Keep it tight, stay in the game early, don’t beat yourselves, make them beat you.
The laws for a plucky underdog away to one of the big boys are as old as time itself. They are written into the fabric of the sport. Ask any spry young newborn how to play away the Etihad, and they will bawl “see off the first 15 minutes” in your ears.
Leicester City, 2025 edition, took less than 120 seconds to violate the these holy scriptures, and half an hour later consigned all the commandments to the flames.
This was the latest of Ruud van Nistelrooy’s carefully managed defeats, a loss designed to incur as little fanfare as possible.
The result was, obviously, never in doubt. From the moment the fixture computer garbled up this encounter, the outcome was carved in stone. Even by Leicester standards, though, conceding within two minutes to Jack Grealish’s first Premier League goal of the season was an impressive way to hammer home the point.
These fixtures have a surreal air to them. It’s like tasking ChatGPT to put together a Premier League football team. In a literal sense it has achieved that goal. This is a Premier League team playing Premier League games. On Wikipedia in 20 years time, it will describe Leicester City as having participated in the Premier League in the 2024/25 season.
Every match is designed to pass a cursory test. Pop this one into your AI checker and it’ll soar through with flying colours. Manchester City 2 Leicester City 0, a perfectly normal scoreline.
Chris Sutton isn’t going to shout about it on TalkSport, no one is going to call anyone a disgrace. It’s just going to drift quietly away, never to be spoken about again, just like Leicester City 0 Manchester United 3, or Chelsea 1 Leicester City 0, or Leicester City 0 Arsenal 2.
In fact, to complain about them would actually be a sign of unreasonable expectations at this stage, a sign of your own failings, not ours. Why would you be angry at this set of entirely reasonable results. We stole a record of every result in Premier League history and rubbish teams always lose to good teams, what did you expect?
Possibly this is Van Nistelrooy’s masterplan, a genius tactic to perform such feats of dull mediocrity that the most basic acts of competence look like historic success. To flood the market with mindlessly boring results that no one notices that he’s pouring out defeats on an overwhelming scale.
Reality
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Of course, as soon as you peer a bit deeper, you are forced to confront the reality that this is all a horrendous charade. It turns out that all the players have got two heads, seven fingers, and Stephy Mavididi’s legs have become one with the bench.
That OpenAI pro subscription you paid for is just copying and pasting the XI from the last game into the teamsheet, it’s making random substitutions that bear no resemblance to the reality of the scoreline.
When you compare them side-by-side, there’s some suspicious similarities across every game. Why is there a goal every time anyone kicks the ball near Wout Faes? Is that Boubakary Soumare’s man in 30 yards of space again? Does that say we’ve only had one shot?
Would a human manager really bring on a defensive midfielder for Jamie Vardy with his side 2-0 down at half time? Would he leap into action on the hour to bring on another centre back?
Van Nistelrooy’s argument for the Vardy switch was that “we were defending all game. He ran a lot in the first half, and the second half didn’t look any different.”
This is the sort of thing that sounds like a normal statement until you take a moment and think, well, shouldn’t he have expected that before the game?
And so it goes on, every game the same as the last. Once upon a time, I think we felt something when Leicester played.
History
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We still retain the ability to see through this. We can still hope and pray that we will have one genuinely human experience to cling to, a sign that this is real.
Because one truth we can be certain of in this era of misdirection and confusion, is that Leicester City haven’t scored in the league since January.
This seven game, 750-minute goalless run alone would be impressive. When it’s coupled with the fact that since playing Brighton at home on 8th December, the Foxes have scored four goals in 15 games across four long months, it becomes something special.
It’s a truly historic feat, one of such incredible ineptitude that it deserves its own place in the pantheon, alongside signing a player 14 seconds after the transfer deadline, or your defenders walking their dogs around the training ground.
At this point, the only thing we have to live for is that this run keeps going. When it comes to passing on the blue flame to your children and grandchildren, you are not going to tell them about that time we lost 2-0 to West Ham, 2-0 to Fulham, 2-0 to Crystal Palace, 2-0 to Manchester City, 2-0 to Manchester City again.
But sitting them down on your knee to reminisce about that time we literally didn’t score a goal for months? Now that’s a story worth telling.
Isn’t that the point of the sport, grandma? Isn’t your manager one of the best strikers of his generation? Isn’t your number 9 quite literally the 15th highest scoring player in Premier League history?
Yes dear, that’s what makes it so good.
After 87 minutes at the Etihad, Facundo Buonanotte won the ball in the final third, played a one-two with Jordan Ayew, and suddenly the two of them were baring down on the Manchester City goal.
For a split second, it looked like the Ottomans at the walls of Constantinople, the enemy at the gates, a historic monument about to go up in flames.
Then Buonanotte wildly overhit a simple five yard through ball and the goalless dream survived.
Life
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There are occasionally moments like that, where you see a vague shape of what they are presumably working on in training. The occasional pattern that resembles what an actual football team would do.
At one stage, Bilal El Khannous cut in from the left wing and shot just wide. At another, Wilfred Ndidi made a lovely underlapping run, straight out of the Maresca handbook, then howitzered a cross 40 yards over everybody’s head. Patson Daka turned his full back beautifully down the right and then ran straight out of play.
Some people might argue that you would expect a little bit more from millions of pounds of investment, a state of the art facility, and months of work on the training ground. That one shot per game is probably not worth all the effort.
But most of the watching world won’t. For the wider footballing public, this is all going exactly as they expected. There’s no reason to question any of this, it’s exactly what we all thought would happen.
Keep this up and they’ll be relegated mate!
Yes, they will.