Team Focus: Leicester's Predictable Routes to Goal Still Proving Hard to Stop

It got rather lost amid everything else, but as the storm clouds burst at Chelsea, there was something fascinating Jose Mourinho said about his opponents in his post-match press-conference after the defeat at Leicester City that ended up being his last game in charge.

"I feel my work is betrayed," he said. "I worked four days in training for this match. I identified four movements where Leicester score a lot of their goals and in two of the four situations I identified they scored their goals. I went through it all with the players, you can ask them."

Obviously the key point there was the aspect of betrayal. But the fact he isolated four key ways in which Leicester score is intriguing. Leicester's goals that night came from a Jamie Vardy volley as he ran across the near post to meet an in-swinging Riyad Mahrez cross from the right and then from some twisting tight skill from Mahrez after he'd been found in space at the back post by a Marc Albrighton cross from the left.

Were those really moves Mourinho had isolated? Yes, quite probably. The fourth most common assist to goalscorer combination in the Premier League this season is (the under-rated) Albrighton to Mahrez. The goal against Chelsea was one of five the left-winger has set up for the right. Vardy moving onto a Mahrez pass, meanwhile, has yielded four goals this season, the fifth most common combination.

But what's intriguing is that four of Vardy's goals have also been set up by Daniel Drinkwater and two by Leonardo Ulloa, who has also set up two for Mahrez. Vardy, meanwhile, has laid on two goals for Mahrez (and that's without even counting penalties, of which Leicester have scored from seven this season). A look at the top 20 combinations of assist-maker and goalscorer shows sixStill Leicester pairings.

They may have been excellent this season and, when they're top of the league after 23 games their form can hardly be dismissed as a freak, but Leicester are predictable. They sit men deep, they break down the flanks, they tend to score through Vardy and Mahrez. Opponents know what's coming and yet they find themselves unable to thwart them.

What is intriguing, perhaps, is that Albrighton has set up Vardy only once (and that for Leicester's first goal of the season, the 11th-minute opener in the 4-2 win over Sunderland). The goal he laid on for Mahrez against Chelsea was atypical in that it required a huge amount of work from Mahrez to convert, but was perhaps typical in that Vardy's movement to the near post had created space at the back of the box for Mahrez to drift into.

That's a pattern that has been repeated: Vardy goes near and Mahrez drifts into the gap that generates. It makes a difference that he is right-footed. Albrighton tends to stay wide – a comparison of his heat-map to Mahrez's for the game against Stoke for instance, shows Albrighton in a bright green blob on the left touchline, while Mahrez has a smaller green blob on the right and smudges of blue across the pitch.

Mahrez cuts in onto his stronger foot and looks to slide vertical passes through for Vardy, while Albrighton, staying wide, is left hitting booming crosses. For him to feed the ball into Vardy at the near post is extremely difficult – the more horizontal pass to Mahrez, changing the angle of attack, is the more natural ball. It's also travelling over a longer distance – he hits on average 1.6 long passes per game – which perhaps explains why his pass completion rate is as low as 63.3%.

Mourinho perhaps had a point, in that Leicester's patterns of attack do keep repeating. But he's probably not the only manager this season to find that identifying Leicester's threat isn't the same as stopping it.

Will teams manage to get to grips with Leicester's attacking approach this season? Let us know in the comments below