Leicester City’s draw at Oxford fit the pattern of their season so far to further emphasise the issue Marti Cifuentes needs to address.
Ten-man City rescued a point at the Kassam Stadium with their second-half turnaround, Cifuentes changing the set-up and personnel to successfully negotiate the man disadvantage and ensure his side recovered from a poor first half.
It was the most extreme example yet of what has been a regular occurrence at City. Their second-half results far outweigh those from the first 45.
Based just on the first halves of fixtures, City would be 20th in the Championship table so far with four points, one more than those in the bottom three. They have been trailing at the break in three of their five games.
But in the second halves of matches, their record is four wins and one draw, putting them top of the table. They’ve conceded just one second-half goal, Milutin Osmajic’s winner for Preston at Deepdale.
It was most evident at Oxford when Ricardo Pereira and Harry Winks swung the momentum of the game, but it’s been a theme of the opening weeks that City’s substitutes have had significant positive impacts.
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There were Winks and Wout Faes in the opening game against Sheffield Wednesday, and Jeremy Monga against Preston too, with Ricardo also scoring as a substitute against Birmingham.
In fact, four of their eight Championship goals so far have been scored by players coming off the bench.
It highlights two big positives: that City have quality in depth and motivated players capable of changing games, and that Cifuentes knows what to do and who to turn to in order to solve the problems that arise.
But it’s not the case that every week City are going to be able to recover. That was true at Preston. City may have got one goal back but in needing another goal to take the lead, they left themselves vulnerable to the counter-attack and were punished.
Using substitutes to successfully alter games should be the failsafe, not the go-to plan.
And so City do need to improve at the starts of matches. They need to get into their stride more quickly, at least to the point of nullifying the opposition if not controlling the game themselves.
Perhaps one way to do that would be through changes to the team. Perhaps the players who have consistently made an impact off the bench – Winks, Ricardo, Faes, Monga – should come into the line-up.
It seems the obvious fix, but it’s not foolproof. Winks did come into the 11 at Preston after changing the game against Sheffield Wednesday and that was perhaps his weakest performance of the season.
It’s certainly food for thought for Cifuentes, and gives him a problem to get his teeth into as he seeks to get City charging up the table.
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