Leicester again had problems to adapt, doing major errors in fatal defensive situations. They had managed to get back in the game, but failed and were defeated in the end.
We do see again fans going after certain players and blaming them for the personal errors, but those lost balls and situations are of course part of a totality and not something you should blame single individuals alone.
If you have any knowledge about football and how to defend, and has been part of a team at a certain level, you understand what is going on, if not, you do the obvious, picking the player doing the error, but that is far from the solution to get the team performing to their best.
The way out of this personal error situations is for the coach to work on the relational behavour and of course drill the first, second and third defender act, being able to cover for errors done, as James Justin is at this point very exposed and of course his runs up and down will see him get tired at some point, and we then have Justin James and not James Justin in the right back position.
The error that happened yesterday was one fatal as also Jordan Ayew never helped, as both tried to play the ball out trying to be clever, of course based on the game plan and the way the coach want to solve every problem, as a short pass to a corner or a throw in, could have been the option, but by doing that James Justin as well as Jordan Ayew would have been sloughtered as they are told in every training session, to not just go for the simplest solution and act on your own instinct, being drilled to do what they did, and by then making a fatal error that cost Leicester a goal.
FT 2-1 Villa. #LCFC have handed the points to Villa with more catastrophic individual errors. You just can’t get away with it at this level. Five consecutive defeats now. The survival challenge is getting bigger and bigger.
— Rob Tanner (@RobTannerLCFC) January 4, 2025
During a game James Justin does a lot of good, but he is a player that should be allowed to play a simple game at times, as we would like to see him getting more freedom, not being tied to certain patterns of play, that is so much part of the game today.
When a player comes on he is often being talked to and shown a lot of different paper flip boards as this has become a pandemic inside football, trying to tell a player what to do in certain situations that are seen as potential happenings.
Tactical talk and different pictures are shown to players, during the week, before the game, during the game and as we have seen, before a player is going on to the field. Seldom those messages are absorbed as they intentially are believed to be. Players at this level, with the pace out there, needs to build an understanding based on his own belief and level of play, based on being tested on the training field in different defensive actions, building on his practice in training, not based on numbers and different drawings on a flip board.
The fact that players are told to play a certain way, makes it easy to see why the get in trouble, not solving a situation based on their own belief, but instead following the pattern of play and game plan being told, the freedom is far from there. We did see this in a more extreme fashion last season, when Mads Hermansen, as a goalkeeper, made stupid errors. He would not have done those errors if he was allowed to solve this based on his own belief, not taking the risks he did. His game this season is more based on his own pattern, having more freedom in his decision making, than he had last season.
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