Leicester (a) – The Review

Random star performer

Teemu Pukki baby. In a very, very good team performance, Teemu stood out. I love watching him makes runs, let alone when he has the ball, and we got a lot of both in this game. From the far end of the field, watching him run onto that cutting through ball, and placing the ball into the net… well, it was a good way to end a bad way, let’s just say. He ran all day long, he was excellent at working to get behind their defenders, and he had two chances to nick a winner in the second half, which he would have taken were it not for some excellent defending. He’s a very good player, and he had a very good game. Oh, and it turns out I was sat next to a Finnish Canary who was so deliriously happy I almost cried from just how pure the moment was.

Moment of the match

We had a good old fashioned Var-cical moment towards the end of the second half when Norwich put the ball out of play for a player to get treatment. Instead of giving the ball back, Kelechi Iheanacho bore down on goal, much to Norwich’s bemusement, and then rage. Todd Cantwell seemed particularly put out and showed his displeasure in the traditional way. It was an outrageous situation. The ref handled it incredibly badly. We’d just calmed down when a message flashed up on the big screen to say that VAR had been reviewing the play for a red card. That got the outrage restarted. 

Farke watch

I know this is the bit to talk about team selection and game management but I mainly want to say how much I enjoyed the surprise post-game Farke wave. I thought we were only allowed them after wins. Maybe he thought it felt like a win. We certainly did, and olé’d with gusto.

Weekend whinge

I don’t have a weekend whinge. Those of us with a red political perspective have had a very, very bad week. I thought it would only get worse with a battering against the Premier League’s in-form team. Instead, we were served up a cracking game of football, played by two very attractive teams, which ended with Norwich getting a big, important, hard-earned point. There’s a lot to moan about at the moment, but football ain’t one of them this week.

(P.S. Maddison put the ball outside the quadrant for their goal.)

Atmosphere rating

It was my first time at the ‘King Power Stadium and I’d heard good things about it. I was disappointed. Norwich fans kept up a more-or-less relentless level of noise throughout, but the home fans were disappointing. The main noise they generated was from their own clappers and from our laughter at every man, woman and child in the home stands wearing Leicester themed hats.

There was one nasty incident where – from my vantage point – the stewards behaved really badly. It seemed like a Norwich fan accompanying a disabled fan, sitting in front of the Leicester fans to our right, was hit on the head by something thrown from the stand. He turned and threw it back, at which stewards were all over him. It looked like he was trying to explain himself, but was aggressively bundled out. Hard to know all the details but it looked outrageous.

I do want to add that I generally had one of the nicest away day experiences in years. The city is lovely, there were several nice pubs on the way to the ground, and numerous fans approached us on the pub crawl back to the station to wish Norwich well and say how much they enjoyed our style. There was even a nice moment when a small group of Norwich fans were being abused by a (very) drunk Leicester fan at the station and locals in blue and white intervened. Proper football fans. Leicester is a fine city.

Summary

This a confusing team. The team which played yesterday isn’t getting relegated. The team who played against Sheffield United and Southampton certainly is. We clearly have enough about us to go up against the best, and we clearly have faults and failures that mean we often can’t go up against the worst. It’s exciting to find out which team appears each Saturday (or whenever Sky dictates.) More than anything it was a good, enjoyable game of entertaining, attractive football from both sides, and not even VAR could spoil it, this time.