Leicester City Fan View: Superb Schmeichel keeps Foxes' Champions League dream alive

March 14th at the King Power stadium is going to be an electric night of Champions League football for the Foxes. With the away leg coming first, and our current form, we could have been facing the very grim prospect of going into that game already essentially out of the competition. Though it may have been a performance of two pretty different halves for Leicester City, we’re still in it. Kasper Schmeichel put in a heroic display, meaning when Jamie Vardy got that crucial away goal, it counted.

It’s very simplistic for so many who talk or write about football to dismiss or play down a good goalkeeping performance as ‘the player just doing their job’. That same argument is so rarely used for when a striker or defender receives praise. While he may have said it in his post-match interview, for me to say it would certainly do Schmeichel’s Champions League campaign a huge disservice. Prior to the Sevilla game, the Dane had an impressive four clean sheets in the competition, his best display coming in the game that saw him break his hand and rule him out for a few games. While the record’s no longer in tact, he takes no blame and instead, gets all the credit for us still being in it past half-time.

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Aside from producing save after save, he remained a driving force in motivating and organising us too. Often the most vocal on the pitch, should we manage to keep hold of him, a captaincy has to be looming. Called upon for interview duty after the game, he was ever honest and modest too. Watching a player’s body language pre-match can be quite telling. Whenever they’ve shown Schmeichel in the line-ups against the backdrop of that iconic music, he beams pride and pure joy to be involved. He’s an early shoe-in for player of the season too largely due to consistency and the number of key saves.

The ‘keeper’s still had some critics this year too, bizarrely. While he may getting the plaudits he deserves this time, it’s not always the case. His distribution tends to be the point up for debate. He may not have the best distribution record in the league, but it’s worth remembering the contributions he made in helping us get the ball moving in some ferociously quick counter-attacking moves last season that led to goals. He’s always looking for a player making a run and sometimes with a lack of true target men in our side, it’s tough to know who to aim for. He’s proved on more than one occasion his season why he’s our first choice though, not least in how he’s made this step-up once again. We’ll need another huge ninety minutes for the return leg. That and us trying to get Islam Slimani fit and available for it look to be the priorities.

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As this is the 2016/17 season, where there were positives, there were equally negatives that can’t be ignored. For not the first time this season, we called upon Schmeichel too often, assuming he could keep delivering. Yes, he took up the challenge in impressive fashion, but we didn’t make it easy for him. We were as defensively frustrating and confused as ever too, Robert Huth and Wes Morgan still looking like a defensive partnership who’ve not met and have been put together on the day. Morgan’s clumsy tackle gave Sevilla a deserved penalty, a combination of it being poorly taken and Schmeichel stepping up when we so desperately needed it, meaning luckily it gave us something to work on.

We’d failed to make a big enough impact in the first half, lacking intensity and press as well as a true threat upfront. Interestingly, I’ve yet to see the justification for starting Ahmed Musa over Demarai Gray. We’re still waiting for the real Musa, witnessed once against Barcelona, to step out and show himself. Interestingly, after a fairly woeful showing at Millwall over the weekend, he was the one player who survived that game and played in this. Having played a big part in Sevilla’s first one, safe to say it was another off night for him. Replacing him with Gray changed us for the better. We were able to move Riyad Mahrez and get him more involved for a start. Not to mention the sheer lift Gray provides. He’s had a great February, even if we’ve had a mixed one and he made a difference once again. It was his clever quick pass to Danny Drinkwater that revived an underutilised partnership between he and Vardy for our goal. We looked interested again, up for it.

While we’ve said it after every half decent performance or result this season, I wonder if the confidence boost from this one could be the thing that does finally get us going. Only two teams have managed to get a result at Sevilla this year. They’re a quality team. So for us to come away with a result of sorts, and an away goal, feels big. It’s just the kind of thing Vardy needs too. This month was a big one on paper and while there’s just one game left in it, if we could get anything out of the Liverpool game, there would be some light at the end of the tunnel again. No doubt we’ll need Schmeichel to be in the same kind of form again to help us with that.