JibrinLeicester City already possess the ideal game plan for crucial Middlesbrough showdown
Leicester City travel to promotion-chasing Middlesbrough on Tuesday evening to encounter a side that has just stumbled against a deep defensive block.
Almost as soon as Luke Thomas’ header unbelievably struck the woodwork instead of finding the back of Stoke City’s net, Gary Rowett’s focus would have immediately shifted to Tuesday night’s trip to Middlesbrough.
Leicester City arrive at The Riverside having failed to secure a league victory since January 5. They remain stuck in the relegation zone, though they have reduced the gap to a woeful West Bromwich Albion side to just a single point.
They make the long journey north having not kept a Championship clean sheet since September and are fully aware they will face one of the division’s most dangerous attacking outfits.
However, it will not have escaped Rowett’s analysis that despite Middlesbrough’s love for dominating the ball—they average a league-high 58 per cent possession—keeping hold of the ball might not be as powerful as conventional wisdom suggests.
That was certainly the approach relegation rivals Oxford United demonstrated on Saturday when they visited Teesside. They sat deep, conceded a staggering 75-25 share of possession, and ensured they remained compact and difficult to break down.
The plan worked. Oxford escaped with a 0-0 draw that arguably harmed Boro’s promotion ambitions more than it boosted their own survival hopes—but it was a step forward and undoubtedly a tactical template for Rowett to consider replicating.
Oxford manager Matt Bloomfield made no apologies when he said after the game: “We have to understand what are our strengths, and what are Middlesbrough’s strengths. If we tried to go toe-to-toe with them today, with the level of players that they have, and the cohesiveness…
“We’re still progressing as a group, we’ve been in the building a lot less time, so we have to understand that they went to Coventry and had in the 70s percent possession again on Monday. And Coventry are a top team, right?
“They’re such a good team in possession. If you jump and reveal space, they’re going to exploit it. They’re so good at finding the space and exploiting it. So we knew that we had to respect our opposition and have our game plan, and that’s what I’m pleased about.”
Sister publication TeessideLive described the visitors’ tactics as ‘deep lines of four and five behind the ball at all times’ which ‘offered Boro so little space to utilise in the final third’.
Yes, Kim Hellberg’s team registered 24 shots, but Oxford managed 13 efforts of their own and even struck the woodwork twice. Middlesbrough found it extremely difficult to penetrate behind the visitors’ backline.
Hellberg admitted his frustration: “We need to get better on all those things, like every team in the world needs to get better. If the games look like this, I think it is a compliment in terms of teams seeing that this is a place where you have to keep the spaces very, very small.
“Oxford are more into it, so they take every minute from a free kick, every minute from a goal kick, they try to get free kicks all the time. They know how to play that way. That could be a difference between different teams.”
Hellberg’s key observation is that this is simply how Oxford play—it’s their identity. Other sides, including Leicester City, may not be able to instantly switch on such deep-lying organisation and comfortably surrender possession for long periods.
Oxford also defend their penalty area exceptionally well—something nobody could confidently claim about this Leicester City side. During the first half against Stoke, they looked just as vulnerable as ever to crosses into the box. Indeed, Stoke’s two goals originated from Ben Wilmot getting on the end of deliveries from wide areas.
But Oxford’s approach remains instructive. If City attempt to go toe-to-toe with Boro, they could leave inviting spaces for Middlesbrough’s creative talents to exploit, exposing defenders like Caleb Okoli and Ben Nelson to extremely uncomfortable situations.
If instead they pack the central areas and force Boro wide, the onus then falls on City’s full-backs to block crosses, their centre-backs to dominate in the air, and Asmir Begovic to command his six-yard box. Of course, if they were consistently capable of doing those things, they probably wouldn’t be mired in a relegation battle right now.
‘Doing an Oxford’ might not be the glamorous football Leicester City fans dream of, but in Gary Rowett—who managed the U’s for the first half of this very season—they have a coach whose fingerprints are all over that Oxford side. ‘Doing an Oxford’ just might be the key to finally ending Leicester City’s defensive nightmare.
Jibrin
