Home   >   MOTDs   >   MOTD: Leicester City 2-2 West Ham United

MOTD: Leicester City 2-2 West Ham United

By on April 17, 2016

Leicester City phenomenon Jamie Vardy has enjoyed his best ever season for the Foxes and has lead the club’s charge to the top of the Premier League table. With twenty-two league goals this season, he is their difference maker and the Englishman’s pace and incisiveness up front allows the wild success of their counter-attacking style of football.

Yet he very much isn’t all there is to Claudio Ranieri’s men. Their title charge has been a club-wide push that has come to gain the support of millions of football fans across the world. Vardy is barely the club’s most prolific attacker this season, a title the forward shares with midfielder Riyad Mahrez, the favorite for the PFA Player of the Year title with sixteen goals and eleven assists.

Although Vardy has started every single game of their league campaign so far this season, there are times when he cannot lead them over the line. Enter, Leonardo Ulloa. The Argentine forward has been the most-used substitute in the Premier League so far this season and has played his own pivotal part in Leicester’s success from the wings, with three goals from the bench and another in a rare start. None, though, have been more important than a stoppage time penalty to salvage the East Midlands club a draw against West Ham United at the death of a tight, intense battle at the King Power Stadium.

Vardy had given Leicester an early lead against Slaven Bilic’s men, but was sent off for diving in the sixty-fifth minute. The match descended into bedlam in a blistering finale with three goals in the final ten minutes.

West Ham completed a marvelous turnaround inside 120 seconds courtesy of an Andy Carroll penalty and Aaron Cresswell’s wonder-strike, only for Ulloa to pull Leicester level well past the end of the allotted four minutes of stoppage time. By the nature of the result, it felt like one point gained instead of two points lost for Ranieri’s men and for the moment, they have an eight point lead at the top of the table.

This amounted to but a tiny wobble in their title challenge compared to the comprehensive meltdown that West Ham threatened to impose. Where Leicester lacked in guile they compensated for with a grit and resolve; for a brief moment, they put a pause on the fairy-tale to get down to the dirty work.

In the end, West Ham could not unlock the key to stopping Ranieri’s men.

Remarkably, the Foxes have still only lost three games this season and have only once been truly trounced, in a 5-2 loss to Arsenal in the early stages of the season.

However, this was their tenth draw of the season and for only four teams in the top half has that number reached double digits — the others being Spurs, West Ham and Chelsea. The first three, the league’s standout surprises this season, are all similar in the fact that what they do off the ball is more tactically significant than what they do on it.

Spurs press high up the pitch, forcing errors out of the opposition, and relying on a strong, tough tackling midfield to intimidate and breaking down their opposition’s attacks.

By contrast, Leicester sit deep and attack on the break in a direct manner. Dan Altman, founder of North Yard Analytics, said in a talk at Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in London: “The more Leicester pass, the less Leicester score.”

West Ham are capable of both styles of play. Slaven Bilic has advanced upon the work of his predecessors, who mostly sat deep and absorbed pressure, and has modeled West Ham into a more proactive, aggressive team. That said, they’re fully comfortable with sitting deep, too.

Their excellence has come by way of the extra mettle that Bilic has instilled in the Hammers. They spring forward on flowing, attacking moves and then coil back on defense. And so oscillated the opening fifteen minutes of their fascinating meeting with Leicester.

Few teams have been able to penetrate West Ham’s back-line this season, but Leicester’s pace and ingenuity caught the visitors out in transition. Kasper Schmeichel launched a long throw to Riyad Mahrez, who turned on his marker and cut into the middle. Shinji Okazaki made a run towards the wing and opened up space for N’Golo Kante to burst onto the end of Mahrez’s through-ball down the center of the pitch. Kante filtered the ball wide to Vardy, who took a touch inside the box and smashed a low finish across goal and into the bottom corner of the net.

Jonathan Moss, the man in the middle, was thrust into the spotlight in the fifty-first minute when he pulled out the red card for Vardy on the other side of the half for a blatant dive in the box. It was only controversial in the regard that the call is seldom made and easy to misjudge, as Mark Clattenberg will attest to. Vardy, though was definitely culpable on this occasion.

Moss’s next big call, a penalty for West Ham in the seventy-second minute, divided opinions in the same way. Wes Morgan dragged down Winston Reid in the midst of a crowded penalty area as West Ham lobbed in a late corner, but tussling in the box is the norm these days and is that is rarely called out as a penalty. A chorus of boos rained down from the stands as Carroll coolly converted.

Cresswell then scored with a glorious volley from the edge of the box, a peach of a goal in an otherwise dogged affair.

There was time for one more twist of fate, however, as Moss called a penalty for Carroll’s push on Jeffrey Schlupp in the corner of the box. It was the most questionable of his three massive calls Bilic was incensed as Ulloa opened up his hips to convert an unstoppable penalty into the side-netting.

Ranieri has been fortunate with injuries this season and started with the exact same lineup six matches in a row, although that will change against Swansea next week due to Vardy’s suspension. His absence will force Leicester to come out of their shell a little bit, given Ulloa lacks Vardy’s pace, but Ulloa has again proved that he is eager step up to the challenge.

In the midst of so much controversy, a smashing game of football was rather lost and in his post-match press conference, Bilic wasn’t even asked about the potentially game-changing moment Cheickhou Kouyate hit both posts with a header just moments into the match.

Instead, he was left to answer questions on the thankless nature of the Premier League and the ruthlessness of the team that currently leads it. Now, only four more games stand in Leicester’s way of winning the league.

Homepage photo credit: joshjdss (West Ham Vs Birkrikara) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

About Alex Morgan

Alex Morgan, founder of Football Every Day, lives and breaths football from the West Coast of the United States in California. Aside from founding Football Every Day in January of 2013, Alex has also launched his own journalism career and hopes to help others do the same with FBED. He covers the San Jose Earthquakes as a beat reporter for QuakesTalk.com and his work has also been featured in the BBC's Match of the Day Magazine.