Reading the club: The initial signs show Steve Cooper ‘gets’ Leicester City
For all my working life I made a respectable living in graphic design. It was (is) a way of life in which things never stood still and a flexible approach was essential.
But one day, quite late in life, I realised that I had been doing it wrong.
Subject to the perils of ever present deadlines, I had always combined thought with activity.
Then I came to realise that I had to resist my natural tendency to grab the nearest pencil or marker first and invest my initial time in thought. Get this right and what appeared on paper would be better.
So, you may be asking, what has this to do with football? I was reminded of this when belatedly researching our new manager. Which, in turn, led to thoughts about previous men and what made them tick, or not.
If I concentrate on relatively recent incumbents it is not to exclude giants of the past like Hodge, Gillies and Bloomfield, but to concentrate on two men within memory for most of us.
What made Martin O’Neill and Nigel Pearson not just successful but popular, even idolised, by us fans? It was, I submit, because they read the club right. They got the thinking right possibly before the first ball was kicked in anger.
Their approach and ambitions were tailored astutely to Leicester City. They nurtured the roots of our tight knit, family feel often referred to by players and support staff.
Conor Coady wrote of this almost unique culture and he has been around. It has been noted by Steve Cooper and referenced in his initial words to us. So what did they recognise here which they felt could be built on and provide the basis for success?
They will have noted our size and position in the football ladder. We are a mid-sized provincial club in an area also populated with similar sized clubs: Forest, Derby and Coventry. We, like them, tended to a yo-yo status often familiar with top, second and third tiers. Attendances tended to be steady regardless suggesting a loyal core of local support.
They will have read of periods of success at each amid longer barren spells. Silverware does not venture this way very often. Not that much to build on, but something. To both O’Neill and Pearson, key to success was to recognise and harness a realistic potential for progress, neither very large nor insignificant. The essential keys were unity, togetherness and collective pride. This was, they deduced, how to maximise progress.
The ultimate departures of O’Neill and Pearson seemed, at the time, real setbacks which reflected their investment in our cause. Others, Wallace, Pleat, Little, McGhee and Rodgers, always seem to have had their eyes on personal career progress. Yes, they said the words but… they initially offered hope but none really built any rapport with us fans.
Their assessment of our place in the football hierarchy meant different things to them. But none built stellar careers after leaving.
What, at this moment, prompted this brief excursion into the past? It’s because I sense that we are on the brink of another era to match those mentioned in which a young coach, having spent some successful time ‘learning his trade’, is keen to spend some serious time building another Leicester City which continues that tradition which looked to be in doubt last season. And he will have seen that we spent time recently proving a real thorn in some much larger behinds.
Having spent some time to familiarise myself with Steve Cooper’s background, I see why Top preferred him (we are told) to early frontrunner Graham Potter - whose published ambitions did not include another Brighton or Leicester. He aimed higher, which is fine, but sent signals to our executive who, we hope, preferred a successor in the mould of the men mentioned above.
If they are right, and prepared to be as patient as they have often been in recent years, then another chapter of overachievement in our club’s history may be opening, and the name Cooper will take its place in the records of a successful Leicester City.
