For Brendan Rodgers, it had been business as usual on Sunday. The Leicester manager called his players into the club’s Seagrave training ground to analyse the bitterly disappointing last-minute defeat at Crystal Palace that left them in the bottom three and he was fully expecting to take charge of the meeting with Aston Villa on Tuesday until the bad news was delivered by the chairman, Aiyawatt “Top” Srivaddhanaprabha.
But if the timing of Rodgers’s departure four years after he succeeded Claude Puel came as something of a surprise, even he must have expected it would eventually end like this given the way things have unravelled since the start of the season. One win and seven defeats from the opening 10 Premier League games after a summer of only two signings – the defender Wout Faes for £17m on deadline day, to replace the £75m Chelsea-bound Wesley Fofana, and the third-choice goalkeeper, Alex Smithies – were followed by signs before the World Cup that Leicester might have turned a corner.
