“The sport most of us fell in love with”: Why the Championship is gonna be alright for Leicester City fans
As we continue to adapt to Leicester City’s reinstatement as a Football League club, Jack Holmes has taken a good look around and doesn’t miss the big time one bit…
I don’t know about you, and you might not be ageing as quickly or as disgracefully as me, but I have a real problem with modern football.
The relentlessness of it all means you can’t escape a ‘BREAKING NEWS’ story, which is often guesswork based on someone making something up. Football has always been a serious topic, but we seem to have entered a new phase of relentless seriousness where we have to receive life advice from those closest to the game.
To quote sports blogger Richard Keys: ‘Have we lost our minds, guys?’
As City resurfaced this season, there’s been very little breaking news about us, and I’ve really, really enjoyed that. Fabrizio Romano isn’t really interested in us anymore, Brighton are the new Leicester, and now its Forest fans worrying about whether Harry Kane moving to Bayern means Brennan Johnson is going to Spurs rather than James Maddison or Harvey Barnes. Not being part of the Premier League has its perks.
Checking out
At the end of the season, I was pretty done with football, I thought I’d be more upset with going down given that I’m a terrible loser, but the truth is I was just done, and I needed a break. It culminated in the day after the season when I made a conscious choice to check out, I’d keep an eye on it and of course I’d be interested in where Maddison was going to go or who was replacing him, but I really wasn’t going to allow myself to be emotionally invested.
It helped that I had six weeks of Ashes cricket to distract myself and my Twitter account became a vehicle of either being rattled personally by the cricket or trying to rattle someone else in the spirit of cricket.
The start of the Championship season caught me a little by surprise. I barely watched a pre-season game nor paid much attention to the goings on. I turned up to the game on Sunday not having watched a single video of our new signing Stephy Mavididi, nor being able to spell or pronounce his name correctly.
The only thing I knew about our keeper was that he was meant to be good with his feet, and presumed Callum Doyle must be good because he had played for Manchester City once. It was the most ignorant I’d been to a Leicester City game in a long time and, potentially coincidentally, the first time I have enjoyed a game in a long time.
Often the more you know about something the more confused you’ll end up being. I knew one player in the opposition lineup but only because someone told me we might be signing him once. I’d not really even allowed myself to get too wound about the PR tour of Thailand, which was no mean feat. There were also many elements highlighted by Harry Gregory recently which made the whole experience more enjoyable, not least a late winner.
AMF
The point of this is so much of football now is what goes on off the pitch. Alex Crook tweeted yesterday that Thursday was the most seismic day of any transfer window he has ever covered…. who fucking cares?
Harry Kane going to Bayern Munich and Caicedo going to Liverpool is no different to what has happened for years, we only now have a side show of hundreds of people telling us what they are thinking at any given moment. It is relentless, it is boring and ‘it’s not for me Clive’.
When Brendan Rodgers talked about the cultural reset needed at the football club last summer, I imagine what he had in mind was Wilfred Ndidi becoming good at football again and Youri Tielemans caring. The truth is we didn’t get any of that last summer, but I wonder if our own cultural reset with the club is happening now.
The sideshow in the Championship is limited – the most rattled I've been is The Second Tier podcast claiming Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall could be the best player they have ever seen at this level…. Riyad says hi. More satisfyingly, I am not going to have to deal with Gabby Agbonlahor telling us Leicester are a small club, but he likes a player he’s watched once.
Such are the lengths we’ve reached that at one point in the summer, I became perplexed to see my Instagram feed tell me I only had one body and I needed to look after it. Sound advice no doubt, but I am still a little confused as to why it was Steve Parish telling me.
On the box
The start of the Premier League season means we are going to be relentlessly subjected to this nonsense with more fly-on-the-wall documentaries about plucky underdogs Newcastle. There was absolutely no way I was going to bring myself to watch Eddie Howe tell me that a glass of lemon juice upon waking, a high performance podcast and an oil state worth of funds was all you required to turn Newcastle into Champions League behemoths, but having now checked back into football I decided to give the new Burnley documentary a go.
I was greeted with dramatic drone footage of Burnley, and five middle-aged blokes playing football against each other. What a start, I thought, five friends who are going to tell us about their lifelong connection with the town and football club and what being back in the Premier League meant to them.
Hang on, it turns out these were the blokes that came over from America, riddled the club with debt and then gambled on returning to the Premier League at the first attempt. Lesson learned; off it went.
For now, all we are talking about with Leicester is the actual football itself and that is great. I could not really care what goes on off the pitch provided it doesn’t hinder my experience as a fan, and long may it continue that the narrative about Leicester City continues to be about 22 players playing football. I could be wrong and we are only a week into the season, but it seems to me that football is actually the major event at this level, and that’s the sport I think most of us fell in love with.
After a five-year stint at this level my enthusiasm may no doubt wane but for now, I am just going to enjoy it.
