Leicester remind me of my Watford XI that went down… it’s the subtle things that add up and leave you in trouble
IT’S a strange experience when an established Premier League club slips towards relegation.
Some players start feeling a sense of entitlement, egos kick in, people take their eye off the ball, levels of desire drop, everything gets a bit lax.
It’s subtle things, little one per cents, which build up and suddenly you realise you haven’t won for ten games and you’re bang in trouble.
That’s my lived experience, when Watford went down in 2020 — after five years in the top flight. The season before we had reached the FA Cup final and finished 11th, 16 points clear of the drop zone.
Every club and campaign is different but I detect a lot of similarities with what has happened at Leicester City this season.
At Watford, there were players wanting pay rises, others looking for a move, there were other disputes.
Throw in a few injuries to key players and suddenly a squad which should have too many good players to be battling relegation, finds itself bottom of the league.
The Premier League is unforgiving. There are too many good teams.
As players, you can never afford to let your standards drop. As a club, you can never afford to stand still.
Three seasons ago, Watford failed to win any of our first 11 matches — and I was one of two or three senior pros who got injured in the first couple of games.
Leicester took one point from their first seven this term.
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And when you suffer a start like that, you are facing a hell of an uphill battle.
Leicester face Liverpool on Monday, then they visit Newcastle, with both of those opponents battling for Champions League qualification.
So it is quite likely that they will be relegated before their final match at home to West Ham.
Like most football followers in this country, I’ll be gutted if the Foxes go down.
What they achieved by winning the title in 2016 allowed everybody to dream — they made the seemingly impossible real.
And under Brendan Rodgers they won the FA Cup and twice narrowly missed out on qualifying for the Champions League.
I like to claim, half-joking, that I set the whole Leicester fairytale in motion.
Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of my winning goal in a play-off semi-final for Watford against the Foxes — when our keeper Manuel Almunia saved what would have been a decisive penalty and we went straight up the other end and scored.
The following season, Leicester were promoted to the Premier League.
The next season, they had their great escape from relegation under Nigel Pearson, and then their crazy title win under Claudio Ranieri.
But they have lost their way badly over the last year or two. Last summer’s transfer window was a disaster for them.
The club’s Thai owners were unable to spend big and, instead of cashing in on Youri Tielemans and James Maddison then reinvesting some of that money, they chose to stick.
Neither Tielemans nor Maddison have been consistently anywhere near their best and now Leicester will lose the Belgian midfielder on a free and the England man for a fraction of what they might have got last summer.
When Kasper Schmeichel went last year, Leicester did not only lose a top-class goalkeeper, they lost a genuine leader, a great character and one of the few remaining links to their title-winning season.
That, along with the injury to Jonny Evans, has left them lacking experience and leadership at the back.
Wesley Fofana, who went to Chelsea for big money last summer, is a very fine player but Evans used to talk him through games and Leicester are missing him badly.
Wes Morgan had already gone and Leicester simply haven’t replaced the experience, as well as the quality, they have lost over the last couple of years.
Jamie Vardy is getting on and the strikers they have brought in, the likes of Kelechi Iheanacho and Patson Daka, haven’t scored enough goals.
I know Dean Smith, Craig Shakespeare and John Terry well and they are good people but they have come into this very late.
Nobody knows whether they will be sticking around for the substantial rebuild which will be needed if Leicester do go down.
There has been a lot of confused thinking at Leicester this season and a lot of players who have not done themselves justice.
I know that painful feeling and, sadly, I recognise it when I look at Leicester.
