It was unusual to see Chelsea play such an open and attacking style of football at the start of the 2014/15 season. As the campaign progressed, Chelsea churned out the 1-0 victories; Leicester City’s title challenge is following the same template.
It’s unlikely that, at the start of this campaign, new Leicester City manager Claudio Ranieri instructed his squad and coaching staff to adopt Chelsea’s approach of the previous campaign. Yet one cannot divert from the similarities in how both teams’ spells have unfolded.
In the first two months of the 2014/15 Premier League campaign, Chelsea had already scored 19 goals in just six Premier League fixtures, conceding seven. Journalists, fans and probably most opposing managers would have been startled by Chelsea’s attacking approach and, more questioningly, José Mourinho’s allowing it. He is a manager seen as a master of the 1-0 victory, with men behind the ball and a guaranteed six-man defence, with two fullbacks, two centre-backs and two holding midfielders.
Mourinho made it clear after the 6-3 away victory at Goodison Park against Everton that he was more disappointed in the three goals they did concede than his praise for the six-goal haul his side had managed to score at the opposite end.
Mourinho told Sky Sports: “I think if the salt and pepper of football is goals then to have nine goals in a Premier League match is fantastic ingredients, so I think (we saw) two teams that played the offensive way fantastically well.
“I know they (Everton) are a good offensive side, but to concede three goals is too much. All of them I can clearly define the mistakes, the people involved and where we failed.
“We were killers in attack, especially on the counter-attack, so when you come to this stadium and get three points, it is a reason to be happy. When you come here and score six goals, obviously my players did well.
“We try to have the initiative so we are a different team.
“But I want to be different in that we play better football; score more goals, but I don’t want to be different in the sense that we concede goals and to concede three goals and identify the mistakes we made is something I have to work at.”
Compare Leicester City at the same stage – late September – The Foxes had bagged 15 goals in seven league matches, conceding 14 goals in the same period. Leicester didn’t manage to keep a clean sheet in that time and had a positive goal difference of just one (+1) yet, until the final fixture of the comparable seven, were unbeaten in that period.
In the four months that ensued for Chelsea of the 2014/15 campaign, it was clear that the leaders had established themselves as clear favourites for the Premier League title, as Manchester City faded away. With that mindset, Chelsea knew that keeping clean sheets and being satisfied with bagging just one goal at the same time would suffice in their pursuit of the title. In the final third of the season, Chelsea scored two or more goals in a match on four of twelve occasions, compared to scoring two or more goals in ten of the first twelve league matches.
At the moment, the same time frame cannot be compared. Instead, taking into account Leicester City’s last twelve matches of this campaign, it becomes clear that the same pattern has developed where Ranieri and his men are taking 1-0 victories at the back end of the campaign, with eight clean-sheets in their last twelve matches. A staggering statistic considering their first clean sheet of this campaign came in the 1-0 victory against Crystal Palace in the tenth round of league fixtures.
Leicester’s last four victories have all been successive 1-0s, which is how Mourinho would normally exercise his campaign from start to finish. Perhaps Ranieri has noted how the current champions approached last season and employed a similar method. Leicester have indeed had an attacking mentality since the start of the season, which has enabled them to accrue as many points as possible. Towards the middle of the season, they have gauged their objected target and shored up the defence to progress.
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