N’Golo Kante, the most sung-about unsung hero of Leicester City’s title tilt, last weekend scurried past 100 completed tackles on the season, the first player in Europe to do so this term.
The role Kante has played in this last stanza of the campaign cannot be overstated, a period in which Leicester have strode, with a sort of compelling impetus, toward the title in very much the way deserved and ready champions should.
They’ve kept five consecutive clean sheets, some brayed out with gritted teeth, others comfortable and calm, all of them vital rungs rammed with conviction into this last escarpment and gripped tightly as the divine summit creeps into view.
Kante’s maiden season in English football has been a raucous success, played out almost exclusively in the middle third of the pitch. He has scored one goal, provided three assists, and is outside the top 100 and 50 in the league for, respectively, blocked shots and clearances.
Goals and clearances are played out at the extremities of the pitch, where the decisive events occur. This is not Kante’s environment. The maw of the centre is his home, a miasma of possibilities, where subsonic rumblings of footballing potential are created and vanquished in a blink of an eye.
It takes a set of subtle senses to identify and control the battle of the midfield, and Kante excels in this regard, rising, hanging and diving like a bird might over a vast canyon, riding the invisible thermal updrafts. He leads the league in both interceptions and tackles.
Against Sunderland, Kante made up one half of a perfect illustration of the saying “it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog” as he – standing a 5’5″ – lined up opposite Jan Kirchhoff, a relative colossus at 6’5″.
Making a comparison of just those two players exposes not only Kante’s proficiency, but also his suitability in Leicester City’s system. The tackling map of both these players is fascinating; they completed the same amount of successful tackles, Kante at a slightly higher rate of efficiency, but only two of Kirchhoff’s interventions were accomplished inside the central corridor of the pitch, the stretch in between the side margins of each penalty area.
All of Kante’s were.
Only a trace example, but nonetheless evidence of the point Troy Deeney made, during his impressively articulate appearance on BBC’s Match of the Day.
“…Then you have also got N’Golo Kante and Danny Drinkwater buzzing around you too,” Deeney explained. “You don’t know where they are coming from, but you know they are coming, so when you have got the ball you are thinking ‘I need to lay it off quickly’… If teams want to come through the middle, they have to get past those two first.”
Deeney went on the explain, with rare clarity, how the Leicester defensive system compels teams to play the ball out wide and cross, a mode of delivery that Robert Huth and Wes Morgan are more than equipped to deal with. Sunderland, unfortunately – or perhaps, more frankly, stupidly – played a lone Jermaine Defoe up front, a talented striker, no doubt, but one who has very little chance of winning anything in the air against the Leicester centre backs.
Sunderland were forced to work down the middle as a result, and Kante devoured them with relish.
“… You don’t just have to get past Kante, you have to keep him behind you, which is the hardest part. He has been the best midfielder in the Premier League this season,” Deeney added.
Critical to the work Kante does so well are his superlative powers of recovery. The quick stride, the whirring footspeed, the delicate precision of one perfectly intervening limb, all of it extend Kante’s tackling window.
In this clip, a smorgasbord of Kante’s refined defending techniques are on show; after tracking back to cover the Sunderland throw-in, he marshals Jeremain Lens down the touchline, safe in the knowledge that Defoe is utterly smothered by Morgan and Huth in the box. As Lens lays the ball off, Kante diverts his attention swiftly to nullify any potential threat from Fabio Borini, who has cut suddenly inside.
The ball is diverted back out the flank, and Kante, having been initially wrong-footed by Lens’ swerve, recovers neatly, tackles with flawless accuracy, and begins a counter-attack that results in a highly presentable chance. The compressed, centralised defensive system that Leicester have flourished under means that any opposing player who decides to cut inside is met by a staunch rampart of Foxes defenders, giving a marker (so often Kante) ample time to recover and make amends.
Tackling successfully, it’s worth remembering, isn’t always about some grand mano-a-mano situation in which the more robust contestant emerges the victor. It’s also about prudent double-teaming, a slick, cooperative exercise, where the tackler must sense and seize the opportunity to isolate and punish an opponent in possession.
Take this moment from the Sunderland match; after nipping the ball off Borini on the edge of the box, Kante then turns over possession with a sloppy header (a chest-down would have been more advisable).
But, as the ball rolls back to Borini, Kante senses an opportunity to trap, and swarms from behind. Hanging delicately, so as not to foul the Italian, the tackle is eventually made and the threat is neutered. Borini subsequently fouls Christian Fuchs, earning a booking out of pure frustration.
Of course, all of this nous rests, like a porcelain crown, on a granite plinth of near-superhuman endurance. Omnipresent defensive midfielders must be exactly that, and fatigue is not a valid excuse. In the 82nd minute, having harried and hustled endlessly, Kante himself created a chance that Leo Ulloa should have converted, a would-be second goal that would have eased the final stages of the match.
Accelerating into space, the Frenchman simply ran past Lee Cattermole, like a cordial-crazed child might pass an overweight elderly relative, showing almost no signs of weariness. Kante isn’t just a little maestro, he’s also an astonishing, supreme athlete.
With football entering a satisfying, if slightly tiresome, high-octane love affair with tactical dissection, one of the many good things to come from it is that the work done by players like Kante is being given the same prime-time appreciation as Jamie Vardy’s goals.
So much of Leicester’s gameplan – a plan that more than likely leads to a phenomenal, unexpected premiership – rests on the shoulders of this 5’5″ Frenchman, and he bears it without even the hint of a grimace.
Bravo, N’Golo.
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