5 days Ago
Have you ever witnessed a miracle? An extraordinary and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws, and is therefore attributed to a divine agency? You know, turning water into wine, parting a sea, Leicester City winning the Premier League...
that kind of thing. The Athletic and 31,150 others witnessed first-hand a genuinely astonishing occurrence at the Amex Stadium on Saturday..
. Leicester City scored a football goal. Next thing, the blind will see and the lame will walk.
Advertisement For disbelievers from the future, records will show it happened in the 38th minute of their match against Brighton & Hove Albion. To prove it was no fake, they then scored again in the 74th minute. Remember the date for next year’s anniversary celebrations: April 12.
What were the odds? Around 5,000-1, maybe? For context, Leicester hadn’t scored a Premier League goal since January 26, when they won 2-1 at Tottenham Hotspur. Obviously, that’s also their most recent victory. At the time, they were out of the relegation zone in 17th place, a point above Wolverhampton Wanderers.
Eight successive league defeats without troubling the scoreboard operator followed against Everton, Arsenal, Brentford, West Ham United, Chelsea, Manchester United, Manchester City and Newcastle United, meaning they went into the Brighton game 15 points behind Wolves and on the brink of relegation back to the Championship, 11 months after leaving it as title winners. It was a cataclysmic, season-defining period of ineptitude that means Leicester will be playing against Preston North End next season instead of north-west neighbours Liverpool. It was also no hard-luck story.
A tale absent of misfortune. For almost three months, Leicester could barely create a clear-cut chance, let alone score a goal or win a match. In those eight defeats, they registered a combined expected goals (xG) figure of 3.
1. For context, Newcastle accumulated 3.4 xG in one match alone last week.
They were playing against Leicester. When Joao Pedro put Brighton 1-0 up from the penalty spot just after the half-hour, Ruud van Nistelrooy’s men had conceded 22 goals without reply and the away supporters were sensing familiar dark emotions. With their Premier League fate all but sealed with six games still to play, the diehards who’d made the trip to the south coast resorted to gallows humour, celebrating Leicester players managing to have an attempt on goal and inquiring why Brighton were so poor that they took so long to take the lead.
Sometimes it’s the only way through the pain. Advertisement And then the moment came. Predictably for such a shot-shy, goalless attack, it wasn’t intended.
Stephy Mavididi was in a glorious position on the left of the box (teed up by the incessantly enterprising Bilal El Khannouss) and, via nose-bleeding stage fright, elected to cross instead of take on the shot himself. The blocked ricochet that came right back to Mavididi was kind, as was the palming of the ball into the net by ‘keeper Bart Verbruggen from the 26-year-old’s eventual shot. Hey, after 13 hours and 18 minutes of Premier League football without a goal, how it happened was irrelevant.
When they repeated the trick to make it 2-2 via the vision of El Khannouss again, the Morocco international sending a free kick onto the diving head of Caleb Okoli, the limbs in the away section were feral, the reaction of a disbelieving Okoli was pure. Is it heartening for Leicester to produce not just a spirited performance and a pretty good result away to a side challenging for European qualification, but also to surge forward repeatedly with pace and valour in those closing stages pushing for an unlikely winner? Or is it just head-shakingly frustrating that they took this long to click into any kind of gear again? Either way, it encapsulates a season of what-might-have-beens. While neutrals are disappointed with Ipswich Town and embarrassed by and for Southampton, for Leicester, the general feeling is of indifference.
Meh. A new yo-yo club, no impact made, won’t be missed. See you in August 2026, maybe.
There is sympathy for the club, having lost their head coach and their best player in the summer post-promotion, and bewilderment at two perplexing subsequent managerial hires. Once a byword for excellence and a template for other mid-sized clubs to copy in terms of recruitment, Leicester have now shown exactly how not to do it. Advertisement From spending a combined £7million on N’Golo Kante, Riyad Mahrez and Jamie Vardy a decade or so ago and seeing them become key men in that 2015-16 title-winning team, to splashing almost six times as much on Oliver Skipp (a substitute against Brighton), Jordan Ayew (unused from the bench) and Harry Souttar (out on loan since August); clubs live or die by their recruitment and Leicester, amid a few shining recent examples, have misspent fortunes.
Given the highs they have reached, being one of only five clubs to win all three of English football’s major honours this century and with successive fifth-placed finishes in the Premier League as recently as 2020 and 2021, the lows they have sunk to are perhaps underplayed . The fallout, the inquest, the recriminations and perhaps dire financial consequences are all to follow, but at least at the Amex this weekend, Leicester were finally afforded an opportunity to look forward again. Van Nistelrooy said pre-game on Friday that the only way to break the doom cycle was to show fight, character and personality.
Leiecster’s players, while riding their luck as Brighton missed a succession of chances either side of half-time, did just that the following day. There was a freshness and an exuberance to their play. And there is youth to look to here.
In El Khannouss (aged 20), Victor Kristiansen (22), Kasey McAteer (23), Luke Thomas (23) and Mads Hermansen (24), plus new debutants Jake Evans (16) and Jeremy Monga (15) , Leicester have something to build on when they’re back in the second tier. “We talked a lot about how to break a negative cycle, because when you’re in there, you think it’s never going to end,” Van Nistelrooy said post-match. “It starts with changing your behaviour.
You have to act now , you can’t wait in difficult moments, in adversity. You can’t wait for something to change, you have to start acting.” Advertisement The way forward offers no obvious route to re-establishing Leicester as regulars in the top flight.
There is so much that has gone wrong and so much to fix. But on a sunny spring day on the south coast, this was a very small — and badly needed — glimmer of hope. A miracle, if you will.
(Top photo: Charlie Crowhurst/Getty Images).
