Leicester City should field a weakened team for both Saturday’s FA Cup fifth round away to Millwall and next Wednesday’s Champions League last 16 first leg away to Sevilla.
They are not going to win either competition and they have had their fun, winning a fairytale first top-flight league title last season and qualifying to Europe’s pinnacle for the first time in 132 years; but now the priority is to stay in the Premier League.
The Foxes sit just one place and one point above relegation with 13 games remaining, following a run of five defeats.
They have not won a game or scored a goal in the league this year and seem destined to become the first English defending top-flight league champions to be relegated since Manchester City in 1938.
The board have questionably decided to stick with coach Claudio Ranieri who — just nine months after winning a shock title — is now struggling despite having only sold one key member (N’Golo Kante) of the squad that lost just three games last season.
It is hard to know what has changed in such a short time, but it is a solid return to form for a club that usually always struggles to stay in the top flight; but for last season’s cataclysmic anomaly.
Just the season before winning the league they were bottom of the table with seven games remaining but were able to stay up, finishing six points clear of the drop, thanks to seven wins from their last nine matches.
They need to replicate that now this season but the man who was responsible for that late transformation and arguably the person who started the run that set Leicester on their title-winning season — Nigel Pearson — was sacked at the end of that campaign, despite keeping them up.
If anyone could come back now and save Leicester it is out-of-work Pearson, not Ranieri, who rather just inherited the latter’s momentum.
Ranieri, of course, deserves his part in the credit, but you can’t live on past results, and you’re always only as good as your last game in football.
For that, Ranieri should probably go, but if he does stay he needs to forget the Champions League and FA Cup and just focus on staying up.
It needed a coaching change at this vital stage in the season and to ignore that is a massive risk by the club.
Going forward though, they need to write off the Champions League and FA Cup and just use those games to give experience to youth, the best of whom might be able to put legs into their league survival bid. After Sevilla next Wednesday is Liverpool in the league at home. That is a far more important game.
The other lesson to take from this is if you win an unexpected title and suddenly have previously average-rated players now priced miles above their stock, sell, because if they stay they are not going to have the same motivation to save you once they have come down from the mountain of Premier League winning glory.
It was time for Leicester to cash in, refresh and replenish, and both club and player missed that chance as those players will now never go for the price or opportunities they once could have done. There’s no loyalty in football, as the inevitable sacking of Ranieri will demonstrate.
