It may have been defensive lapses that cost Leicester City defeat at Swansea, inflating their relegation worries, but at least as significant is the fact that they haven’t scored a league goal this year, a run that now stretches to 610 minutes. It is a problem with many sources, but the bare fact is that Jamie Vardy and Riyad Mahrez, the two forwards whose brilliance was instrumental in them winning the title, simply are not firing.
Claudio Ranieri made clear last week he had spoken to both players, trying to coax out of them the magic that elevated last season. This being Ranieri, he was clear the conversations had not been dressing-downs, emphasising that Mahrez is trying and that Vardy works very hard for the team, but their diminished contribution – Vardy has scored just five goals this season as opposed to 24 last; Mahrez three compared with 17 – is symptomatic of the more general problems at the club.
Leicester as a whole are going through a radical regression to the mean. Before Sunday’s defeat, they had played 100 league games since their return to the Premier League, from which they had taken 143 points. For a promoted club an average of 1.43 points per game over two and a half seasons would usually be regarded as extremely healthy, guaranteeing mid-table security. Put it this way, if Nigel Pearson – off‑field events notwithstanding – had consistently picked up 1.43 points per game, 54 points per season, he would almost certainly still be in the job and be relatively popular with both fans and directors.
But Leicester, for reasons that remain largely inexplicable, did not pick up those points consistently: 103 of them came in a spell of 47 games in which they, improbably, stayed up and then, far more improbably, won the league. It seems very hard to say what the mean they are regressing to actually is: two seasons of relegation struggle plus a title-winning season suggests an average of finishing around about 10th that Leicester have not experienced in two decades.
There are countless explanations for what happened last season, the simplest of which is that half a dozen players simultaneously experienced the form of their lives, Vardy and Mahrez among them. Vardy, at 30, will perhaps never hit those heights again; Mahrez, at 25, would presumably hope last season was part of an ascent to the very highest levels. A couple of flicks from Mahrez and some runs into traffic from Vardy aside, neither was really involved at Swansea.
Part of the difficulty is familiarity. Opponents know how to deal with them. Both have shown at times this season how effective they can still be if you let them perform the old tricks. In the Africa Cup of Nations, for instance, there was a moment in Algeria’s game against Zimbabwe when Mahrez, got the ball on the right, cut inside on to his left foot and curled in the ball inside the far post.
He rarely gets the chance to apply that template in the Premier League any more. There was one opportunity midway through the first half when Mahrez got the ball on the right with Vardy peeling to the back post. He cut inside but, with Swansea alert to his preferences, he found two defenders swooping to smother the shot in his shooting stride.
Similarly, everybody now knows that Vardy needs space behind defences to attack, something that was clear with England last summer when he was ineffective against the deep-lying backlines of Portugal in the pre‑Euro 2016 friendly and Slovakia in the tournament itself.
Only one team, Manchester City, have dared push up against Leicester this season and a liberated Vardy responded with a hat-trick. Let him play as he wants and he will still be effective.
To an extent, these things are self‑perpetuating. Playing with confidence, a Vardy or a Mahrez find themselves successfully pulling off moments that are at the very limit of their abilities. The dipping strike Vardy scored against Liverpool last season, or the jinking skill and finish Mahrez executed against Chelsea, simply would not happen with them in their present moods, as was in effect confirmed with 12 minutes to go by Vardy’s awful slice when Swansea’s defence for once opened up in front of him.
Of course the very best players can impose themselves in a variety of circumstances, cannot be shut down by one tactical shift. It should not come as a great surprise to discover that Vardy, who was after all still playing non-league football at 25, isn’t a player of the very highest level – that devastating as he still can be, he needs the circumstances to be right.
Mahrez, who perhaps hasn’t quite hit his peak, might yet be one of the absolute elite. If he is to prove himself that good, though, he needs to show that he can still outwit defenders who know how he likes to play.