With just four games remaining of the Championship season, Leicester City’s season is on a knife-edge.
Would we have taken this position at the start of the season? Absolutely. Do we want this situation now having seen where we were a matter of weeks ago? Absolutely not.
It sounds easy, win our games and we’re up. In fact, we’re Champions. But this is Leicester City and we don’t do things the easy way.
Of course there is a way by which we’ll be promoted back to the Premier League as soon as Tuesday night. If we beat West Brom on Saturday, Leeds lose to Middlesbrough on Monday and we beat Southampton on Tuesday, it’s clap your hands done. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Not quite.
Having sat with friends and deliberated over the possible outcomes. “We should beat West Brom”, “Yeh and we’ll definitely beat Preston”, “Middlesbrough is a tough game for Leeds”, in the end we settled on “Jesus, who knows, we thought we’d beat Millwall and Plymouth and look what happened there!”
The Championship has become unpredictable madness in the last few weeks. Great for the neutral. Hideous for the fans in the middle of it. As if Ipswich and Leeds weren’t enough to worry about, we’ve now seen Southampton rise up to suddenly be right back in the middle of the automatic promotion race AND they still have to play both Leicester and Leeds. It may well be “in our own hands” but Southampton may certainly have a say in it.
First up is this weekend’s fixture against West Brom. West Brom are pretty much sure of a play off place, but will want the points to make it fully secure. They’re unbeaten in seven away games and have lost only once in the last eleven games. However, some good news for Leicester is that they’ll be without top scorer, Brandon Thomas-Asante, who is serving a one match ban. The reverse fixture of this game produced one of the highlights of the season as Harry Winks scored a wonderful late winner at The Hawthorns, and we can only pray for a similar show of passion on Saturday.
There’s no denying that Saturday’s match is vital. It’s huge. Ipswich don’t play this weekend and Leeds don’t play until Monday night, so there’s an opportunity to get ahead of the pack and go into the Southampton game full of confidence and top of the league. Losing? Well that doesn’t bear thinking about and starts to make the Leeds game on Monday night unwatchable. We have to get those points in the bag because the thought of going into the final game of the season versus Blackburn needing to win and facing the Championship’s top scorer, Sammie Szmodics, at our place, gives me heart palpitations.
For weeks fans have been desperate to see a change. The relentless faith in Patson Daka has long worn thin, especially when Tom Cannon is sat waiting on the bench. Added to the faith in Faes ahead of giving Coady a chance, these are questions that have been asked so often it’s become infuriating. Will Enzo look back on those last two awful and avoidable defeats and look to make a change against West Brom? We’d hope so. But don’t forget, there’s a system, and Enzo isn’t going to change it no matter how much it costs.
In Our Own Hands
For weeks now we’ve heard “it’s in our own hands”, “we’ve got a game in hand”, “don’t forget our game in hand”. But “it’s in our own hands” isn’t as comforting when those hands are about as slippery as Danny Ward’s. And now that game in hand is coming up, and it happens to be against in form Southampton, who have turned their earlier poor form around and are gunning for an automatic promotion place. They’ve also got 2 of the top 5 goalscorers in the Championship this season, in Armstrong and Adams, which could make for a difficult night for our defence.
Here’s the trouble though, and it’s nothing new. This is Leicester City. Unpredictable Leicester City. We can sit and analyse form, analyse player stats, set pieces and formation, moan about the manager and kick off at the football style. We’ve all done a lot of that. But this late in the season and following a few weeks that has seen us lose to QPR, Bristol City, Millwall and Plymouth, plus seen Leeds lose to Blackburn and Ipswich drop points at home, perhaps we should agree, in this unpredictable madness, that the best option for now is just to get absolutely behind them and pray for the points.
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