Frantic ending scuppers full recovery for rodgers
WATFORD 1
Dawson (90 + 3)
LEICESTER CITY 1
Chilwell (90)
Brendan Rodgers won’t forget his 200th English Premier League match as a manager in a hurry.
Back on March 9, 31,125 rain-lashed souls watched his Foxes side canter to a 4-0 home win over Aston Villa in No. 199.
A traumatic 103 days later, a crowd of less than 1% of the King Power audience was present for his landmark game at Vicarage Road.
The former Celtic boss knows better than anyone the thinking behind the restrictions that limited the attendance to so few.
Some two weeks after the Villa win, he and his wife were themselves both hit by bouts of coronavirus.
When recovered, he described suffering a headache unlike any he had felt before, and enduring breathing difficulties similar to the altitude problems he encountered when climbing Kilimanjaro in 2016.
Knocked off his stride for some three weeks, he returned to work with a very personal appreciation of what is global pandemic.
One way or another, Covid-19 has had an impact on everyone, and there were reminders aplenty yesterday as Leicester made their return to action in the restarted 2019-20 campaign.
Vicarage Road is a near neighbour of Watford General Hospital, and while other clubs were shutting up for the lockdown, the Hornets threw their doors open to help NHS staff.
Food and drink was provided, space made available for training areas and even bedrooms offered up for the use of nurses or doctors stranded far from home.
The connection was clear to see in yesterday’s match with television cameras picking out a socially-distanced couple in the stand clad in scrubs and masks.
Able to take notes from the earlier returns in Germany and Portugal, the EPL and the broadcasters are trying their best to provide a bit of atmosphere to these closed-doors encounters.
When the players strode out into the lunchtime sunshine, they were met by a riot of colour. Bright yellow, red and black – the colours of the hosts – were everywhere.
Giant banners were placed in the stands, and the big screens switched between archive footage of Watford fans in full voice and live coverage of the “special 16” group of supporters who provided instant reaction to the play on the pitch.
Fans watching back home from the comfort of their front rooms had the option of taking enhanced television crowd noise or doing without.
Most will have tried both. For this viewer anyway, “canned” cheering is the only way to go.
Thanks to a bit of jiggery-pokery from the on-site DJ, they more or less kept up with the action, with the “home end excitement button pressed when the Hornets were throwing themselves forward.
It has to be said it was unfortunate the crowd was missing from this one because they would have loved the dramatic finale.
England left-back Ben Chilwell had Rodgers celebrating what he thought was a victory when he hit a sensational left-foot shot from the corner of the box into the top corner in the final seconds of the regulation 90 minutes.
That should have been three precious points for the EPL’S third top team to consolidate their push for a Champions League place.
However, three minutes into injury time, Watford conjured up an equaliser every bit as eye-catching as the opener.
Leicester failed to clear a corner and Craig Dawson, the defender up lending support, connected with an overhead shot that was too good for Kasper Schmeichel.