Ricey

Midfield is all over the place. KDH sloppy, Praet too slow to do his defence work.

I can’t see any reason why both ratings can’t match. It could be a big. OVR stands for Overall, as in Overall Rating.

It’s pretty obvious that we’ve been stringing this out in the hope we can sell someone.

I do think the style of play is a bit boring and I can get frustrated with it at times, but ultimately it's more than doing the trick and I'm totally behind it. Yes there are weaknesses and yes I wish we were more ruthless when a goal up, but points are all that matter. The job this season is to get out of this league. Our squad, on the whole, is too good for this league, so adopting a slower, controlled style of play is a really sensible way of maximising that quality and ensuring that we keep ticking over during a long season. I've come to the conclusion though that managers like Puel, Rodgers and Maresca are just never going to be that popular with a large portion of our fanbase. As a club, and as a city, I think a fast paced, aggressive, never-say-die style of play is what fits best. We love being the underdog who never know when they are beaten. That's what really resonates with the majority of Leicester fans, not a slower, methodical style of play that also tend to come with a lack of resilience when we are put under pressure.

I’m not saying it was quiet tonight but I could hear Harry Winks having a go at the Lino and I sit in row BB.

Very worrying signs if we sell him, especially for under £30M. Losing him, having already lost Ndidi until April, could risk us not going up automatically. That’s a bigger hit than £30M. Wildly speculating here, but I noticed on Monday that he was moaning and whinging to other players a lot more, often when it was his mistake.

Transfers don’t take longer, we just find out about them a lot earlier due to people like Fabrizio Romano.

They can’t just dock points from Man City and Chelsea to keep Everton and Forest happy. They have to go through the proper process and prove the charges. Chelsea haven’t even been charged yet. Everton and Forest’s tears over Man City is just pure and utter bitterness.

Another one that’s on Maresca unfortunately. A decent performance ruined by more very strange game management. You could see us tiring at 60 mins, but yet again no subs. You could see us losing control, but we just go deeper and deeper and deeper. I want us to write our own narrative and try and win the game. Push for the second rather than trying to bore the opposition into submission. It all it takes is one misplaced pass and the opposition all of sudden smell blood.

JJ hasn’t played the inverted role like Maresca plays. He’s too uncomfortable in possession to play there. I imagine it’ll be KDH and either Praet or Akgun in the 8 roles.

The Forest argument is crazy. No one can prove they ended up with more money by selling later in the window, that is just their word. Who knows, Tottenham may have bid earlier if it looked like he was off to Brentford. Also, it's a self-inflicted mess. They knew the rules and they knew the numbers required to not break those rules. They risked it and lost. Everything else is excuses.

Football Manager don’t work like that either.

I’m not sure it’s a red, but then again I’m judging that on the slow mo replay. At full speed it looks bad. Red or not, it’s an idiotic thing to do just before half time when we’ve had a ‘contentious’ decision given for us. You just don’t do it. He’ll learn, but it’s cost us and will carry on costing us for the next 3 matches.

Red card changed it, obviously, but to only make one change in the second half was madness. KDH and Casadei in particular were knackered and we didn’t freshen it up. Albrighton, Coady or Akgun would have strengthened us in those final 10 minutes.

They move matches regardless of TV now, to spread them out.

Huge blow, especially as we can’t sign anyone until we sell someone. Fingers crossed Praet gets fit, or even better leaves.

He would have been told to go to the monitor because it was subjective whether Salah was interfering. For a normal offside where the player offside has touched the ball the referee wouldn’t be sent to the monitor.

Good first half but as ever not clinical enough with the chances we created. The game management in the second half was terrible, as were the substitutions. We also used up all of our slots early on so we couldn’t make any more subs in the last 10 to try and stem the tide. Maresca has had a howler there unfortunately. I’d have taken a point before the game, but that’s a real kick in the teeth after leading for so long.

I started work at EA a couple of weeks a go, working on FC. UI bugbears, hit me...

Brighton were very defensive and organised when they first came up. They’ve transitioned to their current style.

My biggest worry is the comments coming from Enzo. He’s happy with the amount of chances we are creating and thinks we just need to be more clinical, but I totally disagree. We hardly create any good opportunities anymore. Last night the worst team in the league, who had scored 8 goals going into game, had more shots than us and registered an xG of 1.4 compared to our 1.06. It was absolutely ludicrous to say that not being clinical enough was the reason we drew. The same can be said for most games. From minute 1 to 75 we just don’t create anywhere near enough chances and instead we rely on the other team getting tired towards the end. That’s not a sustainable game plan. There will be too many occasions when we’ve left ourselves too much work to do or when the opposition sneak a goal, like last night and like against Middlesbrough. We also have to start trying to mix things up in an attempt to stop teams stifling us like they have over the last couple of months. Do that and the chances will come. Swap the wingers, ask Ricardo to overlap at times, ask the wingers to go on the outside rather than always cutting in, inject some intensity and higher risk passing for a 5 minute burst. Take teams by surprise. We have become far too predictable.

I’ve not been that annoyed by a performance in a long time. It was sloppy, but I think it was the arrogance that has annoyed me the most. Maybe it was because it was Sheffield Wednesday or maybe it’s because we are over confident in this ‘tire them out, score late’ philosophy, but we looked like a team expected to win with minimal effort. Once we scored we just…stopped, as we so often do. Intensity drops, aggression lowers, players stop running and passes become too safe. We are playing the team rock bottom of the league, why not try and get a second and kill the game in the first half! There was an arrogance to the team selection as well. I know that we need to rotate, but did we need three traditional CB’s? Did we need Casadei who’s clearly out of his depth? It reeked of complacency. Teams have also sussed that we aren’t actually that good at playing out from the back. Every team is now aggressively pressing us once the ball moves out from our GK or CB’s and it’s causing us all sorts of problems. The worrying thing is that I can’t see Enzo adjusting anything to combat it.

I think so far this season all we’ve seen are the benefits of this clearly defined, well communicated, possession-based style of play, but now we are seeing the drawbacks. Too often we want to take more touches or more passes than are required, whilst we also seem incapable of upping the tempo or mixing it up when we really need a goal. We saw it as well under Rodgers, but perhaps not quite to this degree. Teams learning how to best combat us also isn’t helping. I think all of the above becomes irrelevant if we sort out the general sloppiness that seems to be there for about 60 minutes of most matches. Wingers running into blind alleys, KDH being incapable of weighing his passes correctly, our striker not linking play, our no.8’s just generally not offering enough creativity etc. I’d also love to see us try and go at a team early, rather than settle instantly into the slow, possession based football that’s designed to tire the opposition out. I’m not panicking, but I don’t think we are going to walk automatic promotion like a lot of people think. I think Ipswich, Leeds and Southampton are at least on a par with us currently.