Leicester put 9 past Southampton in record-breaking 90 minutes

With a 9-0 scoreline that you might never see in the Premier League again, Leicester destroyed 10-man Southampton to break records.

Well, what can you say after a fixture like that, other than: “wow”. No exclamation mark, no enthusiasm, just pure disbelief, even as a neutral. While you might have expected Leicester to pull out a win against Southampton at the St. Mary’s in the Premier League’s Friday night fixture, a 9-0 victory was never, ever on the table. Only once in Premier League history has that scoreline been seen before, and there have been over 10,500 matches played since the league began in 1992: Manchester United beat Ipswich Town by a 9-0 scoreline exactly 25 seasons ago.

So what exactly happened? Well, you can pin the 10-man issue on Ryan Bertrand, who made a horrible tackle 10 minutes into the match and got sent off after a VAR review. In fact, the referee played advantage on the tackle and Leicester ended up opening the scoring through Ben Chilwell before VAR even intervened for the red card, so it was essentially a double-blow for Southampton. After that, well, they just completely fell apart. After Leicester scored a couple more times, heads started dropping and sloppiness became evident in Ralph Hasenhuttl’s sides play. It was 5-0 at half-time and Leicester had the 3 points in the bag already.

https://twitter.com/official433/status/1187862934329921536

Usually when these sorts of blowout fixtures happen, either one of 2 things causes the 2nd half to become less of a goalfest: either the losing team tightens up the defence a bit and does some damage control, or the leading team takes their foot off the gas. Well this was an extremely rare occasion where neither happened for either team. Both Jamie Vardy and Ayoze Perez finished off impressive hat-tricks in the 2nd half, and the massive win was capped off by a great free-kick from James Maddison to make it 8-0, and a penalty from Vardy with the last kick of the match to make it 9-0.

At 8-0, it became the biggest away win in Premier League history. At 9-0, it tied Manchester United’s previously mentioned record for the biggest win in Premier League history. The win also broke a number of records for either side, including the record for Southampton’s worst ever loss in 133 years of existence.

While Vardy and Perez scored hat-tricks as mentioned earlier, many other Leicester players put in excellent performances, including Tielemans, Chilwell, Barnes, and Maddison. The 9-0 victory was a rather unique way to start the Premier League matchweek 10, and was a scoreline that you will likely never see again.