Invitation to rant: The great delusion of Leicester City’s leaders
This week we’ve dispensed with the usual questions and asked our writers to let rip with their rants instead. James Knight has been flexing his knuckles and waiting for this all year.
I've been trying to put my finger on why this season has annoyed me so much. Is this just what a relegation season feels like, and it's been a while? Are all the bottom half stinkers going through the same experience? Is it a sign that we've become everything we hate about the entitlement of the Premier League?
It’s none of those things. It’s not even about the relegation. If we finish 17th on the final day, I’ll still be infuriated. Because the problem is the way the club has spent the whole season telling us that up is down, left is right, and losing to the worst team in the league is a sign that everything’s about to come good.
I can take losing, but I hate being treated like an idiot. You can make mistakes, but don’t try to hide them by claiming that what I can see with my own eyes is wrong. Don’t act like this interminable season was inevitable. Don’t act like there was nothing you could have done to prevent it. And stop lashing out at the fans who are the only people left who seem to care about what’s going on.
I feel like I’ve spent nine months, perhaps longer, trying to grab the club by the scruff of the neck and shake it: do you understand what’s happening here? A season watching from the side of the road as the car crawls towards a cliff edge. Then you peer inside to see the occupants are popping champagne corks and patting each other on the back.
Dean Smith’s reaction to the Fulham defeat was the latest absurd statement to grace Leicester City’s Upside-Down Land. It's one thing to lose every week, it's quite another to know you're going to lose every week, spend the days leading up to it hearing about how brilliant our mentality is, only to lose in the exact same way you've lost every other game and discover it caught the club completely unawares.
“I’m disappointed because I didn’t see that coming. We’ve had a good week in training with a good attitude and good application and good quality. I expected a far better performance and a far better start than we got.”
Smith’s shock at the scale of our first half capitulation should be grounds for instant dismissal. It's not even the first time we've been three down at half time since you got the job, mate. We've conceded the first goal 17 times in 18 games. What are you talking about?
What’s more, it’s exactly the sort of nonsense Brendan Rodgers has been saying all season. You can defend anything by simply pointing to the training ground. You, a stupid person, wouldn’t understand why me, a clever person, is making all these brilliant decisions because you can’t see what’s really going on.
So, we’re great in training, the mood in the camp is amazing, Caglar Soyuncu is dreadful, Papy Mendy should never play, Danny Ward is the best ‘keeper in the division. It’s true, I saw it on the training ground.
I thought, briefly, that Smith would come in as a breath of fresh air and deliver some home truths to a club in dire need of them. Instead, he’s just become part of the problem. In the same post-match interview, he described how he’d had to tell the team they are, in fact, a bit rubbish.
“I have to tell them that people keep saying they’re good players and they’re a good team, but we’ve lost too many games already this season. So they have to be aware of the facts and they have to perform better than they did today.”
Why wasn't that mild rebuke the FIRST thing Smith said to the team when he arrived? Why have we let 35 matches slip by before staring those facts in the face? Hasn't Smith been watching the games? And the answer to that is, of course, no, because he had been at the Masters in Augusta the week before he got the job. We quite literally appointed a man off the golf course.
I would find it all less annoying if we were a complete basket case. If James Maddison went on strike, if there were rumours of punch ups in the dressing room after defeats, if the manager was strangling opposition players on the sideline and telling his own fans to f-off and die. If there was, in essence, literally a single sign that anyone realised things were bad.
If I felt like this had crept up on us, then maybe that would be alright. But it hasn’t. One of the few benefits of reviewing every match in a season where you never win is that we have a contemporary history of how we felt every week, right here on this website. So, for example, we know that we felt like this, after losing to Arsenal in the second game:
“Two games into the season and the pressure is building with every half of football. This was one of the most alarming games of the Rodgers era, where there was a yawning chasm between us and a team we finished comfortably above just over a year ago.”
And like this the following week:
“But no, really, where do we go from here? With all disrespect to Southampton, because there hasn’t been enough already, if we can’t compete as soon as a team we beat 4-1 three games ago decides to start trying then who will we beat?”
This was in August. The Fosse Way brains trust is – alas – not particularly unique or insightful. We were merely reflecting a feeling of impending doom among the fanbase that has never left. We all saw that car drifting towards the precipice, we knew what was coming, and we all tried to make someone pay attention. Whether that was writing up match reports, howling into the social media void, or taking our bed sheets to away games, everyone had their own way of waving our hands in the air, 'Look! Somebody! Somebody help!'.
Now it's May, and nobody helped. The whole time our warnings have been treated like the irrational ramblings of entitled fans. The mugs who watch this week in and week out, who suffer the mental grind of following this team veer from defeat to defeat, who are still trekking south of the river on a bank holiday to watch the latest inevitable thrashing, couldn't possibly have a better grasp of reality than the suits in the executive box.
I don’t want Leicester to be relegated. But I do want everyone associated with the decisions and performances that got us here to be relegated. I want them to be slapped across the face with the repercussions of their actions. I don’t want Dean Smith to be here next season, I don’t want any of the players to be here next season. I definitely don’t want Jon Rudkin, whose endlessly vacant expression should perhaps have been a warning sign, to be anywhere near here next season.
For a year - perhaps two - there's been a staggering disconnect between what the board, players, and manager thinks is happening on one hand, and the dismal reality of the situation on the other. The irony is, if the club had shown some understanding, offered an explanation and a roadmap out of it, then asked everyone to unite behind that vision, perhaps it would have served to turn things around.
Instead, endless denials and delusions have led us to the precipice. They’ve exhausted all of their energy trying to convince us that everything is fine. Now we’re three minutes to midnight, and there’s nobody coming to save them.
