Jose Mourinho saw it. Back last season, when ‘The Special One’ still knew his football (just joking… I think), he reportedly approached Jamie Vardy in the tunnel after Chelsea’s win at Leicester and summed him up with one simple question:
“Do you ever stop f*cking running?”
The former pub footballer was understandably chuffed with the backhanded compliment, which was – as can be the case with Mourinho – far more insightful that it initially appeared.
As impressive as Vardy’s barnstorming campaign has been, it’s still has a firework quality to it – loud and explosive, but there’s a nagging feeling that every spark you see is the last, and Vardy and the Foxes will shortly resume a more familiar position in the football landscape.
Surely they can’t keep it up? Surely opponents will work them out?
But they don’t.
Watching Vardy do his thing – with the ball or without – what quickly becomes clear is that his not-so-secret weapon is as simple as it is effective: pure, hard graft.
Vardy is straight out of the old school of strikers, attacking every half-opportunity with the ravenous fury only displayed by those who face a simple footballing equation: score, or don’t eat.
It manifests itself in all the qualities that has Premier League backlines flummoxed and Vardy scoring for fun. He chases down every last ball no matter how hopeless the task. He runs at defences like a jacked-up Energizer bunny. Without the ball, he’s like a toddler who’s had too much red cordial – bobbing and weaving and ducking and diving in and out of the lines, as increasingly panicked (or blissfully ignorant) defenders desperately look around and wonder how the hell he got over there so quickly.
On the pitch, nothing is below him. He’s simply relentless. Every time he straps them on he puts in a shift – much like he did on the factory floor not so long ago.
Work, above all, seems to be the key to the Vardy phenomenon. How can such a simple approach prove so brutally effective at the elite level?
Perhaps the answer lies in the Vardy journey. Booted from the Sheffield United academy at 16, he headed to non-league football (and his pub team on Sundays), ultimately drawing most attention as he banged in 31 goals for Fleetwood Town to lead the conference in scoring in 2011-12.
Leicester came calling and stumped up the cash, and after a promotion and a season finding their feet, Vardy is the Premier League’s leading scorer and the proud owner of an England shirt.
So Vardy came up the hard way. Not so much fashioned by a youth academy and a carefully planned development path, but more a product of on-the-job training: get out there and score son, that’s what we’re paying you your 50 quid for.
He responded the way most would: see ball, get ball, smash ball into net. And if you chase every single ball you see, then you’ll get more of them.
They’re the qualities he’s carried through to the top level, where his type of player is perhaps now far rarer than it should be.
Arsene Wenger remarked not long ago that Europe doesn’t produce strikers any more. Talented kids are sent to the academies barely out of nappies and refined endlessly. The result is intelligent, technically gifted surgeons who carefully create from midfield. The focus on this, above pure hard work and volume of effort, means fewer Jamie Vardys. That’s fine to a point, but when a tradesman like him arrives and is basically so able to dominate, perhaps it’s a sign the pendulum has swung too far.
There’s plenty of teams in the lower half of the Premier League who would kill for a ride up the table like Leicester’s. Maybe the key is finding a more industrial player or two, those who excel above all else in in the areas of energy and workrate.
As Vardy has shown, there’s an awful lot to be gained from non-stop effort.
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