Ritz to the rubble: Leicester City’s fresh fixture list is bringing back memories
For the first time in 10 years, Leicester City are preparing for a season in the Championship. It’s bringing back memories for Harry Gregory.
I have accepted it now. We are a second tier team. The NPower take me, and I’ll embrace you with your Don Goodman-commentating soundtrack. Gary Weaver will scream his pre-rehearsed ‘5000-1 they screamed in this city, 5-1 favourites on opening day’. Cut to a bouncing away end full of Coventry fans while the Sky cameras zoom in on glum faces across the King Power Stadium.
Embracing the affliction
Big boy pants on. Nappies of the post-season analysis off. The bloated excess days of the Premier League are over. Put the champagne aside. In fact, forget the Forest-stocked Madri. It’s Carling Black Label now. Us fans will be on the coalface of the stands. We have Jimmy Hill-sized chins to take it on. We suffer from the affliction which will see us endure a Thursday 11.15am kick-off as Sky’s fifth afterthought on the television schedule.
Time to read up on other teams’ squads. If only to say to your neighbour: number 7 for them is a decent player. Time to suck it up and look at those train connections or roads less travelled recently. Flick through those fixtures and get ready. And yes, what’s the channel number for ITV4? The highlights are on at 9.
At this point during summer, my forecasting side sees a rough opening start until it gets better. Ultimately that’s why I think it’s important that Enzo Maresca makes a connection with the fans. As others have mentioned, the manager at Leicester City is the most notable figure who faces media questions and scrutiny. Persons of other importance choose, despite invitation, to stay in the shadows.
If we feel as though we have a team which displays fight and workrate, the likely poorer results will be patiently accepted. By December, everyone from fans to players and coaches should be aware of what’s needed to succeed in this division.
You could argue the Foxes will find it all too easy. Burnley managed to pull it off at the first time of asking despite a substantial turnover in players last season.
Of our 23 opponents this coming season, we played 13 during our 9-season stint in the Premier League. Incredibly, of the remaining bunch, only Birmingham City have remained in the second tier throughout that period. Sunderland even played us in the top flight, double dipped into League One and now find themselves back with us. Coventry and Plymouth were recent members of League Two.
Memory lane
We’ve played every member of this division in living memory. The cogs of my mind have been pickled by the excesses of those trips abroad and the metropolitan delights playing regularly in London. If I cast back through all that rubble of my living memory, I can find the mad, sad and good moments of these fixtures before.
The opening fixture against Coventry City brought one immediate memory of a similar occurrence. Sven-Goran Eriksson’s transfer splash saw fifteen players arrive at the King Power Stadium over the summer of 2011. Pre-season had involved trips to Stockholm and Austria before accumulating in a showcase friendly at home to Real Madrid. The hype machine was in full flow. Big-Spending Leicester City.
I was recovering from an operation on a fractured wrist and had to endure Fox Travel for the journey down the M69. Despite our normal abilities of performing poorly away at anything more intense than a casual Sunday morning walk around the park, trips to Coventry have cashed points. This proved the case again, despite Darius Vassell's early red card. Lee Peltier’s stooping header gave us the lead to send the away end into raptures. Once dropped off back in Leicester, we strolled to Soar Point to find most of the coaching team there having a drink while we predicted we’d be promoted by March. We lost our next two games and it was apparent the big spenders were not that good.
Trips to Huddersfield have been fruitful too. Knockaert’s scorpion kick. Gary Taylor-Fletcher sealing an end of season dead rubber with Nigel Pearson embracing those invading the pitch afterwards. Ben Hamer’s questionable performance for The Terriers as we strolled to a 4-1 win in the early days of Rodgersball.
For me though, it’s another moment. Huddersfield is a fine town for pubs. But I hadn’t had a drop of alcohol when Lloyd Dyer’s chip seemed to touch the atmospheric barrier and take an age before eventually sailing over the home keeper’s head in a 3-2 victory in League One.
If we really want to get into the grubbiness of who we used to be, Cardiff City were a pain in the proverbial backside weren’t they? You could argue they set the early blueprint for shithousery. Chopra, Bothroyd, Chris Burke, Joe Ledley. Peter Whittingham, who sadly passed away recently, moving the ball ten yards before scoring a free-kick in the first leg. He was the Championship player. Those play-off semi-finals you could position as the start of the ascent to glory, but they didn’t half sting at the time.
On August Bank Holiday weekend, the New York Stadium will become the third Rotherham ground where we’ve seen Leicester play. Further back than Jeff Schlupp and his hat-trick at the Don Valley, I cast my mind back to a day in April 2003 when we could have won promotion.
Millmoor was an utter wreck of a ground ironically owned by a scaffolding tycoon. What I remember most of all wasn’t the late Trevor Benjamin equaliser. It was the warm pork pie that my dad tried to consume before kick-off which, when squeezed, poured off liquid fat. It was, as a fifteen-year-old, that I had the dubious pleasure of standing next to Bernie for first ten minutes. It was walking down the exit alley from the away end avoiding a huge pile of horse dung that the police had left in the middle of it.
We finish before our first international break with the visit of Hull. Personally, the worst spell watching Leicester was those seasons of purgatory between 2004 and 2008. For a couple of seasons, we had this routine of being mindnumbingly terrible and then finding some form in February to get out of it all. One of those relegation flirtation avoidance games would be anything but dull.
In March 2006, Peter Taylor made his first return to Leicester since his terrible managerial spell at Filbert Street came to an end. Hull City were upstarts from the divisions below but step forward Joey Gudjonsson. A cult hero for the season when the only other player we admired used to run around aimlessly and had a ‘chant’ which sounded like you were booing.
On a pitch like a cabbage patch, Gudjonsson launched an effort from the halfway line which sailed over Boaz Myhill’s head to make it 2-1 to us. The drama wasn’t done there. Hull equalised. But Gudjonsson would have the final say with another long-ranger. For one afternoon we had drama rather than Alan Maybury punting the ball into the channel. The Icelandic hardnut didn’t hang around - he left on a free to AZ Alkmaar in the summer. Now he's Iceland's assistant manager.
Our season then bounces into the more recent opponents of Southampton and Norwich City. It starts to take a more normal tone. There’s no doubting that the forthcoming campaign will be very much a success or a failure. It’s difficult to see a middle ground.
The bright lights of the Championship could prove to be the best season the supporters have had in a long time by being slightly detached from the constant news cycle produced by the top flight. Equally, not to be considering the Premier League 2024/25 season as some kind of revenge tour would be slightly gutting.
Whatever happens, there's no way it can be boring.
