Leicester City have nine fences to clear - and one wall to climb
And now we face the final nine games… Harry Gregory pushes through the crowd and gets a good view of the approaching riders as they head towards the finishing line.
The season is a marathon not a sprint, they say. A rather apt summary of this season’s edition of the EFL Championship. A Grand National of injuries, obstacles, financial pressure.
In late March, we find ourselves heading into the final lap. The royal blue clad rider looks shattered. It barely stretched its legs over the Sunderland and Hull obstacle. While the white and yellow suited competitor is going at some speed and the tractor-emblazoned rider has kept this steady pace, never letting the leaders get clear.
9 jumps to go. The finish is in sight. Screams from the crowd to hurry up. The Merry Miller has unseated its rider and doesn’t appear to care. The rest of the pack are getting ready for their gallops to their targets. In a moment, every competitor is going to crack their whip, the gallop picks up and the gaps appear in the field. 35 days. 9 games.
The Royal Blue has hit the wall. As described in the excellent Netflix series Tour De France Unchained, the wall is an inevitable circumstance of long-distance endurance. You are going to hit it and it’s how you react which defines your success. A team manager on the documentary says that the wall is two parts. The first part is mental. It’s about sucking everything up and telling your brain you can do this. Welcome Leicester City to the wall. How are you going to react?
We went off at a terrific pace. Enough to make the commentators scream ‘this is world record pace’. In fact, the Royal Blue horse was cartwheeling over the fences. Peacock White was left stuck in the mud. The Tractor was pinging off fences in a deflected manner straight from the boosts in Mario Kart.
A lot has been spoken about grit, or rather the lack of, shown by Leicester City in recent months. The disappointment from me has been that the gutting results and late goals should be a lesson to learn from. Yet we don’t. Maybe we’d learn our lesson at Wednesday. Or maybe at Coventry. Or maybe at Leeds.
We haven’t. Equally though, we appear short of personality. The last month has involved games waiting for performances. Waiting for the wingers to shake off their poor spell. Dewsbury-Hall to become the Duracell bunny. Winks to break the lines. Enzo has kept faith in his preferred players, determined by injuries sadly. A 37-year-old Jamie Vardy has managed to stand up and drag us to a result. But few players are standing up to mould a game in their own control.
In the analogy of the Grand National, we’ve just had a two-pound handicap dropped on our neck of the likely penalties associated with FFP. Now kick, Leicester.
To the second half of the wall. Once you’ve beaten your brain telling you no, there are two options. Either the strength of your body is conditioned to take you towards the finish line or after the initial kick, you slowly fade away. Sink or swim. It’s about the body rather than the mind now. It’s a question of if the reserves are there.
That’s the great disappointment of the season. We’ve made the season about mentality and physicality. With our resources, our quality should have been so high and defined that the race was all but done. Those chasers pop at the intensity of our quality and consistency.
We’ve double downed on this too. The recent behaviour is akin to play chicken – you can’t catch us, we aren’t in your rules. Now Leicester City must be Roadrunner and make the leagues look like Wile E Coyote. The gamble of not being in the EFL next season makes me uneasy. For once, I have sympathy with the players. You aren’t just adding the pressure of performance but the short-term future of the club. Placing a level of trust into a set of players who have bent under difficult situations before.
The race is now a sprint finish. Is it going to be enjoyable? I hope so but I don’t think it will. The Easter weekend is often a landmark point. Sky Sports has taken full advantage of the schedule to shed your nerves on Good Friday and Easter Monday. A lunchtime kick-off for Leicester followed by Ipswich and Leeds in that order on both days.
It brings back memories of last May bank holiday where we disintegrated at Craven Cottage within 45 minutes. Then Everton and Forest both pulled out results to make the scenario even worse. A pressure cooker. Even harder when you are out of breath. I fully suspect that’s occurring for all of us over the next few weeks.
