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The case for the defence

It's all down to Ange. Seems he is persisting with his plans from last season.
The balance between attack and defence is off, we continue to look vulnerable even though we have very good players.

We're even impotent in attack though we have son .

Not having his own coaches isn't helping him get ideas across. If the style of play doesn't change drastically I think he needs to ge responsible.
 
Just to add on, it's more about the fullbacks and CMs helping with defending. Ange seems to be about throwing everyone forward regardless of the situation, whereas others will alternate either fullbacks in attack/defence, or have a CM ready to track running players from midfield. it's a lot more complicated than that of course, it's firstly about structures and formations during transitions...the boys seem to be oblivious.

In the Leicester game porro is the fullback that needs to cover the player behind romero. its not possible for 2 cbs to intercept all crosses in the box.
 
The only conclusion I can draw from looking at this forum and social media is that we’re completely fudged. Our set pieces are terrible, the back four great individually but poor as a group, our World Cup winner CB goes constantly switches off and goes missing, our fullbacks play too high/too central/too attacking/take your pick. Our CMs are all poor and go missing, Son is a brick captain and a worse player, Johnson just as brick and Werner even worse. Solanke is £25m too expensive and only done it for one season at Bournemouth and his backup is constantly injured, in therapy or just brick.

Add to that our manager is some chancer from Melbourne who’s only done it in Australia, Japan and Scotland and has been found out.

We are fudged.
 
tommysvr said:
The only conclusion I can draw from looking at this forum and social media is that we’re completely fudged. Our set pieces are terrible, the back four great individually but poor as a group, our World Cup winner CB goes constantly switches off and goes missing, our fullbacks play too high/too central/too attacking/take your pick. Our CMs are all poor and go missing, Son is a brick captain and a worse player, Johnson just as brick and Werner even worse. Solanke is £25m too expensive and only done it for one season at Bournemouth and his backup is constantly injured, in therapy or just brick.

Add to that our manager is some chancer from Melbourne who’s only done it in Australia, Japan and Scotland and has been found out.

We are fudged.
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I looked at us first half and we were absolutely fine, for large parts of second half we were fine, for me the issues are not so much systematic (wella wella wella ohh) but more mental and a concentration thing and how we react to pressure. I like Porro and I think he is a big threat for us, but when it comes to adversity he is all over the place and I think indicative of panic in the backline, I think Udogie is similar and he ambles about without being decisive. I think it was magnified when Bentancur got tired because first half he helped keep shape but it just endorses for me the need for someone in midfield who can sit at times and help weather the storm and hold it and also provide an outlet.

If we stop the panic and show maturity in our work at the back we would be fine, but the finger pointing, the wandering and often lazy defending in those moments kills us more than the system IMO
 
It is really rather simple to create high value chances against us. We overcommit going forward and leave our two centre backs one on one far too often. All it takes is for the opposition to win the second ball after a long ball forward and we're in trouble and scrambling. As well as scoring the equaliser, Vardy also had the best chance of the whole game, through one on one from a very simple pass where Vicario made a great save to keep us from an opening day loss.

If you combine our susceptibility to long balls with the fact that we are really naive in our defending of crosses to the far post then clean sheet are going to be a rare occurrence, as our record shows. The decent teams in this league would've won last night's game 1-0 at the very worst, or perhaps scored a goal or two more as the game got stretched and the opposition were forced to overcommit while chasing the game.
 
Baleforce said:
There were times last night where we didn’t have anyone in the middle of our own half.

The midfield is a problem.

We need someone that sits in front of the back four and never leaves our half.
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Not quite 'never leaves our half' (considering quite often the only player in our half is the keeper :D) but I agree that we do need a proper, positionally sound, midfield player that can sense danger and always cover the really dangerous space in front of our two centre backs that is even more evident when one of them has to pull out wide to cover the long ball over the top. I suspect Gray can become that player over time.
 
metalgear said:
Just to add on, it's more about the fullbacks and CMs helping with defending. Ange seems to be about throwing everyone forward regardless of the situation, whereas others will alternate either fullbacks in attack/defence, or have a CM ready to track running players from midfield. it's a lot more complicated than that of course, it's firstly about structures and formations during transitions...the boys seem to be oblivious.

In the Leicester game porro is the fullback that needs to cover the player behind romero. its not possible for 2 cbs to intercept all crosses in the box.
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I disagree here. Vardy is Romero's man in every sense of the word. Yet for some strange reason Romero chooses to ignore Vardy and then compounds his mistake by going and taking up a position in the centre of our box that isn't really defending against any threat, but worse still he takes up a position that is three yards deeper than our lovely straight defensive line, thus also playing onside their goalscorer. It was absolutely terrible defending that if somebody like Sanchez or Dier had done then our entire fan base would be apoplectic.
 
Leicester's equaliser was a really poor moment from a single defender, what worried me more though was the chance that Vardy had to win it for them shortly afterwards when Vicario spared our blushes.

We were opened up by a good move from Leicester but it showed how flawed and naive our defending is.

We are trying to press the ball and Porro has pushed up high to try to put the press on Leicester's full back. You can see that Leicester are looking to exploit this a weakness in our shape as they pull Vardy really wide and leave another player close to Romero. Maddison has completely switched off and ignored his opposite number's move into space. Leicester's other forward then drops into the chasm of space that always exists in front of our defence and is so easily exploitable, their centre back plays a nice vertical pass into that space towards that player, VDV then goes with that player even though he is not going to get anywhere near him, instead of leaving him for Bentancur to pick up (though Bentancur's starting position was really poor) which leaves us wide open at the back with Romero having two players to contend with making runs through our centre right channel. The Leicester attacker lays the ball back to the player that Maddison has failed to track and he then has a simple pass to put Vardy in one on one with Porro and VDV being exposed as being massively out of position. Even at this stage all Romero had to do was hold the line as the ball was going back to the player Maddison had failed to pick up and Vardy would've been offside.
 
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There was also a moment in H1 where we had just had a corner, the ball was moved right across to Porro who tried to take someone on and nearly gave it away, Leicester would have had a 4 on 1 had they controlled the ball.

We need to turn the risk dial down a bit.

We got caught too many times like that last season.
 
Finney Is Back said:
Leicester's equaliser was a really poor moment from a single defender, what worried me more though was the chance that Vardy had to win it for them shortly afterwards when Vicario spared our blushes.

We were opened up by a good move from Leicester but it showed how flawed and naive our defending is.

We are trying to press the ball and Porro has pushed up high to try to put the press on Leicester's full back. You can see that Leicester are looking to exploit this a weakness in our shape as they pull Vardy really wide and leave another player close to Romero. Maddison has completely switched off and ignored his opposite number's move into space. Leicester's other forward then drops into the chasm of space that always exists in front of our defence and is so easily exploitable, their centre back plays a nice vertical pass into that space towards that player, VDV then goes with that player even though he is not going to get anywhere near him, instead of leaving him for Bentancur to pick up (though Bentancur's starting position was really poor) which leaves us wide open at the back with Romero having two players to content with making runs through our centre right channel. The Leicester attacker lays the ball back to the player that Maddison has failed to track and he then has a simple pass to put Vardy in one on one with Porro and VDV being exposed as being massively out of position. Even at this stage all Romero had to do was hold the line as the ball was going back to the player Maddison had failed to pick up and Vardy would've been offside.
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Pretty high bar if you're expecting us to limit teams to fewer than 2 chances.
 
Grays_1890 said:
I looked at us first half and we were absolutely fine, for large parts of second half we were fine, for me the issues are not so much systematic (wella wella wella ohh) but more mental and a concentration thing and how we react to pressure. I like Porro and I think he is a big threat for us, but when it comes to adversity he is all over the place and I think indicative of panic in the backline, I think Udogie is similar and he ambles about without being decisive. I think it was magnified when Bentancur got tired because first half he helped keep shape but it just endorses for me the need for someone in midfield who can sit at times and help weather the storm and hold it and also provide an outlet.

If we stop the panic and show maturity in our work at the back we would be fine, but the finger pointing, the wandering and often lazy defending in those moments kills us more than the system IMO
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I don't have an issue with the jist of your post but I'm not sure you can say we were fine when we only scored the one goal despite the possessional dominance. It actually says there's something not quite clicking with the system whereby it's not quite turning territorial and possession dominance into clear cut chances.

Annoying in the end Leicester had by far the best chance of the whole evening and that should be the case.
 
tommysvr said:
Pretty high bar if you're expecting us to limit teams to fewer than 2 chances.
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I'd be fine with the opposition having 5 or 6 chances if they are low value ones, but the two chances I've highlighted were really high value chances and conceding two chances as good as that is poor, especially against one of the promoted teams who are extremely likely to go straight back down.

If we give two chances as good as those away each game then we'll be conceding one or two goals each game which will be a huge number of dropped points.
 
Baleforce said:
There was also a moment in H1 where we had just had a corner, the ball was moved right across to Porro who tried to take someone on and nearly gave it away, Leicester would have had a 4 on 1 had they controlled the ball.

We need to turn the risk dial down a bit.

We got caught too many times like that last season.
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BAN!
 
Finney Is Back said:
I disagree here. Vardy is Romero's man in every sense of the word. Yet for some strange reason Romero chooses to ignore Vardy and then compounds his mistake by going and taking up a position in the centre of our box that isn't really defending against any threat, but worse still he takes up a position that is three yards deeper than our lovely straight defensive line, thus also playing onside their goalscorer. It was absolutely terrible defending that if somebody like Sanchez or Dier had done then our entire fan base would be apoplectic.
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Yeah it was brick defending from him, something I also noticed in this play which I think is relevant on the a wider scale is that he often drops deeper than the rest of the defensive line. It compounds the positional error because If he had been in line with the rest of the defence, Vardy would have been offside.
 
tommysvr said:
Pretty high bar if you're expecting us to limit teams to fewer than 2 chances.
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I don't think it's the number of chances more so the quality of them. Due to the way play they are often very, very high percentage chances like the 2nd one Vardy got. He really should have scored from that and it was only fantastic work from Vicario that stopped it.

It's something that is going to have to be addressed or we have to absolutely blow teams away when we have the ascendancy. It was the same last season, the attack needs to be more decisive.
 
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