Maddison fails to make his point as Southgate watches on, unimpressed

James Maddison needed a big performance in front of the England manager to prove he’s worth a chance, but fell considerably short.

It’s certainly a question worth asking: with just a few weeks left before push comes to shove and he has to confirm which players he should be playing, if Gareth Southgate was going to make a trip to a match to watch some players, why pick a Saturday lunchtime match? These are, notoriously, matches often played when it feels like the players haven’t quite woken up yet. And it seems unlikely that he will have left feeling as though he learned anything much of any use at all about anybody.

Perhaps that isn’t really the point. In a world in which matches are routinely televised and the days of having actually turn up at a football ground to see a player are long gone, why does Southgate even need to actually attend them? It may well be that Southgate is making an coded statement saying, ‘Yes, I’m aware that James Maddison is a decent player, so consider the fact that I’ve made the journey here today to be formal notification that I am giving him due consideration’. Perhaps attending this match is the England manager’s way of making his point.

But Leicester have been in a bad place this season. The suggestion that they may still be bound to Brendan Rodgers because it would be so expensive to relieve him of his duties remains persistent – it’s believed that it may cost them £10m to do so – and, coupled with a team with a frequently sieve-like defence, the King Power Stadium has become an increasingly unhappy place as the first few weeks of this season.

The opening stages seemed to hint that the problems surrounding this team are a little more complex than a simple equation of ‘bad defence = lots of goals conceded’. In the first 10 minutes, Leicester midfielders repeatedly gave the ball away to Palace completely unnecessarily, inviting pressure when there was no need. This nerviness was possibly a matter of the febrile atmosphere inside The King Power Stadium transferring into a careless and skittish start, and it can become self-perpetuating; nervousness feeding off nervousness.

As the first half progressed, Leicester did start to assert themselves more effectively. They did look dangerous when actually getting into those attacking positions. The quality of Maddison, Harvey Barnes and Patson Daka have been visible through Leicester’s problems this season, although it did often feel as though…