Strange times aboard the Enzo Express - are all football clubs like this?
Leicester City started this season like a runaway train, but this week the journey has started to feel a bit less smooth.
Despite one or two rogue attempts to slam on the emergency brakes, we’re still hurtling along at a record speed.
But things keep flying off the sides, the engineer’s asleep and some of the passengers are complaining loudly. The driver’s still in control - but even he’s apparently starting to think about jumping out the window. Meanwhile, most of us are sitting here waiting to find out how it all ends. Do we arrive safely at our destination or do we veer off the cliff?
Stranger things
We are a strange, strange football club. I wouldn’t take that if a supporter of another club said it about us but I think most Leicester fans can agree: our club is just plain weird a lot of the time.
We’re on course for a record points total and promotion at the first time of asking.
We’ve just spent 48 hours having a massive in-fight on social media and messageboards after the manager effectively called out a section of the fanbase.
The squad is a mix of really likeable young players and equally popular experienced heads.
The director of football is almost universally loathed.
Most people are thrilled with the manager. A handful aren’t, but they’re the ones getting the airtime because the atmosphere is so dead you can hear individual groans at home games when the ball is passed backwards.
It’s February and we’ve only dropped points against two teams outside of the top eight.
We were 1-0 up against our closest challengers in the 88th minute twice in the past six weeks and didn’t win either game.
We’re just an absolutely crazy football club to try to support, and I steadfastly refuse to believe all clubs are like this.
This season alone we uncovered a broken back during a medical and signed the bloke anyway, signed another player who’d never been injured in his entire career and then broke his foot before making a competitive appearance, sorted it out for a player to miss the African Cup of Nations who then got himself sent off and missed all our games anyway, started the season with five first-team goalkeepers and just when you thought everything had settled down, we spent the entire winter transfer window with basically one target, eventually brought him over from Italy on the afternoon of the final day of the window, carried out a full medical on the poor sod and then sent him back home.
It’s not quite 79 ridiculous things, but all this is while things are actually going swimmingly on the pitch.
I’ve been supporting Leicester City for nearly 35 years and I still can’t work out what we’re about.
Nonsensical
Personally, I enjoyed taking no notice of this transfer window until the final few days. It reminded me of the good old days when a player could not only join the club but score a goal in a league game before you realised we’d signed them (Corica? Who?)
It’s not like that any more and while people like Fabrizio Romano might be a bit of a pain in the arse for the less transparent clubs like ours, you can’t ignore the impact their constant updates have on a club’s reputation. Or, more to the point, a director of football’s standing among their club’s fanbase.
It’s easy to get drawn into the speculation of who’s to blame when things go wrong. We’ll inevitably learn as much from the club’s perspective about this sorry scenario and Jon Rudkin’s part in it as we did from the review last summer. The club’s lack of transparency means fans generally fear the worst about the competence of anyone failing to bring the players the manager wants, and that’s understandable.
The events yesterday painted a worrying financial picture though - we must be so close to the big red numbers line if we can’t sort out a loan deal and we’re still not bringing in any kind of transfer fee for anyone.
It doesn’t bode well for the Premier League, if we reach it, because we still appear to be stuck in some kind of stasis in terms of moving players on and getting any kind of money for them. While plenty are out of contract at the end of the season, can we be confident all will be well if we get the big TV money back? Because we’re still not getting a sense this is a finely-tuned operation.
How to run a football club
The important thing is to focus on the needs of the manager and the club. Even the optimists, those that back the club at every opportunity, those that won’t hear a bad word said about the executives, must acknowledge a clear issue here. We’ve lost one key midfielder through injury and his backup through a cancelled loan. We’re a crocked KDH away from a bit of a crisis.
At the first sign that there’s a danger we won’t be able to complete a necessary signing, there should be a plan B. It’s not like we haven’t been here before. The name Stefano Sensi joins the pantheon of great Leicester transfer window balls-ups alongside the likes of Adrien Silva, Ryan Bennett, Jack Harrison and James McAtee.
Not all of them have been our club’s fault by any stretch, but each saga has told a bit about how the club has operated since we used to be a “well-run club” back in the day. Since we used to identify and wrap up targets early, and leave the madness of transfer deadline day to clubs like the merry-go-round lot up the road.
For most fans, this will serve as a reminder that we’ve still got the same people running the club off the pitch. There are still strange things happening: charging kids a tenner to “meet their heroes”, being the poster boys for dodgy dealings. Strange things that make you sit up and question whether it’s always been like this and you just haven’t noticed before.
Amidst all the noise, Enzo Maresca has to keep navigating a way back to the Premier League. Keep himself perched on the front like Buster Keaton, frantically laying out the track ahead of us.
