Chicken nuggets and Rooster Russell: Ric Flair’s Leicester City run-in rundown
We’re into the run-in now, and Ric Flair from the Big Strong Leicester Boys is feeling nostalgic. A squeaky-bummed promotion push? This is Leicester heritage.
“Can you believe this team? Defeat is not in their vocabulary.”
On a trip down memory lane this week, largely because I can no longer deal with the present, that remark from Alan Parry in the closing stages of the 1997 Coca Cola Cup final against Middlesborough grabbed me.
Incapable of mediocrity
It's not so much that we always won high pressure games (we didn't actually win that game but obviously did the replay) or navigated the business end of seasons gone by, but our underdog spirit and attitude was captivating. It got me thinking of the rollercoaster many Leicester fans like me experienced right from the off at the start of the 1990s, and through to the present day the battle scars are there to see. All played out.
It's not just the high profile capitulations down the stretch that we have experienced in 2019/20 and 2020/21 in our failure of securing Champions League qualification from such a commanding position, nor the single worst decline seen in Premier League history for a team to be relegated, when it was in our hands. The Leicester City I know and love have always been either the sublime or the ridiculous, we're incapable of anything in between, very much like me when it comes to eating chicken nuggets - but that's another story.
After the season review of 1996/97 reached the closing credits something stirred in me that vividly brought to life the nervous excitement we as fans feel (or at least used to feel before we've forever been left mentally damaged) as we approach the season run-in when heroes are made.
So I've decided to relive our escapades in the pursuit of promotion over the last 3 decades.
What a season Emile Heskey had in 1996/97. He may have gone on to be a better all round player in future seasons but I urge anyone to go and watch it back on YouTube and witness his raw pace and power that was unplayable at times.
First things first, automatic promotion for us since the 90s has come on three occasions (twice from the Championship to the Premier League and once from League One back to the Championship) and on all occasions the gap to 3rd place was extremely comprehensive and the jeopardy was low.
Sadly that's where we should be at right now with 9 games to go. Some of us (not me) would have planned for promotion parties over Easter and yet we'll be lucky to be in the top 2 come Monday afternoon. I hope the only sickness we see or feel this weekend is because we've tried to make an omelette with Cadbury's creme eggs.
Funnily enough, the other two times we've gone up automatically from the Championship we've had some form of financial issues.
In 2002/03 we were close to going bust and were saved by some salts of the earth and romped to 2nd place with a 12 point gap to 3rd.
Then in 2013/14, after ruthlessly winning the title by 9 points and a 17 point gap to 3rd, it was reported that we'd been collared by the EFL for a mixture of overspending and peculiar goings-on with a company called Trestellar. So the omens are good for the class of 2023/24, eh?
The 1990s
It's unfortunately the closer promotion battles where our record is patchy and where my attention has been drawn this week. The 1991/92 season has some similarities with 2023/24. Except we are more like Blackburn Rovers, who possessed the best squad in the division and were clear at the top of the league only to lose the plot in the final few months.
I'm not sure any of us could cope with scrabbling for a play-off place having thrown it away. We did that in 2012/13 and it was absolutely horrid. Blackburn got across the line in the 1992 play-off final at our expense but it doesn't bear thinking about.
Our efforts that season were incredible. For a team that had stayed up on the final day of the previous season thanks to a Tony James scuffer at home to Oxford, the next 12 months were halcyon days. A new era under Brian Little but promotion seemed a big ask. I was very fortunate that, aged 8 and fresh off a year of being obsessed with Gary Lineker and Paul Gascoigne after Italia 90, that I'd settled on going regularly down the Blue Army and what a first season to be part of.
Focusing on the run-in largely, we were very much in the mix for the top 2 as can be seen in the final league standings with Ipswich only 7 points ahead of us who went up as champions. Unfortunately, while we went on a run of 6 wins from 7 in April where Rooster Russell turned in to Toto Schillaci and propelled us to 2nd place with winners against Tranmere and the bewildering Blackburn, we lost our final 2 games and ended up 4th. The first taste of automatic promotion being squandered at the death in my maiden season, terrific.
However, it gave me the best football game I've ever attended - Leicester City 5 Cambridge United 0 in the semi final 2nd leg, I can still hear the crowd now if I close my eyes and how good Steve Thompson looked in that blue Bukta shirt that night.
The final was pure heartache, we gave it everything despite that diving little shit. Brendan Rodgers last season complained the weather may have affected our players’ performance in a game in October when it had been around 14 degrees. That play-off final was sweltering and as much as that Bukta kit was glorious, imagine how sweaty your Tom Walls would have been in it. No wonder we faltered.
1992/93 ended in the same cruel fashion, more diving, another play-off final defeat and I can still hear the jarring sound of Craig Maskell's goal in off the stanchion. Horrible, why was this happening to us? That is probably doing us a massive disservice because the comeback from 3-0 down back to 3-3 was once again astonishing and once again revolved around Steve Thompson looking the business, this time in Fox Leisure as he's stuck the equaliser in. But still it wasn't meant to be.
In terms of how we fared in the latter part of that season, we never troubled the top 2, despite winning 7 games on the spin throughout March and Steve Walsh on a madness, but it was tight between 4th down to 6th and then we won only 2 of our final 7 games to finish 6th. Portsmouth were particularly aggrieved to have finished 12 points ahead of us and only missed out on 2nd by goal difference having also finished level on points with West Ham - and yet we dumped them out of the play-offs on another raucous night, typical of Thompson with the equaliser that sent us through to Wembley again.
1993/94 finally equalled promotion but if as a fan you wanted an all-inclusive trip to the Premier League then Leicester's end to the season was the equivalent of getting the squits after 2 days and spending the rest of it putting bog roll in the freezer and praying for it to be over.
Brian Little had steered us to 2nd in mid-March with fine wins over Middlesborough and Birmingham, and with 12 games to go we were dreaming of being able to go away in May celebrating as a Premier League team and not having to endure the playoffs again. So much so my old boy booked for us all to go to Menorca at May half term and so Derby ended up being the only Wembley game I've ever missed. Disgusting parenting but this is what Leicester do to you from commanding positions. We won just 2 of those remaining 12 games and finished 4th.
What Leicester were armed with back then though was the beans and little sausages, before beans and little sausages was a thing. Steve Walsh up front with either Speedie or Joachim. A lot had changed since Walsh looked like his career was over at Ayresome Park the previous September, Iwan Roberts had been signed and had more goals for us than teeth.
But the biggest hero of all heroes came back from the now familiar journey of an ACL injury to deliver in a high stakes game, against an enemy and on the back of recent years of agony and accusations of flopping when it mattered. We'd finally done it, everything else before and after could be forgotten, right. Right?
After just one season in amongst the big boys, getting splattered most weeks it was back to our bread and butter in 1995/96 and chasing another May bank holiday outing to north London armed with a carrier bag of bog rolls to launch as streamers. A lost art in the modern era. Anyway, this season was another utterly chaotic one in the life of following Leicester City.
The football Leicester played in the early 90s was honest and at best direct, but it was equally enthralling. By the time we got to mid-Autumn in 1995 what we were witnessing under Mark McGhee was other worldly. We were ripping teams apart with aplomb, sitting at the top of the league and signings like Steve Corica and Scott Taylor were fantasty stuff. It didn't last of course, McGhee fucked off to Wolves citing a better chance of promotion and a bigger club. Pardon?!
I don't need to go into much detail about what followed. We were graced with a higher power in Martin O'Neill but as of 8 games to go that season we were 9th on 52 points having just been smoked 2 zip by Sheffield Utd at home and the natives weren't happy. What was to follow was Messrs Izzet and Claridge and 6 wins, including the final 4 games of the season to sneak in the back door. Claridge was unbelievable with winners away at Charlton and home to Oldham and Huddersfield. Hello play-offs, my old friend. BOSH, back to the Prem we go for major honours, European adventures and a break from all of this. Didn't enjoy front-running, ever the underdog.
21st century Foxes
As already mentioned, the promotion campaigns of 2002/03 and 2008/09 were a breeze compared to what we'd been used to in the 90s, but between those two achievements the club had fallen to its lowest ebb. Picked up off the floor and momentum built, Nigel Pearson took us on a run that was so close to back to back promotions. 2009/10 was a model of consistency where although we didn't trouble the top 2, we never really succumbed to the torturous nature of maintaining a play-off place and skin in the game.
Bar just a few gameweeks, we were top 6 pretty much from Novemeber onwards. A wobble did come with 10 games to go and a 2-goal lead at home to Coventry via an Andy King brace, we conceded twice to draw and then lost 4 games on the spin to go from 4th to 6th. I've got a watery mouth just thinking about such horrors but cometh the man cometh the hour. King spearheaded us to win our remaining 5 games, scoring in a 4-0 pasting of QPR, a winner against Peterborough and the goal that confirmed a play-off place away at Preston.
Yann Kermorgant capped the season finale with his only goal in a Leicester City shirt at home to Middlesborough and sadly 10 days later despite heroics once more from Andy King and Steve Howard to overturn a 2-0 aggregate at Cardiff, the stupid w****r chipped it - cue Dave Henson. Devastating, I also had possibly the worst hangover I've ever had after that game as well and had to endure a 5 hour National Express bus back from Cardiff at the crack of dawn the next day with sick in my eyebrows.
The last tight and unpleasant promotion campaign that Leicester have been embroiled in was 2012/13 in Nigel Pearson's second stint as manager at Leicester. Unfinished business certainly felt unsatisfyingly finished at the end of this season having wasted what was an extremely exciting and promising campaign. Having won 5 games at the turn of the year with free-scoring new signing Chris Wood and then soon to join Harry Kane we'd cantered in to 2nd place as we entered February. We then proceeded to win 2 of our next 16 games to be outside the play-offs with a game to go and an unlikely run of events needed to scrape in to 6th. The club felt toxic and seldom anyone thought there was anything left to play for.
That final game away at Nottingham Forest, a rival we'd not beaten in the league at their ground for 4 decades seemed a foregone conclusion. Forest themselves could clinch a play-off place with a win, Leicester needed to win and for an on-the-beach Blackpool to get a result at Bolton. The celebrations after Anthony Knockaert's injury time winner were iconic, it summed up an utterly batshit crazy season and then the play-off semi-final 2nd leg happened. Knockaert’s dive for the penalty and the outrageous discovery that a player as good at penalties as Harry Kane was on the pitch, as was David Nugent and yet Knockers snatched hold of it and scuffed it and us into oblivion.
What happened next was revolting. I thought it was the end of the world, I was convinced we were never ever going to return to the Premier League. It is that season that I have irrational fears that is again unfolding in front of our eyes in 2023/24. The circumstances are different - for one, we were never in such a strong position back in 2012/13 as we were just a handful of games ago, with the finish line in sight. It's an unwelcome feeling that has been dredged up after a decade away from this nonsense that is coming in waves.
I was hoping this memoir might make me feel better. The most positive thing I can muster is that it'll be over one way or another very soon. We've beaten all 9 of the teams we have remaining earlier in the season, now let's go and do it again and remove any possibility of the blood bath of the play-offs.
The one outcome in the social experiment of Leicester City is automatic promotion from such a narrow position, so that's what I'm tuning into. See you all for the BSLB promotion party.
