The No. 9 appeared on the electronic board twice in swift succession. The timing was the same, the circumstances very different. Erling Haaland departed at half-time with two goals to his name, Jamie Vardy with nine touches to his. And if part of that felt inevitable – the lone striker for a relegation-threatened team can get isolated at the Etihad, while even in his pomp Vardy was on the ball with devastating potency rather than great frequency – his anonymity felt a sign that, 36, his race is finally run.
He remains the only player with two hat-tricks against Pep Guardiola teams. He is also the forward with a lone goal in 30 league games this season.
Vardy’s improbable career – a non-league footballer at 25, a Premier League champion at 29 and the first player to score a century of goals in the division in his thirties – seems in his final throes. He averaged a goal every 120 minutes last season and one every 1457 now. He had 15 goals then, one now. He defied the ageing process, maintaining a sprinter’s speed long into his thirties but now decline seems to have come quickly. The Golden Boot he won three years ago will go to Haaland; Vardy, the last survivor of Leicester City’s promotion in 2014, could face relegation.
This, presumably, is the not Vardy story Hollywood was interested in. He was the unlikely lad who inspired the most improbable title of all.
Now there are a multitude of reasons for Leicester’s slide. There were the bad buys in previous years, the summer where they became the last club in Europe’s top-five leagues to buy anyone, the delay in sacking Brendan Rodgers and the two winnable games they wasted under caretaker managers.
There was the failure to replace Kasper Schmeichel and Rodgers’ decision to persist with his error-prone replacement Danny Ward for too long. There is the poor defensive record, especially from set-pieces, and their propensity to go on losing runs. There is the unsettling element of having a host of players who are out of contract in the summer amid the sense some have eyed the exit. There are injuries and there have been underachievers.
Each is a factor but the fading talisman feels one of the greatest. It was understandable Dean Smith started his reign with Vardy in attack, and not merely because of his status as the scourge of Guardiola. If he was picked on his past and his reputation, they could feel sufficiently compelling reasons. They were for caretaker managers, Adam Sadler and Mike Stowell, too. He was the man who made the impossible happen. But it was telling Rodgers’ reign ended with Vardy an unused substitute.
Minus his searing pace, the Vardy of old has become an elderly Vardy. “It was tough for a few of the lads,” said Smith after substituting him. “Vards was starved of service and we never made contact with him and I thought Kel would be more aggressive.” Perhaps a comparison is unfair because his replacement Kelechi Iheanacho scored and hit the post after Manchester City had made a raft of changes and lost concentration.
But the numbers from the campaign feel damning: Leicester have only won two league games Vardy has started all season, and none since October. They have only taken eight points from the 14 league games he has started, compared to 17 in 17 when he has not. Vardy’s own drought stands at 18 league games. He hasn’t had a shot on target in the division since 3 January.
And yet Leicester, despite their plight, are capable of scoring. Their tally of 41 goals is 11 more than Chelsea’s, within a few of Manchester United, Newcastle and Aston Villa. They have creativity, especially in James Maddison, the outstanding individual in the relegation battle. And they have chances: or their other forwards do, anyway.
Patson Daka and Iheanacho average more than twice as many shots and shots on target per 90 minutes as Vardy: so does Maddison, while Harvey Barnes has almost twice as many. An essential reason is that, minus his speed, Vardy has stopped being Vardy and is harder to find.
Now Iheanacho looks brighter; Vardy’s defining quality was long his sharpness but the nuisance has become ineffectual. Smith is an amiable appointment who has excelled before by getting key players and big characters onside - he made Jack Grealish, another with a cheeky streak, Aston Villa captain.
But Leicester’s next three games are against relegation rivals in Wolves, Leeds and Everton. It is scarcely a time for diplomacy.
Vardy is the last survivor of Leicester’s title-winning team. If dropping him would have the feel of an end of an era, relegation would be still more of one.
Seven years ago, Leicester were the 5000-1 shot that came off. Now only one of Vardy’s shots has ended in a Premier League goal this season. Perhaps he is the greatest player in Leicester’s history but the perils of their immediate future means they cannot afford to be nostalgic.
