Cannon looks better and better with every game - think we've got a gem here. 

 

Ipswich extremely lucky, but our fault for keeping them in the game to that point. 

[pmcla26]

29 minutes ago, lee7 said:

We massively lack having anyone on the bench who can put a bit of fear into the opposition. 

 

Look at the subs we made yesterday Akgun and Albrighton are brilliant at passing the ball but neither of those two are going to take players on in 1v1's. 

Then we had Vardy who relies on having creative players around him to provide chances. 

 

Compare that to Ipswich who brought on Hutchinson, Broadhead and Sarmiento.

All of those three were more than happy to run at our defenders and it caused us massive problems late on in the game. 

We didn't help ourselves either by taking off both KDH and McAteer and leaving only Mavididi on the pitch as our main attacking threat so he was easy to nullify. 

 

 

 

 

We would do if Daka, Iheanacho and Fatawu were available. 

[Raj]

Seemed like they made some attack minded subs and we did too little too late to contain the game.

 

Bad game management.

 

 

[Foxy DK]

22 minutes ago, Blanchflower78 said:

No you didn't say "made a draw" you said "making a draw" as I stated.

 

But you knew that I'm sure 😉

Wasting my time here most probably, but I’ll try once more - you implied that I didn’t think we lost the win when I said “making a draw” as if I meant that we “made a draw” with a positive connotation. That wasn’t what I said or meant, though, as the phrase “making a draw” referred to the former sentence about our position in the league. If you meant something else with you post, then I’ll be happy to hear it.

 

Sure, we should’ve won. Fact is though that in football, teams quite often do not win games they ought to win if you look at the overall performance, because it’s a low scoring game. And the fact that we’re quite comfortably leading the league shows that we have been quite good at winning our games. 

[LCFCABC]

40 minutes ago, lee7 said:

We massively lack having anyone on the bench who can put a bit of fear into the opposition. 

 

Look at the subs we made yesterday Akgun and Albrighton are brilliant at passing the ball but neither of those two are going to take players on in 1v1's. 

Then we had Vardy who relies on having creative players around him to provide chances. 

 

Compare that to Ipswich who brought on Hutchinson, Broadhead and Sarmiento.

All of those three were more than happy to run at our defenders and it caused us massive problems late on in the game. 

We didn't help ourselves either by taking off both KDH and McAteer and leaving only Mavididi on the pitch as our main attacking threat so he was easy to nullify. 

 

 

 

 

This is spot on. Everyone moaning about making changes - who would people actually bring on? Who is reliable enough? 
 

if anything, we should have made a defensive change and shut the game down more. 

[ithuriel]

Well, apart from the Cov game where the red card played a part, not too bad thus far, once AFCON is done and Fatawu is back from suspension can see us trundling along quite happily.

We could use some additional players during this window but cant see much happening and then the big question, if promotion does happen, what will the club spend and who will go.

[FrankieADZ]

17 minutes ago, HybridFox said:

Fine margins are what get you out of this league. In isolated incidents, I would agree with you. Except they aren't and the pattern in the way we drop points is all too familiar. Great to be top of the league but would be foolish to bury our heads in the sand and ignore for the remainder of the season. Especially when we have previous with the botched 4th place finishes

surely if it was a pattern it would be happening alot more than it has; we've lost 4 and drew in 3, out of 28 games. look at 2 of them defeats, one to a massively deflected strike, one to an amazing free kick, would say the leeds one was a bit meh, as it was the only clear chance of the game, not to mention the ipswich goal at their place got a double deflection

the biggest "gripe" for me is, we dont finish off teams; we need to be more clinical up top and take a few more risks in the final third too

 

 

[Muzzy_no7]

XG 1.78-1.13

[bmt]

One thing I will say is that (although I don't think they were right) we did at least make some subs to try and protect the lead, they just turned out to be the wrong ones. There are clearly lots of different perspectives of what the right substitutions would be. I disagree that mistakes were exactly the same as before.

 

I think the mistake was bringing KDH off, and also think Hamza should have moved forwards into midfield and bring another defender on. McAteer should have come off and Cannon should have been given 5 mins longer. But other posters have said completely different things. As long as he learns and keeps trying different things then I'm not overly worried.

[Trev3939]

just seen their goal back and hadn't realised how unlucky we were as couldn't see properly from the kop. That is a gutting goal to concede as Mads did pretty well

[Flappit]

1 hour ago, Twitcher said:

We're Ipswich poor? I thought they defended very well and restricted us to very few chances. Particularly in the second half I thought their press was very good, and full of energy. A better final ball and they'd have been in a few times. Overall we seemed to struggle to break them down when we had possession outside their box. I think we edged it, but not massively.

Ipswich weren't poor in the first half, we genuinely shut them down. I checked their forum and they were talking about the strength and speed of our press completely stifling them. They were right, the press was brilliant first half. 2nd half it looked to me that they made their wingers get out to the touchline properly, and they stopped trying to play it through the middle where we were piling into them. This, combined with a drop off in our intensity (tm Claude) led to them gaining a foothold and then dominating possession for much of the second half where we were playing on the break more.

 

They had several great opportunities to hurt us but fcuked up the last pass (sound familiar?) when a better ball would have given them a clear chance. We created the better goal chances, but it was (yet) another of those games where we just don't seem able to sustain pressure and get the goals that we need to kill teams off. Ricardo should have scored his chance, that was virtually a sitter and would have put us clear. At the end, Yunus's pass to Macateer was not great, but Macateer was a bit slow in anticipating as well and that should have been the end of the game. This lack of putting teams away and keeping on with our push is starting to introduce anxiety. You can see that there's frustration in the team and if we don't put together a few wins again soon, our gap we keep gloating about is going to look a lot smaller.

[goose2010]

1 hour ago, Bert said:

Well, we do else we wouldn’t be sat top of the league 7 points clear. 

currently we dont. Fatawu, Ndidi and Daka (to an extent) you would bring into that 11 but not sure anyone else. 

[goose2010]

59 minutes ago, ARM1968 said:

Nor will we in the Premier League and THAT is the issue. 

Why? I dont think anyone at the club truly believes this set of players would survive in the premier league. 

 

We would strengthen and if we didn't we would be in for a dog fight of a season. 

 

If we do go up this season the players aren't the concern. Its the fans. The majority cant back the players that are at the top so god knows what they will be like if we are fighting for our lives at the bottom. 

[Nalis]

1 hour ago, Sol thewall Bamba said:

Worrying similarities between people excusing another bottle job against a very average side last night and the two collapses under Rodgers. 

 

Obsessed with "perspective" and "the bigger picture" glossing over the here and now. Then we miss out on CL twice in a row and everyone wonders how we got here. These dropped points add up. 

Using that logic any game we drop points in this league should be seen as a failure as we are better on paper than the rest, and therefore anything other than winning every league game for the rest of the season is a failure, which is madness.

 

Even Man City dont have that level of consistency.

[goose2010]

1 hour ago, Mark said:

We need to be less predictable. Push a full back on occasionially, mix it up. We spent all second half doing the same thing in our own third, it's just dire.

Come on, over the years you must have seen 'dire' and last night and this season has been far from it. 

 

We are top of the league, we have more points at this stage then anyone would have thought and we  play some extremely attractive football. 

 

It makes me laugh that everyone says the championship is a tough league, probably 5th or 6th best in the world but here we are as fan base expecting us to walk it?! i just dont get it. We are in this league for a reason. 

[Flappit]

1 hour ago, ian__marshall said:

Was going to post last night but was too frustrated and felt it would have come across as reactionary but having slept on it that frustration has intensified. 

 

Let's be straight, they were awful and scored a fortuitous goal from one of the very few attempts they had. However equally, we were poor. They were fitter than us and the subs compounded the situation as they added fresh energy whilst we persisted with players who seemed to be flagging. Enzo needs to make changes much sooner both to manage the load but also to allow those coming on enough time to pick up the rhythm of the game. You can't be giving players 10 minutes and expect them to slot in seamlessly. It takes time to get up to the tempo and flow which those coming on don't have if you're bringing them on around the 80 minute mark. 

 

Another bugbear I have is that if you're going to play possession football to see out the game then do so as far away from your own box as possible. Many times this season we have sat back in our own half with no outlet and played the ball around the back line. I understand the idea is to utilise the goalkeeper as an extra man thereby giving you numerical advantage and more passing options but it allows the opponent to press aggressively which in turn forces errors. 

 

Finally, one thing that is starting to concern me is that for all the possession we have (particularly first half last night) we don't really seem to create a lot of high quality chances. In fact, when we get in dangerous areas and need to be incisive we'll often overplay our way out of the situation, e.g. first half last night we break with Ricardo on the left, he got to the edge of the box with acres of space to cut inside and bring it onto his right foot (stronger one) centre of goal and shoot, but instead played an awful ball to KDH that came to nothing. It's these situation where we just need to be more clinical and punish teams. We may well get promoted and do deserve to do so, but I'd have serious concerns for next season as we simply aren't ruthless enough and even the worst PL teams have that cutting edge where they are capable of converting half chances to goals. 

 

This isn't a dig at Enzo as he's been a breath of fresh air this season, but rather some observations where I feel both he and the coaching staff need to work on to move us forwards. I will add that my observations are somewhat biased and tainted by his predecessor. Had we not had multiple years of similar decision making and stubbornness I may feel very different right now. 

 

This is balls, sorry. Ipswich weren't awful and they had 11 attempts. That's not "very few". This revisionism and pointing at the gap we have is great, but if we'd carried on our points accumulation from earlier in the season, we'd be a lot further clear right now. Back in November after 16 games we were on 39 points when analysis based on chances showed we were outperforming the stats. We've had this before in our recent years and had no end of people on here and elsewhere try to claim we've got better strikers, etc. and stats are meaningless. Well, no, they're not. In isolation they don't tell you much, but over an extended period they do historically show a true reflection and even the article pointing at our (and Ipswich's) 39 points said: "However, both Leicester (eight points) and Ipswich (nine) have significantly outperformed their expected points totals from their 16 games, based on underlying performances in attack and defence. Has luck been on their side, and will that luck run out?". Maybe we're just going through a bad patch, but our PPG is gradually dropping off. We need to make sure it doesn't drop too much further or we will get caught.

[The Fosse Way]

https://www.thefosseway.net/matchday/leicester-city-match-report-ipswich-home-2023

[Number 6]

In fairness, late goals have recently been a problem, but we've had our fair share on benefit from late goals this season! Just odd how that all came towards the start of the season and recently they all seem to be going in at the other end late on. Complacency maybe?

[whoareyaaa]

I still think we will be fine just the timing of the goal didn’t help.

 

we are a better team

than Ipswich and Southampton we are just going through a bit of a sticky patch we have enough quality to turn it around in the next league games 

[filbertway]

70 minutes last night we absolutely dominated that game, but without ever really looking like we would score again. We got into a few promising positions but it didn't feel like the team collectively wanted to go and score that 2nd/3rd goal. More like it'd be a happy side-effect of how we were playing.

 

McKenna made subs and then the last 20 we were all of sudden being ran at and were in foot races with their players. Yunus nearly put McAteer in but aside from that, the shape was the same and we didn't look comfortable. Another night we might have held on, but allowed the odds of them scoring to increase by not reacting to McKennas changes.

 

Disappointing end to what was otherwise a controlling performance. Unfortunately we are saying this regularly. Whether or not teams take the chance, we're often ceding our dominance in the closing passages of games and teams are invariably going from having the ball in our box a few times in 60-70 minutes to then having the ball in our box every few minutes for 20-30 minutes.

 

Sometimes we get away with it, sometimes we don't. We should be proactively looking to prevent that situation occurring at all and giving the opposition no sense of hope. Especially with the quality available, these are the characteristics you see of teams that are inferior to the opposition and are desperate to cling on.

 

 

[RonnieTodger]

Could not believe the referee at the end. We have the ball when the Ipswich player goes down with a “head injury”.

 

Gets treated for about 90 seconds.

 

Ref somehow decides to give the ball back to Ipswich.

 

We then have the ball on the halfway line and he blows for FT without adding any extra time  

[foxinsocks]

2 minutes ago, RonnieTodger said:

Could not believe the referee at the end. We have the ball when the Ipswich player goes down with a “head injury”.

 

Gets treated for about 90 seconds.

 

Ref somehow decides to give the ball back to Ipswich.

 

We then have the ball on the halfway line and he blows for FT without adding any extra time  

We weren't going to score in another 30 mins

[Number 6]

Just now, foxinsocks said:

We weren't going to score in another 30 mins

Disagree with this. We didn't look like scoring last 20 because we didn't really try to - that was the downfall for me. I thought when we pressed and harried Ipswich we looked dangerous. 

[trabuch]

I think we are suffering from Rodgers PTSD as a fanbase (I certainly am). I hope the players aren't. My only real concern is what would happen if Winks got injured, as I think we would really miss him. We did look tired towards the end of the game yesterday, but it shouldn't have mattered as we should have been 3-0 up by the last 20 mins.

[Tommy Fresh]

30 minutes ago, foxinsocks said:

We weren't going to score in another 30 mins

Not the point though is it, just shows how inept some officials are.