Are we bottlers and do we have a weak mentality?

[suffolk fox]

Said some weeks ago complacency would be our undoing and we are culpable of that.  We cant handle pressure at all.  We concede, aka Leeds, panic, lose our heads and lose.

 

We believe we are better than Middlesborough and QPR, which with our squad, we should be, but we don't seem to try and we haven't got a clue how to break down a packed defence.

 

Too many players having an off day.  Signs of madness are doing the same things over and over again and not doing anything different.

 

Watch Leicester City, that's us in a nutshell.

[Gevans_97]

1 minute ago, Chocolate Teapot said:

Celtic the bottlers who haven't lost a game since mid December 🤣

Ask any Celtic fan what they think of Rodgers

[MalletFox]

This will be answered by the end of next weekend. If we don’t take atleast 4 points from the next 2 then I think you can make a reasonable argument to say we’re feeling the pressure at the business end of the season.

 

Yes we have injuries, but so does every other team. We need to find a way to win games, that’s all that matters now!

[tinpot_fox]

1 hour ago, FrankieADZ said:

im not going to say yes to either atm, as we need to be more clinical in front of goal

cos look at some of the big decisions that went against us in the last 3 league games, cos my god they are actually woeful

 

 

Maybe we need to learn to play to the referee more, QPR were getting away with being more physical yesterday and it took a while for some of our players to start just shouldering their players off as well. Referee didn’t punish our players for it either. Agree that the refereeing appeared poor yesterday. 

 

59 minutes ago, TeamRocket said:

Think we just stuck in one gear and although we are top of league I still feel like we don't have that fearless mentally like we used to. It's honestly feels like we are scared for some reason. Like we're trying to hard, make silly mistakes etc and not hunting our prey taking our hunt home.

Fair play to QPR yesterday, two buses parked in front of goal and they seemed to intercept every ball that went through them. Needed something else, whether it was another gear or 2 moments of magic instead of only 1.

[Chocolate Teapot]

1 minute ago, Gevans_97 said:

Ask any Celtic fan what they think of Rodgers

Not defending him, its a crap argument though to say he's bottling it this season. Your argument is a different one.

[tinpot_fox]

1 minute ago, MalletFox said:

This will be answered by the end of next weekend. If we don’t take atleast 4 points from the next 2 then I think you can make a reasonable argument to say we’re feeling the pressure at the business end of the season.

 

Yes we have injuries, but so does every other team. We need to find a way to win games, that’s all that matters now!

After seeing the game yesterday, I’d say we need to find a way to score consistently against 11 players stood in front of goal.

[dr.o.ball]

34 minutes ago, teblin said:

The squad isn’t strong enough to cope with certain players being out. That in turn breeds doubts. Hopefully just a bad few games. But it is a bit worrying.

Agree with that for sure but for me it hurts the most when fans start to feel the same way as they did this time last year and believe me there is a lot that do. We so desperately want a bright new future.

[Le Renard]

My late Gran used to say that if Leicester start well they will blow it, and if they start badly they will come good.  I know this isn't 100% correct, and there are a few exceptions, but on the whole, she was right, because as a club we have a funny way of shooting ourselves in the foot.  I think this is why winning the prem is the un-Leicester thing to do.   Supporting this club is like going on a rollercoaster ride with part of the track missing...... bloody scary!  Let's hope the team pulls themselves together because they will be remembered for all the wrong reasons.

[Larry_LCFC]

Problem is, bar a handful of performances, we haven't actually played well all season. We have huffed and puffed and quite frankly made incredibly hard work of the majority of our games. The individual quality we have over the rest of the league has allowed us to nick the winning goal but let's not pretend we have been convincing. It's very much a Celtic in the SPL scenario - big fish, small pond. The issue we have now is the individual quality has dropped off the boil and now we are drifting. Don't think we are anywhere near sacking Enzo, but I'm far from convinced he's a top manager. How he steers the rest of the season will determine that.

Edited 3 March by Larry_LCFC

[Cadno'r Cymoedd]

33 minutes ago, Stevosevic said:

Many of the players are still the same also. 
 

 

Not that many from the 2 Champions League capitulations. 

[Chelmofox]

3 defeats on the spin is hard to take. But (even taking the Leeds game into consideration) we have not been battered and we have that Bournemouth win in there. But we are not playing quickly enough and making it too easy for teams to park the bus against us. When we try to force things any quality seems to evade us.  Quality is our big problem. We don't have anyone who can make something out of nothing at the moment. 

 

However, every club has had a sticky patch this season. The key is how well and quick you get out the other side. My biggest issue is that we are not shithousing these defeats into draws.  QPR and Borough should have been games where we clawed at least one more goal back, and we should have been able to hold on against Leeds. Enzo needs this turned around and fast, but he also needs his big guns to do the same. So many heads dropped quickly yesterday.

 

Talking about bottle jobs and weak mentality, the special award should surely go to our fans. The posters who couldn't wait until we hit a sticky patch (and they had to wait a long time this season!), the fans around me that arrived late brining in their lunches with them who seemed to have no idea how important this game was, the blokes who all left at 40 mins past to get a beer and 85 mins to watch from the concourse. And then those who just moan because they don't know how to do anything else. I came home with my voice in tatters yesterday, but from most in the ground you wouldn't have any idea that we were in a promotion battle. Effing bottlers.

[BKLFox]

Is the Qu aimed at the team or FT fan base? 
 

 

Edited 3 March by BKLFox

[Livid]

I am getting a little concerned, maybe it’s nearly 50 years of watching Leicester mainly doing it the hard way or snatch defeat from the jaws of victory but I can see another heartbreak looming on the horizon. Relegations aside from one promotion under Micky Adam and the League/One championship under Nigel Pearson I can’t remember anything being easy.
 

As for this side only time will tell, they have coasted so far this season, now’s the time to make a stand. 
 

 

 

[weller54]

I think Yesterday's performance was somewhat down to the aftermath of the Bournemouth game.  

No Riccardo..injured in that game.

Hamza played 120 minutes and looked cream crackered yesterday.

Justin played for a large part of that game.

Fatawu ... ditto 

Yunus played 120 minutes, came on yesterday and was poor!...

Shoot me down in flames by all means but the FA Cup run could easily have cost us promotion this season. 

.. and for what?  Because we aren't winning the thing!!!!

[ithuriel]

Maresca should put up a picture of the Spurs squad in the dressing room as bottles with the caption, do you want to be this?

[Flynny]

Half of this thread is part of the reason. The tension in the crowd. The panicking after a few defeats. The sudden recontextualising of the whole season (“we haven’t actually played that well”, pull the other one). 
 

Our fans have a weak mentality and it ripples outwards.

[kristianity77]

I don't think there is any team in the past ten years that have blown the things we have.  

 

I mean, for all the labelling of spurs as bottlers, are they?  Did they blow the league when we won it?  How could they, were they ever top?

 

We've blown two Champions League finishes from absurdly good positions and we blew our Premier League status because we flew through the season thinking "it'll be alright in the end".

 

This just feels like more of the same.  We will go through our final dozen games or so thinking that what has worked before, will work again, with zero changes to the philosophy despite what our results might be.

 

I'm not at all implying to get rid of Enzo, but he needs to adjust his methods rather than keep plodding on thinking it will all come good.

Edited 3 March by kristianity77

[smudger63]

2 hours ago, Raj said:

Nah we will be fine......🙄

That's what they said when the Titanic hit the ice berg.

"Nah we'll be fine, we're unsinkable".  

[ozleicester]

2 hours ago, Thequickbrownfox said:

2019/20 - 4 wins in our last 17

2020/21 - 5 wins in our last 13

2022/23 - 4 wins in our last 23

 

Will there soon be four blue bottles hanging on the wall?

thats pretty strong evidence rigth there

[ARM1968]

We certainly aren’t mentality monsters, to steal a phrase. However, I think the issue is simpler. Teams know what we will do. They know where our threats are. We’re easy to nullify precisely because Enzo is so rigid. It will take a spectacular bit of self awareness and personal honesty for him to change his approach, which he needs to do. We need the old heads on the pitch. We need to be a little more direct and aggressive. It doesn’t need wholesale changes, but in needs adaption. We will soon see. Play like we have been and our season collapses at Sunderland. 

[CrazyKopCorner]

1 hour ago, Le Renard said:

My late Gran used to say that if Leicester start well they will blow it, and if they start badly they will come good.  I know this isn't 100% correct, and there are a few exceptions, but on the whole, she was right, because as a club we have a funny way of shooting ourselves in the foot.  I think this is why winning the prem is the un-Leicester thing to do.   Supporting this club is like going on a rollercoaster ride with part of the track missing...... bloody scary!  Let's hope the team pulls themselves together because they will be remembered for all the wrong reasons.

Yes that Premier League win is absolutely remarkably unLeicester and a lot of credit has to go to Wes as captain. 

 

We also had some proper men in that team of course that backed up the incredible talent in the side i.e Wes, Huth, Wasilewski, Fuchs, Kasper  

[SouthStandUpperTier]

7 minutes ago, kristianity77 said:

 

I mean, for all the labelling of spurs as bottlers, are they?  Did they blow the league when we won it?  How could they, were they ever top?

How could you forget those 13 glorious minutes?

 

 

[ealingfox]

At the time I reckoned bottling the Champions League in 19/20 was one of the biggest bottlejobs in Premier League history and now we're on track to outdo it for the second time in the following four seasons. Absolutely mental.

Edited 3 March by ealingfox

[niyaminski]

Every cloud has a silver lining.

 

If we are bottlers, we’ll be in the play offs. And that means that’s 2 more weeks of being able to watch the Leicester as supposed to getting bored waiting for the euros to start 🤷‍♂️ 

[5waller5]

It’s certainly make or break time. Two huge games coming up.

 

Three games ago I was roundly disagreed with when making the point that we were running out of steam, and the fresh impetus, potential new tactics, fresh legs and psychological boost to the squad of a fresh player in January may come back to bite us yet again.

 

It was seen as an unwarranted attack on Rudkin. If Enzo can’t turn this around I have a feeling it’s the first item on his list of what went wrong.