The Incredible Journey III - The Year of the Fox

Over the course of this season I have tried, and failed, many times to explain to my football loathing girlfriend the enormity of the achievement should Leicester City win the Premier League. Even trying to shoe horn in her love for Richard III has failed to engage her in this incredible story. Don’t you support Man United she asks me? Have you just switched teams now that you’re crap? I point out I haven’t switched teams, I’m just caught up in an adventure that would be possibly the singularly most incredible sporting achievement of my lifetime. I just want to be able to say I saw it, that I was there... when Leicester City of League one a few years ago and 5000/1 to win the title... somehow did it. I speak of Jamie Vardy, a guy brought up a couple of miles from our house in Sheffield and how his journey from non league to Premier League title winner in a few years is going to be a Hollywood movie. Will the movie portray Sheffield as an industrial ravaged wasteland of abandoned factories and stereotypical northerners with flat caps and whippets? Almost certainly I say.

Ultimately, whether to someone with no interest in football, or a scholar of the game, trying to explain away this season is frankly impossible. Teams like Leicester City simply don’t win top flight titles. It doesn’t happen. Ever. Comparisons have been thinly clutched to the great Clough teams. Both of his achievements (Derby’s title and subsequent double European Cup triumph with Nottingham Forest) are up there with the finest, but they existed not only in a different era of football where money and elitism was not so dominant. Also whilst the cup wins were incredible, as were say, the Euro triumphs of Greece and Denmark, they were achieved over a much shorter period of games (6 to 12). Leicester have won the title over a full 38 (with two to spare) and indeed you could stretch back their form to a staggering FIFTY games now and they would still be top of the pile. This is a team made up of rejected players who have come together under a likeable journeyman to achieve the incredible. Kante, Mahrez and Vardy have been the three best players in the league this year, but every player deserves a 10 out of 10. Danny Simpson, a player who couldn’t get in the QPR team that was relegated? Robert Huth, deemed not good enough for a Stoke defence that has conceded 28 goals more than Leicester so far. Danny Drinkwater, a Man United loanee of 5 clubs in 2 years before joining this Leicester team. I mean, Mahrez and Kante were both playing French Ligue 2 football just 18 months ago?? When Mahrez was offered a contract at Leicester, he thought it was a rugby club. You just couldn’t make up stuff like that. It would sound ridiculous. It does sound ridiculous. It is ridiculous.

There is an argument that Leicester would not have done this but for the collective failings of the elite. It is worth pointing out then that their points total of 77 is already above the 75 point mark that Manchester United won the title with in 97 (with two games to spare). Leicester have lost just 3 times all season and there is a bitter irony to the fact that two of those losses have come to Arsenal, who were the team seemingly most well placed to take advantage of the ailing of others. Leicester have won this title on their own merit playing a style of football that they adapted wonderfully as the season wore on. 

Having said that, it was worth pausing for a moment to consider the incredible failings of the teams below them this year. Last season, after 36 matches, the top four of Chelsea, Arsenal, Manchester City and United had lost 23 matches between them. This season that figure stands at 37. Two of the top four from last season won’t be in it this time around and there has never been a Premier League season before where any of the top four didn’t finish in the top two of the subsequent season. Manchester City’s European Adventure aside, this has been a truly horrific season for the apparent elite. Incredibly, both United and Arsenal are expected to begin the new season with the same managers in charge.

Spurs however, do deserve credit for pushing them to this stage. In any other year the sight of the young Lillywhites snatching the title from their London rivals would be the stuff of fantasy itself. As it was, had they done it this year they would have faced the unfortunate ignominy of their greatest ever achievement forever being a footnote as the season Leicester almost won it. Spurs somewhat lost the plot last night; responding to losing a 2 goal lead by trying to start a 22 man brawl rather than attempting to just score another goal. But that shouldn’t detract from their own huge effort this season. They are a young, wonderfully talented team who will be back again next year to remind the bigger clubs what a belief in a genuine youth set up can actually achieve.

But this is the year of the Fox. And nothing should detract from that fact. This is a victory that should inspire children up and down the land to take up the game. That should inspire any player released from a club there is still hope. That should inspire any players of the lower leagues that it’s possible to achieve the impossible. It is an utterly, utterly extraordinary achievement of which their will likely be no repeat in our lifetimes.

Leicester City. Claudio Ranieri. I salute you. You have given us all something to remember for the rest of our lives. Now is the time to celebrate. Now is the time to party. Now is the spring of our contentment.

Nobody will ever, ever be able to take this away. Not even a fucking Tudor.

https://twitter.com/HinduMonkey