Kasper Schmeichel: A Leicester City legend departs
When you support a football club, you basically want the players who pull on the shirt and run out onto the pitch each weekend to be as reliable as possible.
That’s one thing I remember most about the 2015/16 season, certainly in the nerve-jangling final weeks: seeing the team news an hour before kickoff and not only knowing what the team would be but having complete faith in all eleven players.
Now imagine not only knowing one name but having complete faith in one player for eleven years.
That’s one of the highest tributes I can pay Kasper Schmeichel as he prepares for a new challenge on the south coast of France with OGC Nice.
Mentality and ambition
It takes a lot for me to trust a Leicester City player - it feels like so many have let me down in the past. Schmeichel so rarely did.
Like many fans, I had the odd gripe. But they pale into insignificance when I think about Schmeichel’s influence on the club in so many ways.
His winning mentality and burning ambition was clear from the start of his time at Leicester City - and it’s obvious where it came from initially.
“In the early years, it did mould me a lot,” Schmeichel told the BBC last year, when asked what it was like to grow up around Manchester United’s legendary team in the 1990s. “As a kid, I wanted to be a professional football player without really knowing what that entails, but there’s no question being around those kind of people, I learned so much and I was absorbing all the time.”
When we signed him, we had no idea he would emulate even a small amount of the success that Manchester United side enjoyed, that he would win the kind of trophies they won. We were told, unforgettably, by many Leeds United fans that he wasn’t that good.
We’ve probably got enough value out of that £1million - a fittingly early 1990s fee - even if we’ve largely recouped it in selling the 35-year-old after more than a decade.
My favourite save
The main thing I’m reflecting on as Schmeichel’s time with Leicester City comes to a close is that feeling of having resigned myself to seeing our net bulge, the opposition striker wheeling away, the other team’s fans celebrating wildly, only for a huge Danish hand to seemingly come from nowhere to tip the ball away.
That contortion in a home game against Blackburn way before the glory years in the Premier League will stay with me. The leap to deny Ruben Neves from distance. But most of all, of course, the one that won us the FA Cup.
Goalkeepers can’t really win games single-handed. Someone’s got to go up the other end and score (even if Kasper did actually do that, once, not that the record books show it). But that save from Mason Mount at Wembley last May felt as close to a goal as a goalkeeper will get while standing between their own posts. A truly remarkable feat of athleticism and probably my favourite save of all time.
Nice to have known you…
That’s the kind of moment that makes me realise I’m happy for him. It seems like such a great move, getting a three-year contract in the south of France. I hope it works out for him in a way I rarely do when good players leave Leicester. He’s earned that goodwill and more.
Another example of why Kasper Schmeichel was so good for us is the sense of foreboding at how much we’ll miss him. The club isn’t really as ready for his departure as it could be, given his age and the intimation last season that he was interested in another challenge before hanging up his gloves. The blow of his departure would have been softened with a reliable replacement. They are big gloves to fill.
How players leave your football club is important. Some can publicly angle for a move away. Some can do it behind the scenes, not that anything’s truly behind the scenes these days. And some can leave before they’ve really achieved anything.
Kasper Schmeichel achieved it all with Leicester City. He may not have been at his very best last season but it wasn’t the sort of huge decline some have suggested. He certainly leaves as a Leicester City legend.
We’ve had some great goalkeepers in our history. To stand alongside Banks and Shilton takes some doing. Given his longevity, his achievements and his influence, there’s a strong argument Kasper Schmeichel was the greatest of them all.