Match Review – Leicester City 2-0 Brighton
“We should be beating teams like Leicester” was one of the more stupid things heard at the King Power Stadium on Saturday. In fact, it is an early contender for most stupid thing heard of the season.
Leicester, in case you have forgotten, were Premier League champions only a year ago. They have one of the best goalkeepers in the top flight in Kasper Schmeichel. They have one of the most prolific strikers in the top flight in Jamie Vardy. They have the PFA Player of the Year from 2016, Riyad Mahrez.
Mahrez was the best player on the park on Saturday. However good we might thank Anthony Knockaert is, you only have to look at Mahrez to see just what a step up in quality it is from being the best in the Championship to being one of the best in the Premier League.
Mahrez set the opening goal up inside the first minute, before plenty of Albion fans had even gone through the turnstiles after what were effectively strip searches being conducted by the Leicester stewards who had clearly been trained for their job using the Gestapo Guide to Interrogation.
It was a classic Leicester goal on the counter attack. Maty Ryan has question marks against his name for the second time in a week as he spilled Mahrez’s shot and Shinji Okazaki followed up for 1-0. It hasn’t been the best of starts to his Brighton career for Ryan and although early days, with League Cup games coming up there must be a genuine chance for Niki Maenpaa to stake a claim for a run as number one.
Given Leicester’s notoriety of playing on the break, we were always likely to set up defensively to try and nick a goal. That was obviously out of the window early on yet even after going 1-0 down in less than 60 seconds, we never looked likely to score. The match report on the official site makes a big deal of us enjoying more possession than them. But that just highlights how misleading and pointless possession stats can be; we may have had more of the ball but Leicester were quite content for that to happen, given us stroking it sideways between each other 50 yards away from their goal was as useful as buying a bald man a comb for his birthday.
Glenn Murray did put the ball in the net but was correctly judged to be offside and Schmeichel’s only other piece of work was a diving save to keep out a Tomer Hemed strike from distance in the second half.
Leicester added their second and once again it was a poor one to concede, Harry Maguire rising all too easily above Shane Duffy to head home a Mahrez corner. That came just before the hour mark, making the last 30 minutes effectively a non event.
Those two goals were more than preventable. The marking from the corner was slack and Ryan should not be spilling shots straight at him. Without two mistakes, it could be a commendable 0-0 draw at one of the tougher places to go in the division. The margins are so small in the Premier League that errors such as those that we might’ve got away with last season and ruthlessly punished now.
Of equal concern is what is going on at the other end of the pitch. 180 minutes, three shots on target, zero goals. Again there are mitigating circumstances. Anthony Knockaert probably won’t be match fit until after the international break. Jose Izquierdo has only just received international clearance. And we are still hunting for that elusive striker who will no doubt be the fourth man to break the Albion’s transfer record this summer.
If you thought the Premier League would be easy and that we would simply carry on where we left off last season then frankly you are an idiot. We’ve played the title favourites and the second most recent champions. Now comes a run of games against Watford, West Brom, Bournemouth and Newcastle – all sides who you expect will be in our half of the table. They are the games we need to take points from. There is plenty of scope for improvement and these next few games are the time to do it.
Off the pitch, Leicester was a great city with so many good pubs that it is a miracle we’ve escaped a two day hangover. Particularly enjoyable was the kebab shop just down from the station called Kayal’s.
There was one pretty big black mark on the day however and that was a small element of the Leicester supporters, who decided to throw the worst homophobic abuse we’ve heard outside of Leeds away in many seasons. It was loud and unnecessary and a real shame that some of their fans are stuck living in the 1950’s. For a league as image obsessed as the Premier League, hearing that sort of nonsense reverberating around the world on television from the King Power can’t be a particularly good look.
