The local loves a fighter: Can Leicester City only ever thrive as underdogs?
All season, Leicester City have been there to be shot at. Now that most of those shots are going in, Harry Gregory is wondering whether our club suits leading the league or if we’re more suited to fighting against the odds.
We giggle at the notion of the ‘West Ham Way’. The idea that football fans would prioritise a style of play over results is foolish. Most supporters just want to see wins. Any suggestion that any football club has a particular way of playing in the modern era of superclubs is comical given the demands of needs-must.
The reality is that the ‘West Ham Way’ is a simply a unique mechanism for supporters to get behind as clubs continue their homogenised descent into a single generic being. A shared romantic belief in something bigger than the very harsh reality that failure leads to a financial cliff-face and trophy wins are increasingly rare for those outside of the very top clubs.
That fans dictate the playing style may be sniffed at, but fanbases certainly can dictate a mood. Millwall is the perfect example of that. A belting challenge from a centre-back is more likely to get The Den rocking than the same player attempting a sixty-yard ping. In Tim Cahill’s final minutes as a footballer on English soil, he went around trying to boot everyone in front of him and got applauded off.
Fan mentality
There’s a validity to clubs internally setting cultures, standards, and policies. The success of Brighton and Brentford is a testament to that. Leicester were lauded for our own culture for several years. This culture, though, was not built around being the leading light.
I referenced back in January that our trip to Coventry gave off a weird feeling where Leicester were favourites and Coventry were the paupers. A casual observer might view Leicester as the baddies rather than the goodies. As Leicester fans, we are not wholly confident in that position.
The week leading up to the game at Elland Road a couple of weeks ago was filled with anxiety across social media and in real-life conversations. The fear of failure outweighed the excitement at potential success. By comparison, Leeds United fans were thriving in their position as the hunter and everyone knows we are a club with a history of falling apart at the crunch end of a season.
At Dean Court in the FA Cup last week, the roles were reversed. Leicester fans travelled down to the south coast with little hope of a result, which was deepened when Enzo Maresca announced that he would make 10/11 changes. Yet once the game started, all that could be heard on the BBC broadcast was the away end singing throughout.
Historically, this was a mismatch. AFC Bournemouth have only made the FA Cup quarter-finals five times in their history. Leicester have done it five times in my lifetime. As the football pyramid currently stands, though, it was a cup shock. We again prospered as the ‘lesser’ party. My thoughts returned to turning up at Norwich City and winning in similar circumstances, where Premier League took on the Championship, but with the Foxes as a historically more successful club.
The Fosse Way
Leicester City’s DNA, ethos, culture, or any other form of management talk you care to indulge in, is to be the underdog. The psyche around it is that we have no expectation as a fanbase to do well. This translates into a more hopeful mood, which relaxes the players to perform.
This isn’t really surprising when you think about it. Leicester isn’t a city which talks about itself in glowing terms. Nor does anyone shout loud about how beautiful the county is either. Our default is a mindset of ‘written off’. Even the city’s most successful band wrote about it.
Martin O’Neill completely exploited that underdog mentality in his period of management. He harnessed it to build a team which displayed all the fighting quality you want from your football team. The ‘Foxes Never Quit’ motto struck a chord and off we went on a highly fruitful period. The fans bought into it.
As they did with Claudio Ranieri’s increasingly hilarious, cautious press conferences under-playing our position. He saw the benefits of taking the pressure off. Even when the on-field dynamic changed during the run-in, which involved playing multiple mid-table sides. By now the fans and club were working together. The last stretch saw the King Power volume turned up to maximum.
By contrast, excuses and complaints have been commonplace this season in our role as favourites for promotion. We’ve seen dull atmospheres again and again, with hundreds flooding out late in games even with the result in the balance. Whether it’s arrogance or an alien feeling towards being the ‘favourite’, it’s led to sterile occasions.
Our previous two promotions had elements of a siege mentality despite strong squads. The 2002/2003 season saw everyone rally together in administration and unite to gain promotion, which was a huge step to keeping the club afloat. Despite the wealth of a Premier League squad (less pronounced in those days), there was a nucleus of players who had been written off under Peter Taylor previously as well.
Nigel Pearson’s promotion was one powered by the previous failure in the playoffs at Vicarage Road when the mood over the summer was downright gloomy. Both are examples where there was an element of being undermined or overlooked by the pundits.
This is our last dance
Which brings us to the Achilles’ heel of Leicester City FC. Pressure. We have history of wilting when it matters. You could argue even going back to the FA Cup final loss to Manchester United in 1963 was an example where we suffered as the fancied team. The top four crumbles, where the ‘supercomputer’ had our prospects of Champions League football above 90%, are a more recent example.
I found Enzo Maresca’s ‘huge game’ comment in the lead up to Leeds interesting in context of the debate here. Was it for once a manager boasting confidence in his team’s ability? After all, he has repeatedly made comments about the lower opposition in the table being the hardest games.
The results and patterns of those games back it up. QPR, Rotherham, Huddersfield and Sheffield Wednesday we have all traded blows with. Rather it’s the mid-table likes of Plymouth and Stoke who’ve been easy to see off. Or was it an attempt to deflect pressure away from his own team by taking the headlines himself?
All in all, it proves that Enzo’s biggest task in this run-in is working upstream against a mentality which is historically ingrained in the club. Equally, it’s time a bit of pretention was left at the turnstiles. We are firmly in a race for promotion now and our players need backing. Perhaps the sudden twist in the promotion race will work in our favour if it means we can unite behind an underdog.
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