Leicester City Boss Russell Martin Slams ‘Rubbish’ Defending After Foxes Throw Away Victory

Leicester City manager Russell Martin delivered a blunt assessment of his side’s defending after they surrendered a lead twice and settled for a 2-2 draw with Stevenage at the King Power Stadium.

The Foxes twice moved ahead through goals from Sammy Braybrooke and Kamari Doyle, only for defensive errors to cost them all three points. A fumble by goalkeeper Alex McCarthy gifted Stevenage their equaliser, while Martin singled out the visitors’ second goal as even more avoidable.

“There will be so much brilliant stuff to show the players about the performance, but the message is we can’t accept conceding goals like that, we can’t,” Martin said. “We’re conceding too many goals. We kept two brilliant clean sheets in the last few games and we go and concede two today which are so avoidable.

“Alex has been brilliant the last few weeks, he’s been so good, so that is what it is. The second goal is worse in my opinion, we can’t concede that.”

Martin expressed frustration that what should have been praise for a strong display was undermined by defensive lapses. “I should be coming out and saying ‘brilliant performance’, but we should score more, we create a lot, but we concede a rubbish second goal, so bad, the amount of bodies we have in the box, it’s so frustrating,” he added.

“They had one touch in our box in the second half. We don’t stop the cross properly, we have so many bodies, we don’t mark the guy. People are leaving the box already, predicting we’re going to deal with it.

“So maybe it’s an overconfidence in their teammates that we’re going to block the cross, maybe it’s just a moment of them not being near our goal so we’re not going to have a problem. But the senses need to heighten at that point and we have to be ruthless.

“We weren’t ruthless in front of goal today and we definitely weren’t ruthless in that big moment, defending our box because we only had to do it once in the second half.”

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