THE UNBELIEVABLES
The Remarkable Rise of Leicester City
THE 2015/16 PREMIER LEAGUE CHAMPIONS
THE UNBELIEVABLES
The Remarkable Rise of Leicester City
THE 2015/16 PREMIER LEAGUE CHAMPIONS
First published by deCoubertin Books Ltd in 2016.
deCoubertin Books, Basecamp, Studio N, Baltic Creative Campus,
Jamaica Street, Liverpool, L1 0AH
www.decoubertin.co.uk
ISBN 978-1-909245-44-0
Copyright © David Bevan 2016
The right of David Bevan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be left liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover design by Dave Williams
Layout by Milkyone Creative
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by the way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the author’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it was published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This book is dedicated to the memory of:
Tom Bedford
Paul ‘Larry’ Flanagan
Samuel Garner
Ian Midgley
Jasbir Rupra
Tony Skeffington
Contents
Foreword
The Moment Everything Changed
The Nearly Men: 1884 – 2000
1: Sunderland (H)
2: West Ham United (A)
3: Tottenham Hotspur (H)
4: Afc Bournemouth (A)
5: Aston Villa (H)
6: Stoke City (A)
7: Arsenal (H)
8: Norwich City (A)
9: Southampton (A)
10: Crystal Palace (H)
11: West Bromwich Albion (A)
12: Watford (H)
13: Newcastle United (A)
14: Manchester United (H)
15: Swansea City (A)
16: Chelsea (H)
17: Everton (A)
18: Liverpool (A)
19: Manchester City (H)
20: Afc Bournemouth (H)
21: Tottenham Hotspur (A)
22: Aston Villa (A)
23: Stoke City (H)
24: Liverpool (H)
25: Manchester City (A)
26: Arsenal (A)
27: Norwich City (H)
28: West Bromwich Albion (H)
29: Watford (A)
30: Newcastle United (H)
31: Crystal Palace (A)
32: Southampton (H)
33: Sunderland (A)
34: West Ham United (H)
35: Swansea City (H)
36: Manchester United (A)
36 And a Half: Chelsea V Tottenham Hotspur
37: Everton (H)
38: Chelsea (A)
38 And a Bit: The Victory Parade (H)
The Messiah
The Unbelievables
Acknowledgements
FOREWORD
Alan Birchenall MBE
WHEN I PLAYED FOR LEICESTER CITY IN THE 1970S, I’D MEET THE rest of the players in the café on the corner of Filbert Street before training for an egg and bacon butty. We’d have to change at the stadium and then head up to the training ground at Belvoir Drive a couple of miles away. Sometimes we’d jog there. These days they do a warm-up session but we’d already done it in those days. By the time we got to Belvoir Drive, we were knackered.
There were two reasons I chose Leicester: they played good football and the atmosphere at Filbert Street was brilliant.
Four decades on, the atmosphere at the King Power has played a part in the greatest achievement in Leicester City’s history.
The club brought in cardboard clappers for every fan during the great escape from relegation in 2015. All the reservations people had went out the window and everyone got involved in making noise to support the team. The feeling built. The results started to build too and the great escape in itself was a story. We carried that on into this season. They say new stadiums don’t create atmosphere. Visiting managers and coaches all tell me the King Power has the best atmosphere in football.
I stand in the centre circle as the players run out to the Post Horn Gallop before games and the noise from the fans always makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Wes Morgan tells me it’s brilliant and gives the players a lift.
As the games went on, people said the bubble would burst. That provided a challenge the lads took and turned into a positive. They were determined to prove how good they were.
We didn’t need possession to win. Everybody tries to copy Barcelona but they’ve got Lionel Messi up front. We played to our strengths and eventually the critics had to admit we were a good team. A great team. A team that’s made history.
I’ve enjoyed it all, standing in the tunnel and watching as we took whatever was thrown at us and came back from it every time.
In May, I got the chance to walk out of that tunnel holding the Premier League trophy.
I’d been sat at home at ten o’clock on the Wednesday night beforehand. The chief executive, Susan Whelan, rang me and I thought I was in for a rollicking. I asked what I’d done. She laughed and said ‘no, we’ve had a meeting and the club would like you to walk out with the trophy’. I couldn’t believe it.
We were lined up in the tunnel after the final whistle and I asked to hold the trophy. The guy looking after it asked if I was ready. It turns out I wasn’t. I stood there for five minutes and it was getting heavy! You only ever see big guys lift the trophy. By the time I walked out onto the pitch, it almost felt like I’d been playing.
As part of my role as club ambassador, I hold a remembrance service in the memorial garden at the King Power every summer.
After family, your football club is the most important thing in your life. It’ll mean so much to the families of City fans who have passed away, who didn’t live to see the greatest achievement in our club’s history, that we will be able to stand there and say we are the champions of England.
Leicester City: champions of England.
Alan Birchenall, May 2016
THE MOMENT EVERYTHING CHANGED
Sunday 23 October 2011
DAVID SILVA, MANCHESTER CITY’S MIDFIELD MAGICIAN, REACHES out and controls the ball at an awkward height. It sits up nicely to be played on the volley. Silva cushions a pass over the halfway line into the path of team-mate Edin Džeko.
Rio Ferdinand and Chris Smalling, Manchester United old and new, give chase.
They can’t get there.
Džeko takes two touches to set himself and passes the ball into the corner of the net at David De Gea’s near post.
The Old Trafford scoreboard reads: Manchester United 1 Manchester City 6.
And we celebrate. We actually celebrate. Across the country, across the world, we celebrate.
This day will change the course of Premier League history.
Manchester United fans call us ABUs – Anyone But United. We can’t argue. It’s true. Isn’t it time for a change?
A title race ensues between the two Manchester clubs. The battle goes deep into stoppage time in the final game of the season before Sergio Agüero scores the goal that makes Manchester City the champions of England, only the fifth club to lift the trophy since the Premier League began in 1992. We wonder how long it will be until a sixth is added to the list.
In the meantime, we’re happy. Even if Manchester City owner Sheikh Mansour has spent hundreds of millions of pounds in an attempt to topple Sir Alex Ferguson’s United, at least it’s something different.
The only problem is that it’s also completely meaningless to the club we love. These events are taking place in Manchester – at Old Trafford and the Etihad Stadium - but they feel a million miles away. They only exist to us on television. It’s another world. Because we are Leicester City and the Premier League is a distant dream.
The day after that tumultuous Manchester derby, Sven-Göran Eriksson is sacked as manager of Leicester City having won only five of the first thirteen Championship games of the season.
Eriksson’s removal signals a change of direction for the club’s Thai owners. They will eventually turn to a manager who left Leicester a year earlier: Nigel Pearson - a man who will clear out the deadwood, assemble an exceptional scouting team, encourage investment in the medical and sports science departments and restore a winning mentality.
Saturday 6 February 2016
THE MANCHESTER CITY GOALKEEPER JOE HART IS STANDING IN the same six-yard box he left in celebration when that unforgettable Agüero goal hit the net at the opposite end of the Etihad Stadium four years earlier.
Now he can only fall slowly backward as the ball flies past him.
And we celebrate. We really celebrate. Across the country, across the world, others celebrate.
This goal will change the course of Premier League history.
THE NEARLY MEN: 1884 – 2000
WE ARE LEICESTER CITY FOOTBALL CLUB. WE WERE FORMED sixteen years before the end of the nineteenth century. Through those years and the hundred that followed and the sixteen years into the twenty-first century, we never won the league. We came close in 1929 and again in 1963 but we never quite managed it.
It seems that every club and their fans have enjoyed time in the limelight.
Newcastle United haven’t won the league or cup for over fifty years but they have ten altogether gathering dust in their trophy cabinet. Southampton, who have never won the English top flight, have their 1976 FA Cup success to look back upon with pride. West Ham United have never won the league either but have three FA Cups to their name.
If you take major honours out of the equation and consider the other measures of the size of a football club – the stadium, the fanbase, its most famous players and managers, its potential and reputation – Leicester City are arguably the biggest never to have won the league or FA Cup, followed by Stoke City, Birmingham City, Norwich City and Middlesbrough.
In football, it is often said that the fans are the club; that chairmen, board members, managers, players and backroom staff all come and go and the fans remain, forming the true continuity in a club’s history. We hear this whenever a club finds itself in crisis or, in the case of most big Premier League clubs, they’ve lost two games in a row. It usually means that the fans want heads to roll.
Nobody says the fans are the club when the club is doing well.
All that’s different, of course, is that the team is winning instead of losing. They’re scoring more goals than the opposition and they’re doing it week after week after week. If those weeks turn into months and months turn into years, the structure of English football makes it possible for something amazing to happen.
It’s possible, but only just. Everything has to come together at once and that’s rare.
Filbert Street in the 1960s: one of the most lop-sided grounds in the country, with two large stands to the south and west and two glorified sheds to the north and east; rows of bicycles chained to the railings on match days and players arriving alongside supporters. You can define it now by what didn’t exist: no segregation of fans; no substitutes; no names on shirts and certainly no diving.
The swinging sixties were arguably Leicester City’s golden era, during which we reached the FA Cup Final on three occasions. Like our first appearance in 1949, however, we lost at Wembley each time: 1961, 1963, 1969. When looking back through history, it seems that City would be tagged as the nearly men of English football if anyone cared enough for such a tag to exist.
Take our three main rivals: Nottingham Forest, Derby County and Coventry City.
Four years have passed since Leicester and Coventry last contested the M69 derby, named after the motorway that connects two cities similar in population. Their football clubs could and should be similar too, but Coventry have won just one of the past sixteen games between the sides and haven’t finished in the top six of any division since 1970 – seven years before the construction of the M69 was completed.
The 1970s were the glory years for football in the East Midlands but, while Derby County won the league twice and Nottingham Forest ended the decade as kings of Europe, Leicester City played the role of the great entertainers. Jimmy Bloomfield constructed a team full of attacking talent – Frank Worthington, Keith Weller, Lenny Glover – who were heroes at Filbert Street but couldn’t convert that quality into silverware.
When Bloomfield left, things got worse. 1978 was a particular low point, as newly-promoted Forest won the league title under Brian Clough and we finished bottom of the table.
If the 1970s were an era of great entertainment, the 1980s brought even greater highs and lows. The first part of the decade was spent yo-yoing between the First and Second Divisions despite the emergence of one of England’s greatest strikers, Gary Lineker.
This is another hallmark of Leicester City’s history. Some of the most celebrated English footballers of all time have played for the club early in their careers – Gordon Banks and Peter Shilton being the two other obvious examples – without quite managing to contribute to collective success at club level.
In the late 1980s, things took a turn for the worse. City weren’t yo-yoing any more. We were mid-table in the Second Division and it seemed the only place we were headed next was down. This was an era of low crowds, low entertainment value and a low-flying aeroplane hauling a banner demanding the departure of manager David Pleat and chairman Terry Shipman.
On 11 May 1991, after both men had gone, City faced Oxford United at Filbert Street needing to better West Bromwich Albion’s result against Bristol Rovers in Bath. If we didn’t, we would be relegated to the third tier of English football for the first time.
In the lead-up to the game, the Leicester Mercury published a map of Third Division grounds for City supporters to cut out and keep. But would it be necessary?
Over 19,000 fans were in attendance – roughly twice the season average – on a nervous day. Defender Tony James struck the only goal of the game in the first half and there were celebrations on the pitch once news arrived from Bath that Albion had drawn.
City may have begun the 1990s battling relegation to the old Third Division but they ended with the club on the verge of our seventh trip to Wembley in eight years.
Despite a successful decade on the pitch, tensions between fans and those in charge remained. One fanzine was provocatively titled Where’s The Money Gone? Successive managers, Brian Little and Mark McGhee, became hated for the nature of their exits, although this was particularly tough on Little after achieving three visits to Wembley and promotion to the Premier League. Later, there were fierce protests against the so-called ‘Gang of Four’ board members: Gilbert Kinch, Roy Parker, Barrie Pierpoint and Philip Smith. For young fans otherwise lapping up own-brand Fox Leisure sportswear and motivational car bumper stickers, it felt like another fad dreamt up by the marketing department when fans handed out A3 paper outside the turnstiles. Kinch Out. Parker Out. Pierpoint Out. Smith Out. Collect the whole set.
And soon they were out, like Pleat and Shipman before them.
We had wanted the Gang of Four out mainly because of their clash with our manager, Martin O’Neill. Our whispered admission is that we had called for O’Neill’s exit too during an infamous home defeat to Sheffield United just weeks after his arrival in March 1996. Hands up. We got that one wrong. He never let us forget it.
A bandy-legged young midfielder on loan from Chelsea made his debut against Sheffield United. From the top of the Carling Stand, a chant began. ‘O’Neill out, Mustafa in…’
Mustafa became Muzzy. O’Neill became a hero. Leicester City became an established Premier League club, won the League Cup twice and played in Europe.
These were the glory years but we wanted more and there was a tantalising glimpse of a possible future in which City competed with the elite. Every fan of a certain age will tell you of one game in particular – a 5-2 home win against Sunderland inspired by a new strike partnership of Stan Collymore and Emile Heskey – which appeared to signal even greater times ahead. Within weeks, Heskey was sold to Liverpool. Within months, O’Neill was gone too and Collymore wasn’t far behind. The club disintegrated.
For years, we looked back on that victory over Sunderland and wondered what might have been.
1: SUNDERLAND (H)
Saturday 8 August 2015
WHAT A GAME. WHAT A DAY. A DAY THAT BEGINS WITH THE England cricket team winning The Ashes just up the road and ends with Leicester City sitting top of the Premier League.
Cricket continues, but the ball that takes Australia’s final wicket to seal victory in the Fourth Test at Trent Bridge before midday acts as something of a bookend to the summer sport. Just over three hours later, City open the 2015/16 Premier League season with a home fixture against Sunderland. Fans troop back to The Gateway, The Font, The Local Hero, The Robert Peel, The Counting House. Outside The Swan and Rushes, supporters of both clubs are sprawled on the pavement enjoying sunshine and heat that has been in short supply for some weeks.
Team news is keenly anticipated. The Japanese forward Shinji Okazaki will make his debut but the main talking point is the decision by new Leicester City manager Claudio Ranieri to switch from the effective 3-4-1-2 formation that helped bring survival at the end of last season to a more conventional 4-4-1-1.
The first one is Okazaki; the second is Jamie Vardy, playing his first competitive game since making his England debut in the summer. Kasper Schmeichel is the obvious choice in goal. The two banks of four read from right to left: Ritchie De Laet, Robert Huth, Wes Morgan, Jeffrey Schlupp; Marc Albrighton, Danny Drinkwater, Andy King, Riyad Mahrez.
As the players take to the pitch, the Kop is transformed into a gigantic graphic of two supporters – one with a scarf, one with a flag – made up of thousands of shiny foils held aloft in a display organised by fan group Union FS. At the front of the stand, a banner reads: ‘Your colours are in our hands. Our dreams are in yours.’
Game on.
Sunderland start brightly, going close three times in the first ten minutes, but that only serves to make the next twenty even more painful for the thousands in red and white stripes in the away end. They have a good view of their team’s abject surrender as City score three times to effectively end the contest before the half-hour mark.
Vardy gets the first, darting onto a Marc Albrighton free kick to loop a header up and over the giant frame of Costel Pantilimon with eleven minutes on the clock. He celebrates with a somersault, already one-fifth of the way to matching his total from last season.
Another arcing Albrighton cross is glanced in by Riyad Mahrez to double City’s lead and Mahrez is soon taken down by Cattermole just inside the penalty area before placing the spot kick beyond Pantilimon.
3-0. We’re up and singing now. Three points in the bag against one of our relegation rivals?
Lee Cattermole, Sunderland’s captain and midfield lynchpin, is sacrificed after half an hour to make way for a second striker, the Scottish international Steven Fletcher, as Advocaat moves to 4-4-2. The veteran Dutch manager, persuaded by Sunderland to shelve impending retirement, has been bested by his opposite number. This is the first tactical victory of the season for Ranieri, who had been written off by large sections of the press after being appointed by City. Their chief gripe, that he was the polar opposite to his predecessor Nigel Pearson, is already shown up as under-thought nonsense just half an hour into a 38-game season.
Ranieri may act the fool occasionally in press conferences but he is a considered tactician. Mahrez, who had played centrally at the end of last season, is back on the wing rendering Sunderland’s defensive midfielder redundant and replaced, instead tormenting left-back Patrick Van Aanholt to an extent that borders on cruelty.
The second half begins with more of the same. Vardy and Mahrez both create magnificent openings for themselves from tight angles but neither brings the fourth goal of the game. That eventually comes at the other end when a rare Sunderland attack sees Jermain Defoe find the corner of the net for his 129th Premier League goal.
The visitors are visibly buoyed and set off in pursuit of a second goal, only to concede yet again. This time it’s Albrighton, albeit returning from an offside position, who takes advantage of slack play by Sunderland’s new centre-back Younes Kaboul to fire past Pantilimon.
The Sunderland debutant Jeremain Lens then makes his first notable contribution of the match when he sets up Fletcher for a second consolation goal to offer brief hope for Advocaat’s men. False hope, as it turns out. The three recent City purchases who had been enjoying the show from the bench – Christian Fuchs, N’Golo Kanté and Yohan Benalouane – all come on to help strengthen an increasing rearguard action by the home side. Vardy and Mahrez are withdrawn having given everything to establish the advantage.
The final whistle brings confirmation not only of victory but also City’s status as Premier League leaders.
Fittingly, the key duel in the game sees one of Nigel Pearson’s many astute signings completely dismantle one of Sven-Göran Eriksson’s many indifferent ones. Mahrez has seen off better defenders than Sunderland’s Van Aanholt, who was temporarily a City player when signed on loan by Eriksson in 2011, but few have given up with so little fight. Van Aanholt’s lackadaisical approach to defending, often walking back to his position while City attack, is symptomatic of Sunderland’s problem.
Frankly, City want it more. That’s nothing new where the likes of Huth and Vardy are concerned, but we were keen to see how hard-working our arrival from the Bundesliga would be. The answer was emphatic. Shinji Okazaki slotted straight into the withdrawn striker role as though he had been playing in the Premier League for years, hassling opponents and setting up counter attacks in bustling fashion.
David Nugent, City’s top scorer for three years running as we fought for promotion, is on the verge of completing a £4million move back to the Championship with Middlesbrough, and Okazaki’s impressive debut plays a big part in reassuring City fans. Nugent may have been relegated to fifth choice by the signings of Okazaki, Leonardo Ulloa and Andrej Kramarić over the past twelve months, but his work rate could have been hard to replace. It is clear why the scouting team kept tabs on Okazaki for so long. He is the heir apparent to a popular player who proved effective in a winning team for many years.
City fans waking up to the exciting sight of our team sitting at the top of the Premier League table for the first time since October 2000 are soon brought crashing back to earth by a headline in The Sun on Sunday. Jamie Vardy has been filmed making a ‘racial slur’ in a casino in the early hours of a pre-season Sunday morning. It barely seems credible after the summer that Leicester City have been through, but the evidence is incontrovertible. Vardy uses the term ‘Jap’ repeatedly in reference to a Far Eastern man he is accusing of trying to see his cards. The nationality of his new strike partner adds to the plot line.
The tabloid exposé is a long tradition. It is hard to believe City didn’t firmly ‘remind their players of their responsibilities’, to borrow a well-worn media relations phrase, after the farce in Bangkok. Vardy’s misdemeanour merely causes them to repeat the message. There’s never any question that one of City’s most important players will meet the same fate as Tom Hopper, James Pearson and Adam Smith did in the summer. Vardy issues a swift apology and Ranieri confirms at his second pre-match press conference that there will be no sacking.
City, having been bumped off the top by Manchester City’s win at West Bromwich Albion in the opening Monday night game of the season, prepare for a final ever trip to an unhappy hunting ground. Our first away game of the season takes us to Upton Park.
Leicester City 4 (Vardy, Mahrez 2, Albrighton)
Sunderland 2 (Defoe, Fletcher)
Team: Schmeichel, De Laet (Benalouane), Morgan, Huth, Schlupp, Mahrez (Fuchs), Drinkwater, King, Albrighton, Okazaki, Vardy (Kanté)
THE WILDERNESS YEARS
2002. AS AULD LANG SYNE RANG OUT FROM TINNY SPEAKERS across the East Stand into the night sky and the lights went out at Filbert Street for the last time, we tried to remember better days. For the older fans, that may have been Ken Keyworth’s hat-trick against Manchester United. Some recalled Keith Weller’s dancing tights of the seventies, the 5-0 play-off semi-final thrashing of Cambridge United in 1992 or Muzzy Izzet crashing a volley into the Tottenham Hotspur net on the night we pleaded for Martin O’Neill to stay in 1998.
In the end, O’Neill’s departure was the catalyst for the club to implode and Filbert Street’s last days were not happy ones. We looked forward to the future and the move to the shiny new Walkers Stadium just a wind-assisted goal kick to the south, but dark times were ahead. Soon we were meeting in backstreet pubs forming organisations to help save our club, shaking buckets outside home games and waiting anxiously for news. In the short term, Gary Lineker rode to our rescue with the help of his friends, Emile Heskey among them, as a group of local businessmen stumped up the cash to save our club. The 2002/03 season had seen the future of the club threatened but it ended with promotion.
In retrospect, that year feels like the odd one out. For a generation raised on the success of the O’Neill era, propped up by a return to the Premier League under Micky Adams, there wasn’t much else to cheer about for the rest of the decade. Five years of gradual decline followed, during which we endured a high turnover of playing staff, uninspiring managers and poor football. Apathy set in and we became accustomed to our team facing similar clubs who were far better organised on and off the pitch. We had some memorable days, mainly when securing survival or battling to an unlikely FA Cup victory, but few chronicle these times because they’re not worth reading about. This is the reality of football for most fans, but it’s not glamorous and it’s certainly not worth dwelling on.
We trudged our way towards the Britannia Stadium in May 2008 under the darkest of clouds, a fitting atmosphere for City’s first-ever relegation to the third tier.
The players were a problem. Some of them didn’t work hard enough. Others didn’t possess the talent to merit wearing our shirt. A handful fitted into both categories. At times we didn’t even recognise them, so often was the door revolving to bring in mediocrity and spit out failure. It was a similar issue with the number of managers that came in and out without achieving anything positive, although some had trying circumstances as a defence.
We had lost our identity. As we slipped out of the Championship for the first time, nearly eight years had passed since we last sang our hearts out to O’Neill’s team. It felt like a hundred. Maybe we needed relegation and a rebuild.
Stoke fans danced in front of us, some seemingly celebrating our demise as much as their own promotion to the Premier League, and joining them felt like a very distant dream.
One of them approached.
‘Heading back to Leicester? You want to go via Oldham, Swindon, Scunthorpe…’
We gave hollow laughs and stared straight ahead.
2: WEST HAM UNITED (A)
Saturday 15 August 2015
LAST CHRISTMAS, OR JUST ABOUT: 20 DECEMBER 2014. Leicester City left-back Paul Konchesky didn’t give West Ham United his heart but he certainly gave them a present – the opening goal gift-wrapped for Andy Carroll to give the Hammers the lead in what had been an even game of few chances. Wham! Another kick in the ribs for Leicester City’s travelling supporters.
It was the lowest point of Konchesky’s season and one of many difficult moments for his team. So often City conceded the first goal, then a second, before a late, yet fruitless, rally.
As we sloped away from Upton Park with our team bottom of the league at Christmas, the home supporters skipped out of the exits with theirs in the Champions League places. It seemed inconceivable that the two sides would meet again in the league the following season.
Yet here we are. The sun beats down as stewards frantically clear claret and blue streamers from an immaculate playing surface and, against all the odds, Leicester City are back.
West Ham, buoyed by their win at the Emirates on the opening weekend, start brightly with Dimitri Payet, a £10.6million summer signing from Marseille, pulling the strings in midfield. In front of him, Diafra Sakho and Mauro Zarate run the channels to good effect. The home side go close when Wes Morgan sends a header narrowly over his own crossbar and the noise builds inside Upton Park in anticipation of an early goal.
Fortunately for City, it doesn’t arrive. The tide begins to turn with Shinji Okazaki a revelation in the withdrawn striker role. He holds the ball up, links play and scurries back to win possession in midfield on numerous occasions.
Halfway through the first half, Vardy drops in behind West Ham centre-back Winston Reid to collect a ball from Marc Albrighton and looks up from the flank. He sees Okazaki’s run and delivers a perfect cross into his strike partner’s path. Okazaki meets the ball on the volley with the outside of his right foot, sending it towards goal. The save is made by Adrian but the Spanish goalkeeper can only push the ball up into the air. Leaping and hanging for a split-second, Okazaki nods it over the line for his first goal in English football. At the other end of the ground, we go wild.
Our team continues to impress. The same four attackers who tormented Sunderland are at it again and all four are involved in the goal that doubles City’s lead. Vardy wins the flick on. Okazaki retrieves the ball and sets it back. Albrighton darts into the area and pulls it across to the edge of the area. Mahrez guides his finish disdainfully into the top corner of the net and hares off wearing the same gleeful expression as thousands in the away end. City are 2-0 up, having failed to win on any of our last 20 visits to the capital.
Just before half time, a long ball catches Huth and Morgan napping and leaves Sakho through on goal. The Senegalese striker lifts the ball past Kasper Schmeichel before falling to the floor inside the penalty area courtesy of the goalkeeper’s outstretched right arm. It should be a penalty. It could be a red card. Again the fortune lies with City. Referee Anthony Taylor waves play on to the fury of the Hammers supporters.
The second half is a very different story. West Ham press forward and City retreat towards the edge of the penalty area. Payet quickly pulls a goal back with a neat finish into the top corner. City struggle to get out. Yet there are few shots to test Schmeichel. Ranieri makes similar defensive substitutions to the ones which helped close out the game against Sunderland, again introducing N’Golo Kanté, Christian Fuchs and Yohan Benalouane.
West Ham force one clear chance to equalise, working the ball to Sakho six yards out in the centre of the goal. He strikes the ball straight at Schmeichel who beats it away and both the chance and the game are gone. Leicester City have won in the league at West Ham for only the second time since 1966. We go top of the Premier League table for the second successive Saturday.
We’re pinching ourselves as we leave Upton Park for the very last time. West Ham will move to the Olympic Stadium in Stratford when the season ends and another of English football’s iconic stadiums will disappear. Visiting supporters will soon be able to tick off another new ground but we will lose the opportunity to visit the jellied eel shop on the Barking Road or Ken’s Cafe which has served West Ham supporters for nearly fifty years. We won’t see the bemusing sign above a dry cleaners on Green Street that reads: ‘Don’t Kill Your Wife, Let Us Do It!’
Upton Park has never been a happy hunting ground for Leicester City, but all football fans should treasure these grand old venues. At least we walked away for the last time having seen a City win.
West Ham United 1 (Payet)
Leicester City 2 (Okazaki, Mahrez)
Team: Schmeichel, De Laet (Benalouane), Morgan, Huth, Schlupp, Mahrez (Fuchs), Drinkwater, King, Albrighton, Okazaki (Kanté), Vardy
THE HARD ROAD BACK
THE MAN WHO CONDEMNED LEICESTER CITY TO THE LOWEST point in our club’s history in the summer of 2008 was the man charged with restoring us to the Championship. Not Ian Holloway, whose last game was to be that goalless draw at Stoke, but Nigel Pearson, who had guided Southampton to safety at our expense.
Initially, we were underwhelmed. Thankfully, we were wrong. Pearson quickly assembled an honest, hard-working side that was far too good for League One and soon the club found itself back from whence it had arrived. We danced on Southend beach after Matty Fryatt’s double secured the title and we trooped down Filbert Way the following Friday night to watch Matt Oakley lift our first trophy for nine years.
The football club felt fresh again, not least because there were exciting youth team players emerging. Andy King looked like an old head on young shoulders, while Max Gradel was tricky and skilful on the wing. Pearson had recruited well too, adding the likes of Jack Hobbs and Bruno Berner who were to prove equally comfortable in a higher division.
We had enjoyed League One. It had helped that we were winning most weeks, but it was a joy to visit new towns and new grounds. Some fans felt it was a disgrace that the club had been lowered to an unprecedented level but there were others who would miss places like Hereford, Scunthorpe and Yeovil. It felt more like proper football and our players, management and fans took it seriously. We were there because we deserved it and we left because we deserved it.
With that, it was back to the rigours of the Championship and another long, hard campaign that would bring us to the cusp of Wembley during a play-off semi-final second leg in Cardiff. When King’s header found the corner of the net, we were so close. Then came a goal for Cardiff’s Michael Chopra, Yann Kermorgant’s infamous panenka and the sight of Martyn Waghorn lying on the ground and sobbing uncontrollably as Cardiff’s players leapt over him to celebrate. There were tears in the away end too, a mixture of pride and disappointment. The young centre-back Jack Hobbs and veteran striker Steve Howard left the pitch with their arms draped around each other’s shoulders, an image that seemed symbolic of the club’s unity.
Yet again there was hope and yet again there was a wild change of direction that would throw us off course entirely.
Nigel Pearson left to join Hull City in mysterious circumstances at the end of the 2009/10 season, Paulo Sousa took his place and City began an ill-advised attempt to morph into Barcelona overnight. Suddenly, players who knew their roles inside out were expected to keep possession in tight areas. They looked unfit. The results were appalling. Sousa was never going to last long. And then came Sven.
The appointment of Sven-Göran Eriksson in October 2010 was, for a brief time, exciting. Here was a former England manager with a high-profile global reputation being given the opportunity to build a side at great expense. After the dreariness of the mid-2000s, it was no wonder that some fans gleefully threw themselves onto the bandwagon.
The Eriksson era had its moments. Some of the football was sublime, the high point being a glorious display at Pride Park that brought two wonderful goals by Yakubu and Andy King. It was never quite the right fit for the Championship though. Like some of his less prestigious predecessors, Eriksson signed too many players on loan and supporters perceived a lack of passion and commitment among the squad.
By November 2011, the Swede was gone too. The King Power consortium needed a capable man to steady the ship and begin to build for the future with a long-term plan. They needed Nigel Pearson.
Despite his previous success, fans were split. Eriksson had raised the club’s profile from Pearson’s spell in charge, if not its league position. Had we moved on? Would this be a step back?
It took Pearson a few months to adjust, but soon it felt like he had never been away. He signed Wes Morgan from Nottingham Forest; Danny Drinkwater from Manchester United; Jamie Vardy from Fleetwood Town. Finally we were seeing players with hunger, players with something to prove and players who showed their quality on a more consistent basis.
The 2012/13 season began with City playing exciting, attacking football and promotion to the Premier League appearing closer than at any point in the previous ten years. In mid-January, thousands of City fans packed into the away end at Ashton Gate and saw our side dismantle Bristol City with new signing Chris Wood scoring a hat-trick.
Few could have predicted the dismal run that followed. City collapsed from title favourites to be fighting just to make the top six. It took a last-minute winner at the City Ground – our first league away win against Nottingham Forest since 1972 – to secure a play-off place and spark delirium among the travelling supporters behind the goal.
The rollercoaster continued to Vicarage Road for a play-off semi-final second leg that would live as long in the memory as victory over Forest. Anthony Knockaert’s penalty could have taken us to Wembley. Instead, it was saved and Watford raced up the other end where Troy Deeney’s goal took us to the depths of despair. It hurt. It really hurt. It also felt like we would never get out of the Championship.
Luckily, our players had a stronger resolve than many of us realised and 2013/14 became one of our most glorious seasons. Perhaps driven on by the heartbreak of the previous campaign, the likes of Danny Drinkwater and Jamie Vardy improved to unimaginable levels. We cast our minds back to the mid-2000s and the roll calls of teams who had dominated the division, making a downtrodden City their cannon fodder along the way – Sunderland; Reading; Birmingham City. It was Leicester City’s turn and we revelled in it.
Promotion was achieved on 5 April 2014 when Queens Park Rangers failed to beat Bournemouth. Lloyd Dyer’s right-footed rocket at Bolton later clinched the title. Yet we had even greater celebrations in the weeks to come. We invaded the pitch at Huddersfield and mobbed Nigel Pearson and his players. Then we found ourselves standing in the centre circle after the final home game of the season, shielding our eyes against the sun as it dawned that we were finally back in the Premier League.
3: TOTTENHAM HOTSPUR (H)
Saturday 22 August 2015
AN UNBEARABLY HOT AND HUMID DAY RESULTS IN A GAME OF few chances between City and Tottenham Hotspur. Goals were expected but the first one doesn’t arrive until the 81st minute. Harry Kane bustles through a crowd of City players and lays the ball off to Nacer Chadli, whose deep cross is headed into the net from close range by substitute Dele Alli. There are a number of defensive errors involved in the first opening goal conceded by Ranieri’s men. Last season, City went a goal down on far too many occasions including ten of the first twelve games in all competitions. It has taken until the third game of the following campaign to concede first and a reaction is vital.
The ball is played back to Wes Morgan who looks to his right. Both Robert Huth and Ritchie De Laet are pointing further up the wing and Morgan obliges, launching one long into the Tottenham half. Jamie Vardy jumps early and wins the flick-on despite a height disadvantage.
The ball lands at the feet of Riyad Mahrez. He turns towards goal. This is where he thrives, running diagonally into the penalty area with the ability to go left or right. The defender, in this case the Tottenham centre-back Jan Vertonghen, always knows that Mahrez wants to cut inside on his left foot. But Mahrez did the opposite in the corresponding fixture last season, instead darting to the byline and pulling the ball across for Leonardo Ulloa to score.
The doubt is there, yet the left-back, Ben Davies, is still frantically pointing for Vertonghen to show Mahrez onto his weaker right foot. Davies knows what can happen if the man he has been marking all game gets a chance to shoot.
Mahrez is only able to engineer a quarter of a yard of space but that’s enough. The ball rockets into the far corner with a ferocity rarely seen since his early days in a City shirt when a similar strike against Blackpool found the same side of the net.
The sight of six-foot-two Hugo Lloris diving full-length and yet still finding Mahrez’s strike unstoppable is a sweet feeling for every fan who endured the Frenchman’s string of improbable saves on Boxing Day last season to deny City a draw. Morgan should gain the ultimate revenge by securing all three points with a late point blank header but Lloris denies his fellow captain. The game ends one all.
This game is also notable for what happens just moments before the exchange of goals, with Gökhan Inler replacing Danny Drinkwater for his Leicester City debut.
Inler is the captain of Switzerland and the capture of such a prestigious player from Serie A club Napoli was one of the transfer window’s most eye-opening deals.
Drinkwater and Andy King made it impossible for Ranieri to instate Inler from the beginning of his City career. Just as Nigel Pearson had needed to break up a successful midfield partnership when King and Dean Hammond made way for Esteban Cambiasso and Drinkwater after a few games of the previous season, Ranieri had to choose wisely when to introduce Inler and his fellow summer signing N’Golo Kanté.
Leicester City 1 (Mahrez)
Tottenham Hotspur 1 (Alli)
Team: Schmeichel, De Laet, Morgan, Huth, Schlupp, Mahrez (Ulloa), Drinkwater (Inler), King, Albrighton (Kanté), Okazaki, Vardy
THE BASEMENT BOYS