5,000 to PR1: Leicester City’s promotion party rolls into Preston
Set the satnavs to PR1. We’re all off to Preston, by road and rail and whatever will get us there. More than 5,000 of us will enjoy one last glimpse of a proper football ground before we return to the Premier League.
And now we know what it means, after Ipswich were pegged back three times at Hull on Saturday night and made the maths the simplest they’ve been all season - win one of our last two games and Leicester City are champions again.
This is my favourite type of game, the dual truths of there being little to play for and everything to play for. The pressure off and still the opportunity for glory.
This season has toyed with the emotions almost as much as any Leicester City season. Desire has stretched elastically from smashing the record points total to merely getting over the line and back to winning the title with 100 points. That last alteration has come in the past week.
The positive turnaround in fortunes over a short space of time reminded me a little of the situation fifteen years ago, another point in the club’s history when we didn’t feel we belonged in the division we were leading.
We’re all going on a League One tour
Easter 2009. It was a very good Friday when Peterborough, who could have gone top with victory, conceded an equaliser at home to our relegation-bound, conga-loving friends from Cheltenham.
The following day, we were all off to Hereford, the travelling Blue Army arriving over hills that resembled the opening titles of Postman Pat to the kind of place you don’t get to visit in the Premier League. A wonderful place. It was beer garden weather, this being in the distant past before Matt Le Tissier exposed the government’s decision to bring back April showers.
It was a perfect football ground too. Edgar Street, with its tiny two-tier stand running along one touchline giving unparalleled views of Max Gradel flicking the ball over a defender and collecting it on the other side. That day epitomised the League One tour, ticking off new grounds and falling in love with a new Leicester.
Two days later it was Leeds, which in those days meant Luciano Becchio, Robert Snodgrass and the 2009 version of Archie Gray, a young local called Fabian Delph. Steve Howard’s header. Nigel Pearson’s neck muscles. Pandemonium and the cusp of promotion.
That evening, Millwall’s victory over Peterborough brought us even closer to a title we’d secure at Southend the following Saturday. Leeds crumbled and lost in the play-off semi-finals, unable to turn over a deficit from a feverish first leg at The Den.
Millwall themselves lost in the final and it was 6th-placed Scunthorpe, who’d finished 20 points behind the flying Foxes, that went up. Perhaps a good omen for Norwich, West Brom or Hull this season.
Time for heroes
As in 2009, the past week has felt like a good team confirming they’re the best in the league. At Deepdale, after a few months of nerves and bad results causing me to doubt them, I’ll appreciate the chance to thank them and to make some acknowledgements.
The stumbles from Leeds, Ipswich and Southampton in recent weeks have been a reminder that this is a long, gruelling league to go and win. Enzo Maresca has been right all along that we were somehow overperforming with our early results, that he trusted the players to see us over the line and, despite all the misgivings, that his way would prevail.
There are individuals that I’ve doubted this season who have been lauded elsewhere as being among the best players in the division. From those, I’d pick out Stephy Mavididi and Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall. It was easy to say, during Southampton’s long unbeaten run and Leeds’s long winning run, that they had better or more reliable players in those positions.
It’s only right to revisit those concerns now that both of those teams have blown up at the worst possible time, with key contributions like Mavididi’s goals against Norwich and Birmingham, and Dewsbury-Hall’s through ball for Fatawu setting the tone against Southampton, proving crucial.
One last rustle?
And then there’s Jamie Vardy. Again, there were certain games when it looked like a season too far for our greatest ever player. When it looked like he would cost us rather than supercharge us as he always had in the past. Leeds at home, when he was struggling with the demand to drop deep; Bristol City and those missed chances; Millwall, where he barely touched the ball.
You can just never doubt the man. Vardy has come roaring back to life in the past couple of games and will end the season with another magnificent goal return for the minutes he’s played. I’m not sure how you rustle a bunch of mid-table Preston North End fans, but 5,000 of us will be desperate to see it again in the flesh tonight.
Mouth that Stanley Matthews was better than Tom Finney? Do an impression of a Blackpool donkey? Point triumphantly to his own south end? Whatever it is, we’ll be there for it.
At first, I wasn’t going to be there for it. My Carlisle-and-Plymouth-away-without-a-moment’s-thought days are behind me but walking past the Robert Peel after last Tuesday’s game I had this sudden knowledge that I needed to be at Deepdale, work in the morning or not. I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. With a salute to those who have made it to every game this season, see you there.
It may be an all-time great Leicester City night, where someone pops up to be this year’s Lloyd Dyer and smashes one in from the edge of the box late on to turn Saturday into a title party from the start. It may be that the M6 leads to a dead end at Preston, with the bigger numbers dialling the atmosphere down.
Either way, at least the nerves have gone now. Scarves out the window, tickertape at the ready.
