At the end of his tether, and now quite possibly at the end of his tenure, Julen Lopetegui cut a despairing figure on the touchline at the King Power Stadium.
West Ham 1-0 down to Jamie Vardy’s early Leicester goal and having just wasted their latest of a host of chances to equalise, he slumped back into his chair and rubbed his face vigorously, with a shake of the head.
Rather than better, the night only got worse and ended in a 3-1 defeat. Chairman David Sullivan and the club’s board must now decide whether the latest unravelling of Lopetegui’s side is the final undoing of him.
Lopetegui was close to the brink a week ago, but a fine display in their hugely merited 2-0 win over Newcastle at St James’ Park earned him credit and bought him time.
Thrashed 5-2 by Arsenal and now outsmarted on the counter-attack by Leicester in Ruud van Nistelrooy’s Foxes curtain-raiser, it could now be curtains for Lopetegui.
There remain six teams lower than West Ham in the Premier League table, so it cannot be said that his tenure has been catastrophic. But the Hammers were the sixth-highest net spenders in Europe this summer, and yet they have just four league wins to show for that investment.
Most significant, certainly as far as the fanbase are concerned, has been the blunt quality of the football produced. Many supporters had grown tired of David Moyes's defensive-minded brand of ‘percentages’ football — but at least the Scot delivered European football for them to enjoy in each of the last three seasons.
Lopetegui’s football CV takes in some august names — Real Madrid, Porto, the Spanish national team — and yet it is hard not to see his appointment in July as an extremely costly case of misprofiling. If ‘heavy metal’ attacking football was the order of the day, Lopetegui was never going to be the man to serve it up.
The Leicester match was supposed to be the beginning of a kind run of games until Boxing Day, with subsequent matches against Wolves, Bournemouth, Brighton and Southampton an opportunity for Lopetegui to cash in on his side’s mightily tough fixtures at the start of the season.
Yet on what basis has he proven he deserves the right for those games to be his? He could be gone before West Ham host the most recent club he previously managed, Wolves, at the London Stadium on Monday night.
120 miles north, events at the King Power were at least a departure from the usual script under Lopetegui, where West Ham have tended to soak up pressure from their opponents, only for that same pressure to tell in the end.
Instead, the Hammers had 61 per cent of possession, took 31 shots — a club-record 20 in the first half alone — but scored just once. From eight shots all game, their hosts struck three times from clinical counter-attacks, leaving Lopetegui to insist his team “didn’t deserve” to lose and promising “the second half of the season is going to be much better.” Under his watch?
The 58-year-old made plenty of changes for the trip to Leicester, dropping Crysencio Summerville in order to restore Mohammed Kudus to the starting line-up after his suspension, and resting Emerson. Aaron Wan-Bissaka moved to the left and was less effective, with Vladimir Coufal's performance at right-back conclusive enough by itself to show he is well and truly over the hill.
Lucas Paqueta was dropped too, as was Michail Antonio — with no explanation — only for his replacement, Danny Ings, to last just 45 minutes before making way.
And yes, West Ham created chances, took a huge number of shots. But these were not gilt-edged opportunities. West Ham deserved a draw. What they got instead was a lesson from veteran Jamie Vardy, who gave centre-backs Dinos Mavropanos and Max Kilman a schooling in how much space not to give a masterful, wily striker like himself.
On the odd count, Lopetegui can consider himself unlucky. Before Tuesday, he had lost a key player in Kudus for five games due to a suspension, and Niclas Fullkrug’s late consolation goal in his first appearance since August will have felt bittersweet; if only the German had been available sooner, might the manager’s future not be in quite such grave peril? We will never know.
But facts are facts. West Ham lost again, and some of their own travelling fans joined in when Leicester supporters chanted “You’re getting sacked in the morning”. Lopetegui may well be gone.
