James Maddison has claimed that Leicester City’s 6-2 defeat to Tottenham Hotspur, before the international break, ‘looked like a battering’, but it was far from it and his side ‘took positives’ from that performance heading into yesterday’s 4-0 win over Nottingham Forest.
Sitting bottom of the Premier League table, with the most goals conceded after seven matches and with only one point to their name, the pressure was firmly on Brendan Rodgers’ head.
Well, during these moments, you can either wilt in the corner or stick your chest out like Maddison did on Monday night and score a brace, including a brilliant free-kick, to help your team to their first three points of the season.
That’s Maddison’s fifth Premier League goal of the campaign, and since May, he has 14 goals or assists, better than Manchester City star Kevin de Bruyne, Tottenham striker Harry Kane, but not better than the Premier League’s new freak of nature, Erling Haaland.
Even during Leicester’s struggles, where they have put in abject performance after abject performance and conceded goals like they are on the playground, Maddison has still managed to stand tall.
The attacking midfielder spoke about the noise around the King Power Stadium heading into last night’s game, using their recent defeat to Spurs in a positive light and now trying to climb the table, as he told Premier League Productions (03/10/22 at 10:25 pm).
“You see things in the press (re criticism) and sometimes it’s impossible to avoid,” said Maddison. “You see things asked of the manager, the players, the club and the desire.
“When you are a player and you see the work that goes in everyday on the training pitch and how hard we work to try and turn the form around, sometimes it just doesn’t click and it hasn’t been this season.
“The last game for example against Tottenham, we lose 6-2 and it looks like a battering, but we actually played well and there were positives to build on, the game just got a bit stretched towards the end and we just conceded a lot of goals late on.
“But we knew there were positives to take from that and we knew this was going to be a big night. And hopefully, this win will spur us on and put us on a nice run – over the last few years we have challenged at the top of the table by putting lots of wins together and ultimately it’s the same squad.”
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Other than continuing to put in top performance after top performance, it has to be questioned what Maddison has to do in order to earn an England recall.
He is the best-performing English midfielder in 2022 and the best-performing English player full stop, at this moment in time.
Yet, during the previous England squad that was picked, the last one before the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, Maddison found himself out of Gareth Southgate’s plans again.
It seems highly likely that Southgate won’t be moved from his viewpoint of not selecting the energetic and technically-gifted midfielder, despite his performances and the outstanding numbers he’s putting up.
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