This weekend looks certain to be Ruud van Nistelrooy’s final match in charge of Leicester City.
Sunday’s trip to the south coast is the last stop on a journey that began with genuine hope and excitement in early December yet quickly fizzled into a zombie-like procession towards disaster.
The Van Nistelrooy era is ultimately an unmitigated failure. Yet a strange kind of failure, largely unaccompanied by the sort of vitriol you might expect for a manager with a record as historically bad as his.
After Leicester won his first game at home to West Ham, his new side sat above not only Ipswich and Southampton, but Wolves, Crystal Palace, and Everton as well. Since that cold winter evening, they have picked up 12 points, 7 of which have come since relegation was confirmed.
They are now 16 points behind Wolves, 20 behind Everton, and 24 behind Palace.
Van Nistelrooy has benefited on a personal level from the chaos around him. It’s legitimate, and surely true, to argue that he was handed a horrible job, hamstrung by a poor quality and poorly built squad, and then probably misled about the backing available in January.
But it is also true that he took these dismal ingredients and, instead of producing some low quality baked goods, proceeded to burn the house down instead.
If and when he departs the club next week, it will be impossible to argue that he deserved anything else.
Despite the name brand and the promise of a well-defined approach – remember Jonny Evans waxing lyrical about defensive organisation? – there has been no evidence that Van Nistelrooy has either been able to instil his style of play on the team or adapt to something pragmatic that could achieve results in the short term. There’s no reason to believe that would change given more time.
Even in the post-wins managerial era, where someone like Ruben Amorim can come into Manchester United, lose relentlessly, and pitch it as part of some grand masterplan, you need to be able to show some signs of either the ability to win or an idea people can believe in.
After six months in charge, you would be hard-pressed to explain what Van Nistelrooy-ball is.
It was pitched as a more direct or pragmatic version of Enzo Maresca; the same emphasis on the wingers and getting the ball wide, diagonals runs in behind, but with real full backs and everything happening a bit faster. We were also promised that he favoured young players, those he could mould into his style.
Yet in reality, when given the choice he almost always chose cautious, slow, experienced players over the younger or more exciting or direct option while the season was still alive.
If there was a plan to attack and create chances, we never saw it. The one positive feature of Steve Cooper’s Foxes disappeared almost as soon as he arrived. By February and March, games in which Leicester had a couple of shots and didn’t lose by too many had become stories of remarkable achievement.
The other side of the RVN coin was some of the most disorganised defensive displays you are ever likely to see. One feature was the ability to put in a relatively competent display in losing to a good team, then to be dismantled by someone rubbish the following week. It gave off a sense of a manager protecting his image in the games that broke into the wider footballing consciousness.
Either side of the relatively competent 2-0 defeat at home to Arsenal, Van Nistelrooy’s Leicester lost 4-0 twice, to Everton and Brentford. The disastrous display at Goodison Park, when his side conceded after 10 seconds and was routinely carved open by the most basic through balls, might be the single worst performance of the last decade.
Similarly, Van Nistelrooy the idea suggested a man who would create a team in his image, a professional outfit with an edge, that would fight for every point. But the reality failed to live up to those ideals.
Leicester are the only side in the Premier League without a red card this season, and he allowed players who routinely failed to keep their place, a practice that reached absurd levels when he was naming unchanged teams during a historic losing streak.
It’s difficult to escape the fact that a lot of the problems over the last few months seem to have been as a direct result of things Van Nistelrooy has done.
Here, for example, is a non-exhaustive list of mad or bad decisions he has made since arriving:
* Brought Danny Ward on at half time against Newcastle, only for him to concede three goals in about six minutes and ruin the season.
* Started Danny Ward in a relegation six pointer with Wolves the next game, only for him to concede three goals in about six minutes and ruin the season even more.
* Only stopped playing Danny Ward after he dropped himself.
* Started Jordan Ayew and Bobby De Cordova Reid together on multiple occasions.
* Reacted to Leicester looking like a real team whenever he played Facundo Buonanotte and Bilal El Khannouss together by never playing them together again until Leicester were relegated.
* Oversaw a Premier League record run of 9 consecutive home defeats without scoring.
* Oversaw 15 defeats in 16 matches.
* Dropped Harry Winks for having a baby.
* Allowed Jannik Vestergaard to bring his dog to training.
* Started Patson Daka on the right wing.
* Signed Woyo Coulibaly in January, started him once against Brentford, hooked him after 45 minutes and never played him again.
* Started 38 year old Jamie Vardy in every single game, so that he has played 1000 more minutes this season than in any of the previous three campaigns.
If a manager can’t offer you anything, whether that’s results, a coherent approach, the ability to attack or defend, or even basic competence in his decision-making, then you have to face reality. Any number of other options would offer at least one of those things, and even a basket case of a club can find someone to do better than that.
The challenge has always been that Van Nistelrooy was not operating in a vacuum. That the club itself is evidently run in an appalling way and he was the latest poor soul tasked with cleaning up a mess years in the making.
His words and actions have spoken to a man who understands what’s necessary to change a culture that has become rotten. He took steps to try to deal with players that have been mollycoddled for too long, a team that has gone soft. He has spoken well about the need to build around the academy.
But this isn’t enough. You can look at the number of minutes Jeremy Monga has played, or Jake Evans, or the way Luke Thomas and Kasey McAteer have worked their way back into the reckoning. You can squint and believe that handed full control next season, Van Nistelrooy might build a sparkling young team of academy products.
Except all of these things seemed to just happen out of necessity or last-ditch desperation. Were this something the manager did proactively, with the season still alive, you could at least feel like this was something to hold on to.
Instead, Monga was more or less forced on him by the crowd, Thomas and McAteer by injuries and the sheer paucity of alternative options. Their introductions ultimately came far too late to make any difference to this season’s outcome.
His attempts to instil discipline and a culture on the squad have been haphazard and difficult to understand. Vestergaard, for example, was only ostracised after news of his canine antics became public, the club (and presumably Van Nistelrooy) had allowed it privately.
Targeting Winks when his baby was born seems similarly ill-advised, while freezing out Buonanotte for large parts of the season only hurt the team.
The squad building before he arrived is not his responsibility, but for a club with limited resources to be leaving players like Vestergaard, Winks, Odsonne Eduoard, Oliver Skipp and friends outside of the matchday squad while losing every week without scoring just makes everybody look ridiculous.
Van Nistelrooy’s ultimate failing was his inability to pick a lane between the needs of the present and the long term interests of the club. In the end, he addressed neither, allowing the present to descend into historical failure without creating any kind of hope for the future.
Until very recently, he has been talking like a man planning for next season, as if he came in when the current one was a lost cause. At the same time, the teams he picked have been full of players with no future beyond this Sunday.
In some sense his biggest strength was and is to give you the impression that we never got to see the real Van Nistelrooy. That perhaps there is a proper manager in there who would, given time, turn the ship around.
It seems more likely that this is just a figment of our imaginations, a delusion based on the fact it’s Ruud Van Nistelrooy, rather than Steve Cooper, Dean Smith, or any other run-of-the-mill Championship manager. He might have an aura, but he also has six months of mistakes on his resume. There’s only so long you can keep looking past what’s right in front of you.
It was, briefly, fun to have Ruud van Nistelrooy as manager. But what he oversaw over the last six months was not inevitable, and he has done nothing to deserve another shot. The club, for all its own failings and ineptitudes, is clearly right to move on.
It’s time for something else.