Leicester City 2 West Ham United 1: The final curtain
It’s over. This season. Leicester City’s nine-year stay in the Premier League. The Fosse Way’s first campaign. To round off our matchday features, TFW newcomer Adam Hodges sums things up while James Knight and David Bevan decided to take a look at the differing experiences on screen and in the stadium as our club slipped out of the big time.
AH: Belief. Determination. Willingness to win. That’s what we have wanted the players to strive for all season: a season of false dawns, underachievement and disbelief that saw us going into the last day of the season needing to win and hoping others didn’t do the same.
We wondered which Leicester City team would turn up against West Ham and it was a joy to see a team not scared of their own shadows and being confident on the ball, yet it left a feeling of frustration as to why they couldn’t perform like this sooner in the season - even sooner this month when they were dismantled by Fulham.
The first half had so many bright sparks with Kelechi Iheanacho linking up well with the midfield, striking the bar with a fine effort before a lovely one-two with Harvey Barnes brought the opener. The players had one job to do and, come half time, they were defying the odds with safety on the horizon as it remained goalless at Goodison Park.
However, the blue half of Liverpool were also hungry for the win and Abdoulaye Doucouré’s strike for Everton 12 minutes into the second half burst the bubble of optimism at the King Power. Wout Faes connected with Youri Tielemans’s dead ball delivery to double City’s lead, but the Bournemouth goal we needed never came.
The final whistle sounded at the King Power and the players crowded round Victor Kristiansen’s phone watching the dying moments of Leicester’s most recent stay in the Premier League which has brought so much success.
The performance was there but it was too little too late. Everton stay up and we are down – not something I would have predicted when I watched us take the Toffees apart at Goodison last Bonfire Night. The Championship awaits and it remains to be seen who will be crossing the white line and, indeed, giving instructions from the touchline come August. A campaign when we hope consistency and belief make a return.
JK: I live in London and spent the morning wandering around a city awash with football fans embarking on trips around the country. Kings Cross was like the point at which our different destinies intertwined before spiralling off in different directions. Stockport fans heading to Wembley disappointment, Leeds shirts staring helplessly at screens informing them of failures of the electricity supply at Newark, Newcastle supporters in high spirits on their way to Stamford Bridge, detouring to lock dissident journalists into the Turkish embassy.
I scowled at the couple of Everton fans I passed, perhaps heading to Liverpool via Euston, or maybe like me, forced to watch from afar. Then I headed home to see our destiny unfold on Sky.
Watching final day drama from home is like being handed the ability to inject live updates into your eyeballs. You can set up multiple screens, you can spend the whole game refreshing Twitter, you can know everything, all the time.
But it’s also a strange experience. The fog of war can be a good thing if it helps give you hope. In the first half, I could focus completely on our game. It was all that mattered until we took the lead. As soon as we did, from the sort of attacking football that has no business being played in a team that’s going down, my attention was dragged elsewhere. Suddenly, we had something to lose, and I was left incessantly flicking and scrolling, desperate for no news but fearing the worst.
Instant access to the facts means that you don’t even get to enjoy the brief moments of jubilation that followed the three separate reports of a Bournemouth goal. Instead, you get to watch the joyous celebrations of others, to watch Abdoulaye Doucoure hammer past a reserve goalkeeper who doesn’t even dive in near real-time.
The hope died for me at that moment. The final third of the final weekend of the season played out to the tune of endless channel hopping as I knew in my heart of hearts that it was over. After about 70 minutes, I spent a long spell flicking back and forth the two games, during which time literally zero football was played at Goodison. Every time I cut back, I saw the same image of Jordan Pickford receiving treatment, followed by replays of Yerry Mina seeming to bite Dominic Solanke in a bizarre incident for which he was, of course, not punished by the VAR.
For a long time, I couldn’t fully commit to watching the Everton game. After they’d gone ahead, it was clearly the only one that mattered. But it felt like a betrayal of my own team in their hour of need. The same impulse that forces me to stay to the bitter end, to keep watching even when all hope is lost, made me stick with the game at the King Power, even as the two sets of players knocked it around in a funereal atmosphere.
I also had visions of celebrating an unlikely Bournemouth equaliser only to discover that we’d collapsed in a heap at home. This fear increased still further when Pablo Fornals – who doesn’t score against anyone else – pulled a goal back for the Hammers.
I finally did switch over for good as the clock ticked into injury time. The first thing I saw from Goodison was ten minutes flash up on the fourth officials board. A ripple of tension ran around the ground. The second thing I saw was Bournemouth getting penalised for a foul throw. In that moment, we were living vicariously through the Cherries, and they summed up our season for us.
At the full time whistle I received an influx of messages from other fans, mostly supportive, but the truth is that this has been coming for so long that we burned out our anger and frustration months ago. By the end of the game the nerves that I felt at 1-0 up today had long given way to resigned acceptance as the final minutes played out, just as the fury of Southampton, Brighton, Spurs, Southampton again, Blackburn, Bournemouth, and Fulham had long since been replaced by empty disappointment.
The supporters’ role is to back the team on days like this, so there were no protests and none of the outpouring of ire we’ve seen in the weeks and months that led us here. Today was the first time the fan base felt united all year. Over the summer, we need to channel the fury of the weeks and months that lead us here once again, to force the change that has to come.
Right now, I’m just glad it’s over. This season has been a largely dreadful experience, almost bereft of excitement. The 40 minutes or so between Harvey Barnes’ opener and Doucoure’s goal was arguably the best bit of the season. That is what we’ve somehow, inexplicably been reduced to. The result of a season that started with horrible vibes and barely improved from there.
DB: I’ve been building a fortress around myself for the past few weeks, partly out of necessity to ensure I wasn’t too floored by our inevitable relegation. But also because it was so obviously going to happen, it didn’t feel worth getting worked up about.
So yesterday felt like a huge emotional void for me, when I’d been a nervous wreck on FA Cup final day and during the successive chases for a Champions League place.
I’m not sure what this is. Age? Perspective? Resignation? There’s something going on here that I’m not used to, but it all feels very mature. And sensible. And wrong.
Not everybody will be on the same page. This will hurt like hell for a lot of people. The scenes when the final whistle in the Everton game confirmed our relegation summed up the split in the fanbase. On one side, people applauding the players off and mentally preparing their “it’s been a great ride” tweets. On the other, those booing ahead of a night of raging on social media. And in the middle, me. Silent. Not really thinking anything.
My emotions disappeared in the aftermath of our home game against Everton. Although my season ticket is close to the back row, I was pitchside that night. I could see the looks of confusion and terror on our players’ faces when it rapidly became clear they were in for a physical battle of epic proportions. They weren’t up for it. Everton celebrated their point on Filbert Way with their travelling fans despite arguably deserving all three, knowing they’d picked up a bit of momentum from nowhere.
Within minutes of the following game, we were two down at Fulham and ended up conceding five. Within another couple of hours, Everton had struck five of their own at Brighton and that afternoon now feels pivotal - but those two results stemmed from the sense of shifting sands in the earlier game between the two sides.
Resignation helps. Maybe it also helps that we’ve completed football already, so what real difference does it make which league we’re in from now on? I’ve never had any interest in who our opposition is. The only thing I’ll really miss is the chance of getting into Europe and those unforgettable trips abroad following my football club. But we were so far away from that by the end, it seems a moot point.
Ah yes, the game itself. Of course our team would stick two fingers up at us one way or the other. Either by showing us how we knew they were perfectly capable of playing all along, or by not trying. We got the former and it quickly felt like such a waste that this set of players have somehow contrived to finish below Everton, Forest, Bournemouth and the like.
In one last puff of YOLO, I bought a transistor radio from Argos for £9.99 a couple of days ago. I thought I’d want to know what our score meant. But when the game kicked off, all I actually wanted was to concentrate on how we were doing.
So the radio went away until much later. The Harvey Barnes goal was wonderful and I appreciated the chance to properly celebrate a goal without caring yet about what was happening at Goodison Park.
Then we had the first of a few flurries of false information originating in the south-east corner of the stadium about a non-existent Bournemouth goal. The radio stayed off.
Then Everton did score and it was the West Ham fans who let us know, quickly erupting in joy at our imminent demise.
Eventually the radio came out but it summed up the season when all I heard was a continuous crackle. I’d bought cheaply and it hadn’t worked. I’ll be holding my end-of-purchase review later today and may well exonerate myself entirely seeing as, despite it being my responsibility, I’m the one doing the review. I began to wonder if it would feel cathartic to smash it to bits with a hammer when I got home. What I didn’t begin to wonder at any stage is whether Bournemouth would equalise. It was never going to happen.
With relegation confirmed, the players gathered in the middle of the pitch and looked unsure of what to do. It was a fitting way to end the season. It looked like James Maddison was trying to cajole them into walking round the perimeter and facing the applause and the boos. There was a reluctant wander round in the end.
My own wander back to the car felt suitably apocalyptic: a man yells at a car; sirens blare in every direction; a bunch of blokes converge on a supermarket car park to try to punch each other because they’re from different parts of the country.
I watched from afar for a few seconds before continuing on through Nelson Mandela Park behind a small group of West Ham fans talking about their upcoming trip to Prague.
Sounds nice, but it’s no Plymouth.
What’s the phrase? We go again?
