A big performance from Leicester’s talismanic striker leading the way in a hugely significant win over one of the traditional elite. It all feels very 2016.
Leicester have done a great many very good things under Brendan Rodgers, but this 3-1 FA Cup sixth-round win over Manchester United might be the best of the lot.
If there has been a slight criticism of this latest Brendan project, it has been in this sort of big game. There has just been the slightest sense that Leicester don’t quite always turn up when it really, really matters. The collapse from seemingly certain Champions League qualification last season. A limp seond-leg performance in the Europa League last 32.
An FA Cup quarter-final against Manchester United is just the sort of game that Leicester have been going wrong in. Today, they were excellent. Quite simply the better side over 90 minutes, no matter how Fred-assisted they were (and they were very Fred-assisted). Conceding an undeserved equaliser didn’t faze them. Nothing fazed them.
And all achieved with Harvey Barnes and James Maddison still absent injured and Jamie Vardy in the midst of a lengthy goal drought. It was particularly fitting that today’s goals came from a Kelechi Iheanacho brace sandwiching a Youri Tielemans strike. They are the players who have stepped up to take the considerable slack in recent weeks. As well as (likely) qualification for the Champions League, the Foxes now have their first FA Cup semi-final since 1982, and on the significantly kinder side of the draw, and could be on for their most sensational season for fully five years.
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Iheanacho’s run of form really has been spectacularly timely. With Vardy short of goals and Barnes and Maddison injured, Leicester’s season really could have fallen away. The whole squad has carried the extra load, but none more visibly than Iheanacho. It’s now nine goals in nine games for a player who’d managed three goals – all in the Europa League – all season before that run. And like Vardy at his best – and still Vardy at his worst, as today showed – Iheanacho has been about far more than just goals. His running was intelligent throughout today and United never got a handle on him.
While Leicester can look at the possibility of silverware as a lovely cherry on top of Champions League qualification, for Manchester United the expectations are necessarily different. Only a trophy can elevate this season from good to excellent, and the Europa League is now the only way. Whatever Ole Gunnar Solskjaer says, United’s longest trophy drought since 1989 is not irrelevant and progress cannot truly be measured until that scratch is itched. The rules are different at Manchester United, as Ole knows better than most.
They were desperately poor today. Whatever caveats about Leicester having had a week off (two if you rightly consider last week’s 5-0 win over Sheffield United not to really count as a meaningful workout) while United scrapped and battled so impressively to victory in Milan are offset by the gulf in resources between these two clubs and Leicester’s injury horror show.
Fred will inevitably take the bulk of the criticism having been palpably at fault for the first goal (although Harry Maguire has questions to answer about the pass he played, knowing as he did both the location and identity of its recipient) but really he was just the most visibly misfiring component of a team performance that just wasn’t quite there. Not even being away from home was enough for United this time, despite the familiar sight of an equaliser swept home before half-time.
And thoughts that after Mason Greenwood’s smartly taken goal United had got away with a shoddy first half and were sure to be better after the break proved unfounded. Leicester were deserved winners as United’s options narrowed on the pitch and for the season as a whole.
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