Leicester City P-P Tottenham Hotspur: Everyone loses
Leicester City’s pre-season trip to Thailand and Singapore seemed ill-judged even before unforeseen circumstances saw a bit of rain arrive during monsoon season to put the dampener on a meeting with Tottenham.
Rejoice, because Leicester City have found an exciting new way to lose a vital game: for it not to take place at all.
We’d all become accustomed to Leicester losing games last season. But to lose 90 minutes from a pre-season that already looked light? Frankly, it slams the brakes on the current optimism surrounding the Enzo Maresca revolution. It brings the focus back to off-field decisions that affect on-field fortunes. And it feels like another completely unavoidable own goal.
On the bright side, at least we got a laugh out of the surreal sight of the penalty area being re-painted after the lines were washed away by the rain. And we thought Newcastle were the leading sportswashers.
Wise before the event
Is this an overreaction? After all, nobody remembers what happens in pre-season unless it’s an absolute disaster - so we can only judge just how ridiculous this will look once the season begins.
What we must remember is that we, the fans, are the idiots, and the people that make decisions at our football club are the geniuses. So they know what they’re doing and we are ungrateful oiks for questioning things.
Things like: was it possible to imagine a game being called off during the height of Thailand’s monsoon season? Things like: could we make the most of our £100million training base to prepare for the new season? Things like: should we be maximising our chances of success by preparing sensibly for a chastening, gruelling, defining season rather than chasing money?
These were the kind of questions floating around a fanbase sitting at home watching on laptops as Matty Fryatt ruminated about Harry Kane’s career and the rain lashed down on row upon row of empty seats at the Rajamangala National Stadium.
But this wasn’t just being wise after the event. There were very few Leicester fans who thought it was a good idea to be touring Thailand and Singapore in the days leading up to the Championship’s big kickoff (see item 76 on this comprehensive list of ridiculous things, published two months ago).
Hopefully this is the epilogue to the story of last season - a poorly-planned pre-season conceived by a complacent boardroom that refused to countenance relegation. And we can swiftly put it behind us.
Fail to prepare…
How do you prepare for a Championship promotion race? Let’s rewind ten years to remind ourselves how Nigel Pearson’s Leicester City side were readied to rally after a harrowing play-off semi-final defeat.
There were some underwhelming results in pre-season that summer - a goalless draw at York and defeat at Northampton either side of losing 3-0 at home to Monaco in the prestige friendly of the summer.
But by the time Radamel Falcao, a Monaco goalscorer that day, returned with Manchester United a year later, Leicester City were a different proposition.
The results didn’t matter. The fitness did. Now Leicester are playing catch-up and as a result, most supporters are feeling somewhere between frustrated and infuriated.
The fan experience
The recent announcement of the forthcoming open training session back on home soil seemed like a tilt in the right direction. It suggested the club were responding to concerns that local supporters are being left behind in the pursuit of some kind of global prestige. Global prestige that would make sense if we had the onfield status to merit it.
We’ve already spent time cataloguing what it’s felt like recently to be a Leicester City fan. Now people are even questioning the authenticity of some Leicester City fans, with unsubstantiated claims that those decked out in blue welcoming our players to Thailand are employees of King Power or are being paid for their mere presence.
While there must be some genuine Leicester supporters in Thailand, those claims of artificial inflation gained a bit more plausibility for those of us who wasted 45 minutes of our lives staring at a laptop screen waiting for a match that would never happen.
Because the stadium was mostly empty, and the cameras seemed to find an awful lot more people in Spurs gear than anyone as invested in Leicester City’s fortunes as us idiots sitting at home.
Meanwhile, we were left wondering whether this farce was a minor blip in the revival of our beloved football club, or another staging post in its gradual descent into comedy status.
