Leicester Coach Brendan Rodgers has accepted the blame for Leicester’s 2-0 tame Europa League exit at home to Slavia Prague.
Rodgers, who missed injured James Maddison and banned Kelechi Iheanacho, opted to start Youri Tielemans in a more advanced position. The Foxes coach13-goal Harvey Barnes sits on the bench and he has admitted his decisions failed to pay off.
“It’s my responsibility, I pick the team with the players we have available and clearly it didn’t work as well as I would have liked,” he said.
“We have changed the team often enough through the season because we’ve carried injuries all year. The players are coming back from injury; we had to find a way to freshen up the team,” he added.
“Overall, they were better than us and deserved to go through. We have to go away and learn from that.
“We started pretty well, we had to be patient, but we never really created too many opportunities. I’m disappointed with the goals, in particular, the second one – we have to defend with greater urgency,” the Northern Irish concluded.
The one-sided game saw second-half goals from Lukas Provod and Abdallah Sima sank the Foxes. Leicester was no threat to Ondrej Kolar but, only Cengiz Under’s early low-cross tested the goalkeeper.
However, Slavia grew in confidence after a patient approach to the last-32 second leg following last week’s 0-0 draw in Prague. Their effort paid off four minutes after the break when Provod volley in Nicolae Stanciu’s cross for the opener.
One was not enough for the visitor; 11 minutes left, Sima settled the tie following poor defending from the hosts.
Meanwhile, UEFA Europa League next round fixtures draw is expected today with Napoli, Leverkusen, and PSV joining Leicester all knocked out.
The tie saw Manchester United, Arsenal, Rangers, and Roma joins Tottenham, who qualified on Wednesday with an 8-1 aggregate.
Others are Ajax, Molde, Granada, Shakhtar Donetsk, Villareal, AC Milan, Young Boys, Dyn. Kyiv, D. Zagreb, Slavia Prague, and Olympiacos Piraeus.