Straight back up Leicester City
Leicester’s return to the Premier League was sealed, as the title win was, without the Foxes having to play. Has an instant return where you’ve been top for months on end ever felt so dramatic?
Of all the ways I thought Leicester might be promoted, I didn’t expect it to happen so suddenly. For a long time over the past few months, I’ve been assuming it wouldn’t happen at all.
It’s only a fortnight since Leicester lost away at Plymouth, incurring the wrath of an away end that had suffered through two long southern away trips in the space of 72 hours, only to witness zero goals and two defeats against teams in the thick of the relegation scrap.
A few weeks ago, I was one of the many people suddenly googling “Championship play off dates”, a prospect I had not considered for virtually the entire season up to that point. The prospect of a horrifying, doomed encounter with Coventry loomed large.
Then suddenly, it’s all over. Word started filtering out of the phone at about 8.30 on Friday night that Leeds were in trouble. Within an hour the government was scrambling to put together a nationwide emergency alert, like when they had to inform the country that Spurs were 5-0 down to Newcastle after 20 minutes.
Mayday, mayday, QPR have just bagged a fourth against the best team in the league.
One of the ways the Championship has humbled me is to emphasise that I really have no idea what’s going to happen. I’ve veered from ‘piss the league’ mode, predicting a record points tally, to utter conviction that we were going to blow it, to the realisation now that it was probably always fine. I suspect everyone feels much the same.
The hardest thing to get your head around is judging your own performance while ignoring what other teams are doing. Football is, ultimately, a zero-sum game. You’re either promoted or you’re not. But you can’t ignore the fact that results elsewhere massively impact your perceptions.
Burnley won the title with seven games to go last season, a Championship record. Compared to that, Leicester scrambling home with two to play feels like we’re way off. Being unceremoniously turfed out of top spot in recent weeks, even out of the automatic promotion places, felt like a damning indictment of Enzo Maresca and his footballing mission.
In reality, though, that’s kind of all nonsense. Burnley won the title with 101 points, Leicester could well end up with 100, hangovers permitting. Luton, in third place, got 80. There are already four teams with more than 80 points this season. It’s likely that all three of Leicester, Ipswich, and Leeds will end up with more than the 91 points Fulham got in winning the division the season before.
This has been a wild promotion race, with four separate teams going on long unbeaten runs at various points. The fact that Leicester’s most sustained run of success came before Christmas means that we’ve always been the team to chase. Leading is difficult, it adds an extra bit of spice to the opponent in every game, it raises the stakes so that anything other than automatic promotion would feel like a complete failure.
Before the season, when we surveyed our writers on where we would finish, we had answers ranging from first to bottom half. As many people expected us to miss the playoffs as thought we’d go up automatically. This promotion, from where the squad and its mentality was a year ago, is a massive achievement.
Even so, it has undoubtedly been a strange experience. We were so good earlier in the season that the only way to keep everyone interested was to complain about how we were winning. Then we started conceding in the last five minutes of every game, then the club itself experienced a mid-life crisis and started suing everyone within 100 miles of the stadium.
It was the manager and the players’ misfortune that their worst run of the campaign coincided with this meltdown, so that they became the focal points of anger and frustration at the way the whole club is run. It is a deserved relief that they pulled off those two home wins over the last week, so that everyone could come together in celebration.
Some of my favourite moments of the run-in have been the reactions on the bench as Leicester goals went in. Late-stage Brendan saw any sort of emotion drain out of the manager and the team. One of the positives of every game recently coming under extreme pressure has been seeing that return in spades.
One of my most abiding memories came following Jamie Vardy’s late third goal at home to Norwich, where Abdul Fatawu, Wilfred Ndidi, and the normally-reserved Stephy Mavididi exploded off the bench to join Maresca racing down the touchline. It is easy to say that the players don’t care when results go against you, but it’s pretty clear from their actions that this team does.
This sort of thing is what I wanted to take away from this season, whatever the final position in the end. Some moments and experiences to savour, things that stick with you. For long stretches we didn’t have much of that, we had Harry Winks’ ridiculous last minute winner at the Hawthorns and some late winners early in the campaign. In the last few weeks, though, we’ve had plenty.
The Norwich comeback, when the team felt like it was on the floor, is one. Wout Faes cupping his ear at the crowd, the celebrations at the end. Big players stepping up at big moments: Ndidi to Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall for the equaliser, Mavididi tying his defender in knots to put Leicester ahead, Vardy bagging the goal that sealed it. Mavididi again against Birmingham, heading home then tearing off, waving his shirt above his head, as the crowd exploded.
Then we had Hamza Choudhury’s unbelievable display to seal that West Brom win, an all-time great individual performance, one that I still can’t quite get my head around. Then Southampton, one of my favourite games in recent memory, with four goals in 19 minutes.
The quality of every goal, and the feeling of possibility that hit during that 20 minute spell as Southampton collapsed under the Leicester assault. When Dewsbury-Hall broke away from our penalty area at 4-0, with blue shirts surging forward around him: my God, we could score ten here.
You have to be able to celebrate the good times, otherwise football is just a ceaseless grind of anxiety and frustration. That finish to the season, all games at home, has certainly transformed the way we’ll remember it. Moments of genuine joy, relief, and release, where the team and the crowd felt united in a way they haven’t for a long time.
There is clearly a lot of uncertainty still to sort through. Once this season ends, who knows how many more months it’ll be before we’re back in positive points. There are contract situations to be resolved, not least with the club’s greatest ever player, and plenty of the squad are still in limbo. Even the manager’s future is not entirely certain.
But for now, none of that matters. What you want, more than anything, from your team is hope. When the walls were caving in, with points deductions and financial reports and losing to The Likes of Plymouth, you feared for what the future might bring.
Now, we can get excited about what’s to come.
And there’s still a title to win.
