Bill Shankly once said that football is a terribly simple game. It is about the giving and taking of passes, he said, of controlling the ball and of making yourself available to receive a pass.
At Swansea on Saturday, Leicester City made that terribly simple act look more akin to a Herculean task.
In the first half alone, City misplaced 54 of their 251 passes. More than one a minute.
You just cannot afford to do that in the Premier League. Let alone against a side like Swansea. They thrive on possession, keeping the ball for long periods and building their attacks with short, sharp passes.
That means when you do have the ball, you need to keep it. City simply could not.
They were simple, basic mistakes, made under little pressure.
None more so than that of Kasper Schmeichel, who fluffed a clearance straight into the path of Gylfi Sigurdsson, only to be saved by a terrific last-ditch tackle by his captain Wes Morgan.
But it was not just Schmeichel. The errors were pandemic. At this level, if you insist on repeatedly handing the ball back to your opponents, they will punish you.
Swansea did just that, thanks to two goals from Wilfried Bony, a player scouted at length by City before his £12million move to Swansea last year.
The first goal was the culmination of a move of sheer beauty, with Bony and Sigurdsson at the heart of it.
Sigurdsson dummied, Bony backheeled, only for the Iceland midfielder to return the favour and allow the striker to sweep the ball past Schmeichel.
City's defenders were left rooted to the spot, powerless to do anything other than watch Swansea show them how it is done.
City, meanwhile, were toothless in attack. It was perhaps telling that the nearest they came to Swansea's goal until late on was when Liam Moore's long throw bounced unopposed inside the six-yard area and landed on the crossbar.
Other than that, City were reduced to trying their luck from range. Riyad Mahrez let fly with a couple but to no avail.
But for all the irresistible quality of Swansea's first goal, their second came courtesy of the basic errors which typified City's performance in south Wales.
It came, like at Newcastle a week ago, during City's most dominant period in what was a much-improved second half.
Sigurdsson slid the ball into debutante Jefferson Montero who, not for the first time, beat Ritchie De Laet on the outside.
The Belgian stood with his arms aloft while the winger, played well onside by Moore, squared it to an unmarked Bony, who needed no invitation to bag his second.
Queue the visible inquest among the City defence.
It could have been more. Jonjo Shelvey hit the bar from 30 yards with a magnificent strike while Paul Konchesky went to ground to stop Wayne Routledge metres from goal.
The post-mortem will continue to rage on a run of form that has seen City pick up just one point from their last four, slipping to a point off the relegation places.
Pearson was widely criticised for a 'negative' team selection in the defeat at Newcastle last week. That certainly could not be levelled at him on Saturday.
His starting line-up included Leonardo Ulloa, David Nugent, Jamie Vardy and Mahrez – essentially three strikers and a winger. That is an awful lot of attacking potential.
The problem was, it did not work. Nugent and Ulloa's link-up play lacked any sort of fluidity, while Vardy was wasted out on the flanks.
One of City's most potent threats had just 18 touches in the whole game, the fewest of all of the starting 11. The next nearest was Moore with 46.
Pearson made a drastic change on 67 minutes, using all three substitutions at once. Off went Vardy, Danny Drinkwater and Dean Hammond, on came Andy King, Esteban Cambiasso and Matty James – all central midfielders.
They had an impact, but it was all too late. In added time, King's shot was parried back into Cambiasso's path. Somehow, the Argentinian could only manage to hit the post from a yard out before Lukasz Fabianski scooped clear the rebound from on the line.
That just about summed up City's day.
