Now that the January transfer window is out of the way we are in the home straight of the 2019/20 season.
While it appears safe to say that Liverpool will win the Premier League there is still a race for the remaining Champions League places.
Until very recently it appeared that Leicester City, under Brendan Rodgers, were one of the favourites for a top-four finish. A recent downturn in form has altered this perception slightly.
Chelsea, on the other hand, started the season extremely strong under their new coach, Frank Lampard, but their form suffered earlier than that of Leicester and supporters have been growing increasingly frustrated as Chelsea struggle to turn their strong performances into points.
This narrative added an interesting context to the match last weekend between the two teams with Chelsea travelling to the King Power Stadium.
In the end, the two sides could not be separated as they effectively cancelled one another out with neither side managing to build a strong attacking game model.
In this tactical analysis, we break down the key points in the match including the effective way that Leicester prevented Chelsea from building out from the back and the issues Leicester struggled with when in the opposition half.
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Neither side impressed going forward
When taken at face value a 2-2 draw with both sides holding the lead at separate points appears to have been an exciting game. In this case, however, that cannot be further from the truth.
The expected goals table of the match gives a more accurate picture of the match as Leicester edged the match by 1.06xG to 0.94xG. In other words, it would not have been a surprise to have seen the match end 1-1 or even 0-0.
Neither side was effective in their attacking phase despite both teams having forward players who are extremely talented.
Indeed, even if Leicester edged the match in terms of xG they came to this score from 15 shots at goal.
Such were the poor positions that they were shooting from that only two shots carried an xG score of 0.20 or higher. Those came in the 25th minute from Jamie Vardy and Harvey Barnes in the 80th minute.
The two Leicester goals carried xG’s of 0.08 and 0.09 respectively.
Chelsea, on the other hand, only registered 7 shots at goal with Callum Hudson-Odoi having an effort that yielded an xG of 0.30 at one point. The xG’s for the two their goals came in at 0.11 and 0.09 respectively.
Better than Leicester, but still not great.
Issues with Leicester’s attacking structure
By this point, it is relatively simple to decipher the attacking gameplan for Leicester City.
Jamie Vardy leads the line and plays off the shoulders of the central defenders. In the attacking phase he is constantly looking for the pass in behind the defensive line and this, in turn, stretches the pitch as the defensive line drop deeper to cut off this space. This then creates space for the likes of James Maddison to occupy between the midfield and the defence.
In this match, however, Leicester struggled to use this space because Maddison was playing as a strict ‘8’ alongside Youri Tielemans. This prevented the young attacking midfielder from moving to find space and get himself on the ball in dangerous areas.
The average positions chart from Leicester in this match show this clearly.
We can see Maddison (10) was even deeper than Tielemans (8) and with Vardy (9) continuously pressing high he became isolated as Leicester struggled to play effectively in the final third.
We can see from this example that Leicester found it difficult to progress the ball beyond the Chelsea midfield block safely.
More often than not they would rely on a direct ball into the wide areas for their wingers with players then looking to stream forward to support the ball.
I have highlighted the positions in this image of the three central midfielders with Maddison being closest to the ball and Tielemans being more advanced on the ball far side.
The highlighted area in the Chelsea half is where they would ideally be finding Maddision and from there he could turn and threaten the defensive line.
Leicester are notoriously slow in their build-up play with a lot of passing between the backline. This does create space by pulling the opposition block towards the ball but it also makes the entire attack less dynamic and explosive.
There were periods in the match in which Leicester showed signs of solving this issue but only when they were in comfortable possession in the final third. This involved some interesting rotations.
These rotations are shown above with Tielemans moving short to receive and Maddison moving high. Harvey Barnes then moved inside from the wide space and Ben Chilwell moved high to receive the ball.
Neither team allows the other to play out comfortably
In this match, both teams pressed aggressively when the other side was building out from the back.
In the end, however, despite their numbers being similar Leicester displayed a far more effective press than Chelsea.
Wyscout produces a metric for games called PPDA (passes per defensive action) which gives us a measure on how aggressive a team is when pressing out of possession.
This tells us how many passes they allow their opponent before engaging in a defensive action.
This metric, however, as with so many others needs to be taken in context with the game state of the match. With PPDA the lower the figure the better and with Leicester totalling 9.0 and Chelsea 10.9 both are extremely good.
When you watch the match closely though you can clearly see that one is more effective than the other.
Leicester pressed well with players moving in the first phase, towards the ball, and the second phase, towards the second player.
The other options Chelsea would have in possession of the ball were then taken away as Leicester covered them in a man-to-man system.
This meant Chelsea struggled to comfortably move the ball forward towards the opposition half. We can see this above as Jorginho moves towards the ball to receive. The first two players for Leicester press and the other four comfortable passing options are taken away and covered.
This invariably led to Chelsea playing direct passes that were into areas of the field that could be contested by the opposition.
Chelsea, on the other hand, were equally aggressive in engaging the ball but they did so in a less structured and therefore less effective way.
We can see in the image above that with the ball in the possession of Caglar Soyuncu, the Leicester central defender, Tammy Abraham triggers the press.
He is not supported though with both Mason Mount and Callum Hudson-Odoi keeping their position and not supporting the forward as he presses.
This tended to see Leicester able to comfortably play through the press as you can see above. The pass is simply played out to the full-back and then back into the deepest midfielder. From this point on, however, we saw Leicester suffer problems of their own making as we saw earlier on with no players moving beyond the Chelsea midfield to threaten further up.
Conclusion
In the end, it is difficult to form an argument that the draw was not a fair result.
Neither side was especially impressive in possession and both were stubborn when the other side entered their half or the final third.
They didn’t do enough to break down their opponent with Leicester especially content to circulate possession without ever looking for the vertical pass that could open the game up.
There is a genuine possibility that these two sides could finish third and fourth respectively but this is more of an indictment of the quality elsewhere in the league than anything else.
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