Kitchandro

Today has been pitiful. Are there mitigating circumstances? Yes. But he’s not getting anything out of these players.

Because even at his best he doesn’t offer anything. Mavididi has a bit of potential, Ayew has none yet he regularly starts ahead of players who can actually carry a threat. He’s an easy ‘safe’ option for managers to pick because they can point to his ‘experience’ instead of taking a risk on rawer, younger players, which I could forgive. I despise the cowardice of signing and picking Ayew, not Ayew.

What’s the game plan here? There’s no ideas, the front 3 are isolated and can’t get the ball.

Yeh well we haven’t got 5 days, we’re over halfway through the window. Why are you defending the club when it’s clear they can’t make the most out of transfer windows and it’s nobody’s fault but their’s? The time for giving them the benefit of the doubt has been and gone.

Looks quite obvious that the front 3 are working hard but are isolated, they always have to either wait for the midfield to get up with them or just go direct with little support.

Didn’t realise football was played on spreadsheets. Maybe managers would get more consistently good results if they started basing their signings and selections on what they see on the football pitch.

Revisionist or not, the fact is that side (plus Kante) won the league the following season. We should never have been struggling, this team however is hopeless with no potential.

Sorry I can’t let this one go. Hideous player for us. Could not keep possession in any circumstance, terrible goal return, and cost us a place in the Champions League with one of his many sitters (Chelsea). He was so far below the standard the rest of the team set that he was arguably our most costly flop of all time. Were other players picked ahead of him we’d probably have scraped the top 4, he was that much of a hindrance.

Yep, a lot of people ignore the reality that most of football is down to good recruitment. They brought Pearson back just because he’d been here before and he and Walsh were great at finding good value in the transfer market. We recruited well under Puel but he was a terrible managerial appointment. So was Shakespeare (great coach but no manager and yet we kept him for the following season). The good decisions paid off handsomely but the poor ones are swept under the carpet because we had good player recruitment from good scouting. Not because of the owner’s genius. It was the genius of the scouts and 2 great managers out of about 5 (hardly a perfect success rate!) I hate that King Power have always taken credit for the league win, that starting 11 cost £20m, it was down to Walsh and Pearson that we had that team and down to Ranieri’s tactics that it won the title. Owners don’t pick players and they don’t pick tactics. All they should be doing is signing cheques and delegating to people who know things about football. I’m not interested in moneybags taking credit for sporting achievements, especially when it was notable for how little money it cost.

Define ‘balanced’? Ayew is an attacker with no attacking threat. I can’t even have the idea of him starting matches on my mind. Buonanotte had a poor game tonight but he’s regularly far, far better than Ayew and our better performances are with him in the team. Even tonight, we looked balanced and threatening, we just kept giving the ball away and there were several culprits.

So what? Why is it people can’t get their head around the idea that 2 different managers might not be very good. Nobody deserves any credit for the season we’re having, collectively everyone at the club has failed. If Cooper genuinely had a say in the summer transfers, he undoubtedly takes a huge chunk of the blame for this, because they were awful, awful signings. I keep thinking ‘why is so and so still getting picked’ and then I realise there is absolutely no one in the squad good enough to replace them! It would take a particularly good manager to keep this squad up, neither Cooper or Ruud are that I’m afraid. As I say, tonight we didn’t lose because of the manager’s tactics or selection - but you could argue we did lose it because of Cooper’s transfer business.

There have been times this season where I think both managers’ selection and tactics have handicapped us. But tonight I can’t even say that. Much like against Man City; the line-up was right, the tactics were right, the effort was there, there was enough space to play, but the players were wasteful. There’s just not the consistent quality, even from our better players. So our best players didn’t perform today, but about 7 of them are not good enough for this level even at their best. We’ve got no chance. Some people should be embarrassed looking at what they’ve allowed this club to sign, you can tell just watching them for 5 minutes that they are out of their depth. We will deservedly go down.

The approach to the game has been good, but we just haven’t got the quality. Vardy’s going through one of those low confidence spells.

They’re already comparing us on BBC Sport, it’s insufferable. I can’t believe any Leicester fan would be ok with it. I don’t think I will though.

The home game? That was the winner in the 1st leg. The whole tie was shockingly officiated though. 2nd leg was one of the best games I’ve ever seen, they were a good side but undoubtedly the balance of refereeing decisions cost us a place at Wembley. 1st leg - At least 2 (arguably 3) blatant handballs not given as penalties, plus the free kick you mention. 2nd leg - Their equaliser (penalty) was given after Chopra was at least 2 yards offside (we were looking very comfortable at that point). Chopra stamp on Wellens’ face, no red. Knee-high tackle on Berner when we’re breaking and he’s bearing down on the last man, no red. Even one of those decisions would have been an absolute robbery, to have 5 or 6 over 2 matches, shocking.

We can’t ignore the fact that PSR rules benefit bigger clubs with bigger revenues. Whether you think that’s better or worse than the richest billionaire owners being the most important factor in a club’s success is another matter. But we can be sure that everything football has done over the last 30 years has made it less competitive and more difficult for medium/small clubs to compete. That could be addressed with a wage and transfer spending cap that’s the same for every club in line with the poorest club in the league, but that would be too ‘fair’ for the bigger clubs to accept, so we ended up with this instead. I agree though, the club have known the rules so there are no excuses and getting away with it on a technicality doesn’t change the fact we’ve pissed so much money up the wall. The suggestion is we’re essentially asset stripping the playing staff and just buying players for the sake of it, almost to make it look like we’re trying to stay up. Whether we actually get a charge is irrelevant, it’s clear we are not doing the business we need to do to stay up and that’s years of negligence coming home to roost. In reality we are down unless we sign several players good enough to walk into the starting 11, and when we do go down we’ll be left with a squad of very little potential and a likely points deduction. The club is absolutely dead. I mean it wouldn’t be if we were just crap but going down to support them was still fun, but no, the club ruined that too.

Agree about Perez, one of the worst value for money signings ever and arguably single-handedly cost us the Champions League with his predictable miss against Chelsea. But Castagne? Decent player for us overall, far better than Chilwell and played on the opposite side?

Everyone says RB but not LB, which I find odd. Kristiansen and Thomas are both nowhere near up to this level. If it was possible I wouldn’t play any of the defenders on our books! EDIT: seen you’ve put LB in a subsequent post, my bad! 😄

Have people forgotten how crap Chilwell is? Even Thomas looked better than him at the time he played for us.

It’s so depressing. Signing players for the Championship means we’ll have a squad that looks right at home in the Championship. It’s a flawed strategy. I can’t believe how pathetic our attempts to stay up have been.

Why are people skating over the Wolves game like it wasn’t an absolute fiasco which has made our relegation far more likely and reflected terribly on the manager? If anything that match alone is enough to judge us on. This is like when people were saying draws against Everton, Leeds and Newcastle were ‘good results’ when they effectively relegated us. ‘Only really’ - no, it’s a massively significant match which the manager got horribly wrong. It counts.

My issue with Ruud is if you do the things he’s doing, you’re more likely to lose than win. Let’s say we bring in 2 full backs and a centre back, and they are the best business we’ve done in years. And let’s say Ruud manages to get them organised as a unit and they start making good decisions. You’ve still got a big problem in that Rudd obviously doesn’t have faith in the team. His decision to go with Ayew over Buonanotte today says an awful lot. He can’t say he didn’t know Buonanotte was a better attacking threat or that we don’t play better with him in the team. He now knows that. I don’t care if Ayew contributed to the goal, the fact remains he’s slow, limited, and we play better with Buonanotte in the side. Let’s not convince ourselves we think Ayew is an asset or better than him. He’s a negative choice. The manager is saying that he doesn’t believe the team can beat the opposition. He believes we can ‘grind out a result’ but not be better than them. We’ve seen time and time again this causes two problems. One: the players lose confidence in possession because they feel that the manager doesn’t have faith in their ability. Two: we naturally get too territorially deep and invite pressure, statistically giving us more chance of conceding due to the areas the ball is in most regularly. So not only does the manager think our attack is worse than the opposition’s, we’re also getting near their goal less. Surely even under his own reasoning that makes conceding goals far more likely than scoring them? In this scenario we’ve accepted our position and struggle to get out of our half, and putting pressure on a leaky defence is only going to result in conceding goals. It’s just basic percentages, even with better players. We’ve seen this so many times. This was a big reason we regressed under Rodgers, it’s the reason we didn’t progress under Puel despite good signings and it’s why a very talented side was bottom with 2 months of the season left under Pearson in 2015. In fact it happens to some extent every season bar the best season in our history. We can all acknowledge the squad needs strengthening, but this is why I’m not convinced it will make any difference. At some point you have to back the team to win, Ruud has shown he’s not going to do that. He will look the facts in the face and decide Ayew the cart horse is the ‘safe’ and therefore better option. We will continue to throw many points away because of this thinking.

What we deserve for being passive and trying to draw rather than win. Mistakes from managers and players are dooming us, no excuses.

Sorry but if we lose this he’s earned the sack. Bringing Ayew back in for Buonanotte after the difference in the last performance is stupidity and we deserve everything we get.

Sorry but I disagree - if you’re getting paid as much as these guys at this level, you should be doing everything you can to know everything you can. Considering the likes of Faes can’t realistically be judged on his championship performances as opposed to his premier league ones, and considering Ward’s crimes two seasons ago are extremely relevant to why he shouldn’t have given him a chance against Wolves - Ruud has shown himself unprepared for the job and we have already lost valuable points because he doesn’t know what his best (or worst) team is.