It was the first entry in the letters page to The Fox that caught the attention after digging out the right change for one of the fanzine sellers on Raw Dykes Road, the main thoroughfare down to Leicester City’s stadium, where stickers have started appearing on lampposts using the words from an old Paul Weller classic, You Do Something to Me, and showing the crowd at Filbert Street, back in the days when none of this would have seemed imaginable.
They have been selling this fanzine since the 1987-88 season when Leicester, in keeping with what was generally expected of them, finished 13th in the old Second Division, and the editorial by Gary Silke is probably a decent starting place for all those foreign journalists who have checked into the city’s hotel rooms and are currently studying the club’s history. Silke, to borrow the old line, has done more years watching his football team than you might get for murder.
“It takes more than eight months to wipe out the mindset of a lifetime of supporting Leicester and the things drummed into you ever since you were a kid,” he writes. “The yo-yo club. Too good for the Second Division, not good enough for the First Division. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Four FA Cup finals and never lifted the trophy once – a unique ‘achievement’. As my boss used to say in the mid-80s: ‘City will always let you down.’”
But not now, surely. The mood has changed. At the Blaby Chippy they have turned the sausage batter blue. There is a pie in the window of one butcher’s named after Claudio Ranieri and a flashlight illuminating the city in the team’s colours at night. It is the vibe you would usually find in a small market town before a plum FA Cup tie and that letter stood out because of what it said about the new order of English football. “Their time has passed,” it proclaims. “The ‘Big 5’ are dinosaurs. Most of them are imploding. Domestically, their tippy‑tappy, bore‑fest brand of football has been shown up for what it is. They can all turn on their managers but the cold, hard fact is their set-up, style of football and pandering to washed-up galácticos is history.”
Unfortunately for Leicester – and not that it should concern them in the slightest for the time being – it is much more likely that the clubs in their wing-mirrors will not be so obliging next season. Millions will be spent on trying to fix what has gone wrong. Pep Guardiola will arrive. José Mourinho could return. And nobody can be sure what will happen to Leicester next. A bad run of injuries, plus the extra rigours of playing in Europe, and it is not entirely harebrained to think they might return to the bottom half of the table next season.
Equally, the members of my profession should probably know better by now than to patronise them with watery predictions. Leicester stand to receive around £100m in prize money for finishing the season with the championship trophy. Their owners have already sanctioned the eighth most expensive recruitment programme in the Premier League over the past two seasons – as fairytales go, this one hasn’t come as cheaply as some people like to believe – and the new television deal is another reason why the champions-in-waiting will be under no pressure to sell their better players.
There are plans to enlarge their stadium to 42,000 seats and it all feels a long way from the days when Dave Bassett described Leicester’s average crowd as “three people and five cabbages” during one of their relegation seasons.
Bassett tells another story from that 2001-02 season, when Leicester finished rock-bottom, about being stopped by police in his car and asked for his name. “When I told them: ‘Dave Bassett,’ this cop said: ‘What, the Leicester manager?’ I said ‘yes’ and he burst out laughing.”
Yet here they are, not too many years later, on the verge of one of the sport’s more implausible success stories and there are certainly an awful lot of teams with greater reputations who should feel chastened, to say the least, about being left behind by a club that was grubbing around for points among the hoi polloi of League One as recently as 2009.
What does it say, for example, for Manchester United’s diminished status that they are so far behind their opponents on Sunday when their wage bill is £203m compared to Leicester’s £57m. There is a stand at Old Trafford that is not too short of the entire capacity of the King Power stadium. United’s net transfer spend over the past two seasons has been £132m (Leicester: £49m) and a club that appears to have more money than sense signed off more than £10m in agents’ fees from October to February. For all that, Louis van Gaal’s team are 17 points off a side whose leading scorers since winning promotion two years ago came from Fleetwood Town and Brighton and Hove Albion.
The current champions, Chelsea, are even further back, 29 points adrift, after sleepwalking through a season they would no doubt like to airbrush from history, and what do we make of Manuel Pellegrini’s casual rewriting of history when he said recently that Manchester City had improved every year in his time as manager?
Pellegrini forgets, perhaps, that after City were defeated in the Manchester derby last month he was asked in the post-match press conference to assess the team’s 51 points from 30 games compared to the figures – 61, 67, 62 and 70 – from the same stage of the previous four seasons. He refused to answer and his show of temper suggested an acute form of discomfort that, with a couple of months still to play, the most expensively assembled team in the league barely registered on Leicester’s radar.
Yes, Pellegrini’s team have made it to the Champions League semi-finals but if they cannot see off Real Madrid there is something about his final season that reminds me of what Rick Parry said after Liverpool had beaten Chelsea to reach the 2007 final. Parry was Liverpool’s chief executive at the time and keen, plainly, to sympathise with the losers. “I guess when you’ve invested £500m it’s a fantastic season to win the League Cup,” he said.
Not that Liverpool can feel entirely pleased with themselves when, in the past week, they have overtaken Manchester United’s infamous 26-year sequence (or 9,494 days, to be precise) without a league title. There is a theme here of the traditionally elite clubs stagnating. Arsenal are another one given their now-customary meltdown – and how ridiculous those victorious dressing-room selfies, having beaten Leicester in February, look now – while Everton’s position in the bottom half of the table is so chronic nobody should be too surprised if it brings down the guillotine on Roberto Martínez’s time as manager.
Everton are 32 points behind Leicester and if the charge against Martínez is that he is too wedded to one way of thinking, too lax when it comes to defensive structure and too damn stubborn to do anything about it, it is certainly not eased by a story I heard in the last few days about his time managing Wigan Athletic.
You might remember their 9-1 defeat against Tottenham at White Hart Lane in November 2009, a record defeat for Wigan, a few months after Martínez was put in charge. What is not so widely known is that in the dressing room afterwards Martínez told his players – whose mood, it is fair to say, was collective bewilderment – to continue playing exactly the same way. Wigan duly conceded 79, 61, 62 and 73 goals in his four seasons while Everton are far too vulnerable in the same way. Martínez undoubtedly has qualities but, equally, it is a damning indictment that Leicester’s seven clean sheets from their past nine league games is as many as Everton have managed since September.
Martínez is singled out because of the widespread belief this is Everton’s finest squad for many years but, in fairness, they are far from the only club who could learn a thing or two from the way Ranieri has set up his team.
Leicester went into administration in the year Bassett remembers. They were bucket-collection skint and a club employee from the time tells me the offices were infested with rats. “Thankfully, this is the present,” Silke writes in The Fox. “The best place we have ever been.”
MLS is no home for the elderly
Could the Major League Soccer obsession with offering various former England players a place, to quote Ashley Cole, to go for “retirement”, be starting to wear thin?
Frank Lampard’s record since his transfer from Manchester City to their sister club, New York City, certainly indicates that maybe a different approach is needed, given that one of the correspondents from the New York Daily News has just branded him “the worst signing in MLS history”.
Lampard played 10 games in his first season, culminating in his team failing to make the play-offs and the manager, Jason Kreis, being fired. New York went into this weekend in eighth, out of 10 clubs, in the Eastern Conference and Lampard has not played a single game because of a calf injury. New York cannot sign a replacement if he remains on the books and the journalists who cover MLS regularly are asking whether he should retire or be paid off. “The greatest contribution Frank Lampard can make to New York City FC is to leave,” one has written. “And leave as soon as possible.”
Knowing Lampard, he will be deeply frustrated that he has not made a better contribution for his $6m-a-year salary. Yet it was never going to be risk-free, bearing in mind he is 38 in June, and it does make you wonder whether MLS should devote so much time and energy towards players at the fag-ends of their careers.
Hodgson’s battle with perception
Roy Hodgson clearly doesn’t like the perception in England that his style of management is too conservative. “I don’t know when I got it, but I was given an epithet at one stage that will stay with me for the rest of my life,” he says. “I don’t have it in Switzerland, I don’t have it in Italy. I can’t remember who said it first but it’s not true and I have never felt that way.”
He might have a point, too. Hodgson’s England could conceivably start with a 4-3-3 formation in Euro 2016 and, with a couple of exceptions, it hasn’t been overly defensive football in his time in charge.
Unfortunately for Hodgson, it probably didn’t help him that he once selected Javier Mascherano ahead of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo as his pick for the Balon d’Or and it did amuse me recently to learn of the three people he regards as the best managers of all time. Roy’s first selection: Dave Sexton (followed by Arrigo Sacchi and Rinus Michels).
