The moment the Chelsea versus Tottenham game ended in a welter of kicking, eye-gouging and general disgruntlement, a truth barely hoped for, a dream rarely uttered, became a joyful reality. Leicester City – Leicester City, as the English commentator Jon Champion proclaimed incredulously, were champions of England.
A friend of mine has a saying that there is always in a Premier League season a club that experiences “Altitude Sickness.” They ascend to the top of the table, make the early running, only for reality to collide with glorious expectation, hastening a tumble down the rankings, leaving the “real” stuff to the usual suspects from Manchester and London.
Portsmouth, Norwich, Leeds and Newcastle have sought to upset the four-club power struggle over the years with improbable form for a good portion of the season.
Leicester went unbeaten until Round 7 where they were summarily thrashed 5-2 by Arsenal at the King Power Stadium. Despite the wizardry of the largely unheralded Riyad Mahrez, there were knowing winks and nods. Leicester’s first encounter with one of the “Big 4” had ended brutally and it seemed that Claudio Ranieri and his side of cobbled-together artisans would do well to scrape together the necessary 40 points seen as the safety net in avoiding the dreaded drop.
They didn’t lose again until Boxing Day when Liverpool beat them 1-0 at Anfield, the first time all season the Foxes were held scoreless. They then failed to score in three successive games, although the last of those, a 0-0 draw at Bournemouth on January second, secured their 40th point.
Ah, but this was it – this was the point where the altitude would get too much for the Midlands club who had spent 132 years making up the numbers in various levels of the Football League. They were statistically safe from the drop, as their wonderfully canny and unruffled manager reminded us.
Instead, they had a mid-season re-invention, as a club that almost no-one could score against. After securing only two clean sheets in the first half of the season, they became the kind of defensive wall Donald Trump dreams about in his anti-Mexican ramblings.
I can take all the credit for this as it was at about Christmas that I finally gave up on Kasper Schmeichel as my Fantasy Team goalkeeper. He then proceeded to give an admirable impression of his father, repelling opposition attacks along with one of the most stable back fours in the premiership.
Arsenal didn’t send flowers and chocolates on Valentine’s Day, instead they snatched three points in the fifth minute of injury time at the Emirates in a game seen once again as the end of the fairytale. But within that defeat lay a steel that many missed. Leicester were arguably the better side on that day and even when reduced to ten players with the sending off of Danny Simpson, Arsenal found it hugely difficult to break Leicester down. In defeat, Leicester shone.
They haven’t lost since.
With two matches still to play, Leicester City have re-written the playbook on sporting improbabilities. They have balanced the ledger on the predictability of rich sporting cartel successes in just one glorious season.
Not just football, all sporting competitions around the world could not have failed to tune in to this story. It is a story that would have been rejected by film-makers if submitted as a script. “Change the ending,” they’d have said. “Needs more realism.”
From now on, any unlikely sporting triumph can be coined, “Doing a Leicester.” Newly promoted clubs don’t need to fantasise about a glory-filled run in the league because in legal terms they can now cite a precedent. What odds can you get on Burnley winning the title in 2017? I bet it’s not 5,000/1.
Leicester City have also united the disenfranchised. Those of us with an interest in the EPL but without a stake in the race adopted the Foxes and for once, it has paid off gloriously. They didn’t tumble off the side of the mountain, they ascended the summit, stuck their flag in the top and made believers out of us all.
I’m off to find my boots. Anything’s possible now.
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