Leicester City: What once was so magnificently simple is now abundantly complicated

Richard Jolly writes that as Leicester City prepare to meet Manchester City, the perfect balance they struck last season has been shown to be impossibly delicate.

Claudio Ranieri's Leicester City are 16th in the Premier League, just two points ahead of Sunderland in the relegation zone. Lee Smith / Action Images / Reuters

It isn't always easy to sum up a surreal situation in 140 characters. The press officer running Leicester's official Twitter feed managed it on 6 February.

The Foxes were away at Manchester City, the title favourites. After an hour, the improbability of their position was described perfectly: "So if you're just joining us.... #lcfc are leading 3-0 and Robert Huth is on a hat-trick!"

The centre-back did not get his hat-trick, and Leicester’s eventual win was only 3-1 but it was, Claudio Ranieri later revealed, the day he began to believe his impossible outsiders could be champions. Now, as these two Cities reconvene for the first time since then, it is with Leicester in danger of suffering a decline that would be as remarkable as their rise.

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“We are in the battle for relegation,” Ranieri admitted after Saturday’s defeat at Sunderland.

Lose on Saturday and, if Sunderland and Hull both win, his side will be in the drop zone. Prioritising the Champions League came at a cost, and while a weakened team faced Porto on Wednesday, a 5-0 defeat suggested they have neither strength in depth nor the team spirit that proved so formidable last year.

There are joking suggestions Leicester could win the Champions League and drop into the Championship and it feels pertinent to point out that at this stage of the season two years ago, they propped up the table. If there are two fundamental differences between that squad and this, it is that higher-calibre but largely ineffective newcomers – the club record buys Ahmed Musa and Islam Slimani, the oft-injured midfielder Nampalys Mendy and the unused Polish winger Bartosz Kapustka – have been acquired with the spoils of success after others reached unexpected, stratospheric heights.

Now Jamie Vardy has gone 16 club games without a goal. Riyad Mahrez’s only league strikes this season have come from the penalty spot. The forward has only mustered four attempts on target in the league all season, the winger just one in open play since September. Neither went to Porto, the latest attempt to spur the Footballer of the Year and the PFA Player of the Year back to form. Ranieri has tried repeating last season’s formula, all to no avail.

“We are the same team doing the same things,” he lamented last week. But they are no longer doing them as well. Mahrez and Vardy, acquired for a combined £1.4 million (Dh6.5m), are no longer terrorising defences. The Algerian is crowded out, the Englishman deprived of room behind them where his pace can be so deadly.

As Leicester concede at set-pieces, the back four that kept 11 clean sheets in 15 games earlier this year is no longer impenetrable. Ranieri’s tactics seemed magnificently simple last year; now complications abound.

They can’t play 4-4-2 without the sold N’Golo Kante, it appears, without exposing the slow defence, but lack the calibre of central midfielders to justify a switch to 4-3-3. There are suggestions some have been lured into complacency aided by the lucrative new contracts their excellence secured. Perhaps focus went before form.

Ranieri may reflect on the strange, elusive nature of chemistry, how everything and everyone gelled, how individuals played better than ever before. Now perhaps only Danny Drinkwater and Shinji Okazaki have replicated last season’s efforts and the midfielder is suspended while the striker has struggled to secure a place after signing of Slimani.

His decisions have grown more difficult. This should be a good time to face the other City, with Nicolas Otamendi, Fernandinho and Sergio Aguero all suspended.

But last season Leicester made most games a bad time to face them. They have to rediscover such resolve before Huth’s heroics at the Etihad seem a mirage.

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