We’ll be fine: Why Leicester City fans are waiting for reassurance
Leicester City have been in Thailand for less than a week, but it feels like longer. Just a few more days until our football club is plunged back into reality.
The monsoon season put paid to the friendly game against Tottenham. Meanwhile, back home we’ve been subjected to another relentless barrage as the LCFC PR machine goes into overdrive.
There have been some comic moments to quell the sense of unease surrounding the fanbase. The Spursy debacle was a highlight. The nonplussed expression on a child’s face while posing for a photo with Gerry Taggart. The incredibly dull Chang beer event press release that had everybody pining for Everards.
The answer, of course, is to try to pretend not to care. Perhaps we should all be stowed away in storage for a few weeks while our football club does its dirty business and fulfils contractual obligations in a faraway land. But the itch is still there, so we agitate away until a time in the future when we’ll feel reassured things are on track.
The problem is that so many of us crave our football club. We are drawn to it by some magnetic force. I’ve lost count of the number of times recently when I’ve been enjoying some entirely non-football-related activity only to be tempted into a quick check of the phone to see if we’ve signed a winger yet. It’s an affliction.
And in its purest sense, that affliction feels like a deep-seated need for all to be well with our football club, and for it to need its supporters too.
Watching brief
At the bottom of the hierarchy of needs of the typical football fan is probably the mere ability to watch their team take to the pitch. That’s where the underlying agitation among a section of our fanbase has originated: our pre-season so far has consisted of one game we could watch either in person or online, three games held behind closed doors without any access at all, a game cancelled due to prodigious rainfall and another cancelled before it was even announced.
So our anticipation for the new season is based entirely on 90 minutes in Northampton. Speaking as someone who’s lived in Northampton for nearly 40 years, that’s a shaky foundation on which to base any kind of optimism.
This isn’t about blaming the club for the pre-season tour, the monsoon season or even the lack of UK-based games with fans allowed in. It’s more just the basic fact that we are trying to buy into the exciting prospect of this revolution in footballing style and philosophy but we haven’t been able to see very much of it yet.
Some of us are also starting to worry how much of it we’ll see even once the competitive games begin. And that’s not just a Leicester City problem. Football has wrapped itself in knots trying to become the ultimate television product and forgotten to find a way for non-travelling fans to watch every game.
You may have bumped into your own friends and family as they, like you, wandered zombie-like around the labyrinth of trying to work out exactly which non-televised games would be available to watch on Filbert Viewer or whatever it’s called.
At least the best approach to the question of how we’ll be able to watch games is the same as the question of which players we’ll be watching - best to just wait until the season starts and try to figure it out then.
In the meantime, there are other ways this bottled tension of waiting to see our team in action can be released. A new signing or two in the creative attacking areas of the pitch would do the trick. Beating Port FC by more than one goal would have helped too. The other outlet comes in response to the club’s social media output. To the comments and replies sections! A splendid opportunity to let off some steam.
Title tilt
I have a vision in mind of what this time of year should ideally look like for Leicester City, and there have been times when that vision has blended seamlessly with reality.
The arrival of Enzo Maresca: a genuine revolution that the vast majority of fans are buying into. The signings of Conor Coady and Harry Winks: sensible and decisive transfer business that brought much-needed leadership into the playing staff. The sales of James Maddison and Harvey Barnes: necessary outgoings that didn’t become overly rancorous.
But it doesn’t take much for everything to tilt off its axis and before long you’re peering around at what’s left to build a team from.
We have five goalkeepers but, frustratingly, can still only play one. We have five of the best full-backs in the league and we’re setting up to play a formation that only really plays one. Three of the best strikers in the league - and we’ll be playing one. Meanwhile, we have zero creativity or width, Seagrave’s already put its curse on Conor Coady and we still have a bunch of deeply unpopular and overpaid players we can’t seem to shift.
The new season starts in ten days.
And it feels to the outside observer that everything ground to a halt when the entire club upped sticks to Thailand for endless Taggart tales and tuktuk tours. It’s no wonder the whole endeavour has caused discomfort among supporters for whom the ideal vision right now would look more like friendlies against League One and Two sides, getting rid of one or two players even if we don’t get the full asking price and signing someone, anyone, who might create chances on a regular basis.
Getting mashed by Liverpool in Singapore probably doesn’t appear on that list but at this point we’d probably all take Man in Blue Shirt Seen Kicking Ball as a positive headline.
These concerns are nagging away but it’s important to remember pre-season is always like this. The doubts will pass soon enough.
The real thing is ever so close now. Just a few more days. Then the PR machine can close down, our football club returns to us and we’ll sign a winger or two.
Don’t worry.
As a famous prophet once said, we’ll be fine.
