Leicester City are the champions of England. And it doesn’t matter who you support – Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Arsenal or Tottenham Hotspur – it’s a triumph to celebrate, and it’s a season to remember.
It has been called a fairytale, which it surely is, but, as a popular quote suggests: “Fairytales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
Leicester took on the financial might of the big clubs, and their multi-million pound stars, with a rag-tag bunch of under-achievers and turned them into the one of the biggest sporting success stories in a long, long while.
It’s difficult to articulate the enormity of the achievement in words but, reading an article in an English newspaper recently, I came across the perfect description in comedian Mark Steel’s brilliant comparison that Leicester winning the English Premier League “is like winning the Grand National (a horse race), on a cat”.
For me, as always, it also offers an opportunity to quickly peruse my bookcase for similar inspirational tales. And the story of Leicester flipped open a wonderful book by Joe McGuiness called “The Miracle of Castel di Sangro”, in which the football team of a small Italian town of just 5 000 people went from the complete obscurity of amateur football all the way to promotion to the Serie B, the level just below the famed Italian Serie A.
It’s a fascinating tale of the wonder and romance of sport, which, as McGuiness says: “Spectators can cheer, writers can write, bands can play as a result, but, for the wizard, the nature of the wizardry lies beyond the reach of words.”
And, “beyond the reach of words” is exactly what Leicester have done. So we, in the aftermath, as the Premiership winds down, continue to sit enthralled and enchanted and more than a little confounded that the ostensible “big clubs” we support failed to keep up with a club who only narrowly managed to avoid relegation the previous season.
The answer is in Leicester’s magnificent teamwork, the man-management of manager Claudio Ranieri, the self-belief, the fight and the bite, the pace and the industry and, above all, the desire to rise above the also-ran, average labels the club and the players had been stamped with.
But while it’s a narrative to salute and imprint in memory, for those of us who are old enough to remember, it’s not the first time that we’ve witnessed such a feat. So let me take you back to January 6, 1975, when Brian Clough took over at a beleaguered Nottingham Forest, struggling towards the basement of the then-Second Division. Forest would go on to be champions of England in 1978, and the miracle continued when they won the European Cup for two successive years after that.
At the time, a newspaper described Forest as “a mix of fresh and well-worn faces who ought to be slogging it out at the bottom of the table”. The Cough and Forest tale has been been turned into a movie, called “I Believe in Miracles”… Don’t those two sentences remind you of Leicester?
For the inimitable, charismatic Clough, read the understated yet brilliant Ranieri; for Forest goalkeeper Peter Shilton, the genetically-gifted Kasper Schmeichel; for Viv Anderson, the first black footballer to play for England, substitute Danny Simpson; replace the hard-working, tireless John McGovern with Danny Drinkwater; take Larry Lloyd, the centre-back whose signing-on fee – according to legend – was a washing machine Clough stole from the City Ground laundry, and you have Wes Morgan; in the doughty Kenny Burns, who never shirked a scrap or a challenge, it’s Robert Huth in disguise; in former carpenter Garry Birtles, there’s ex-factory worker Jamie Vardy; of course, the cucumber-cool, super-skilful and elusive John Robertson -– dubbed “Picasso” by Clough – and it’s the trickster Riyad Mahrez; and, last but not least, my favourite footballer of the era, the combative, pugnacious Archie Gemmill, who epitomises the lung-bursting graft of N’Golo Kante.
More than that, though, Leicester’s victory is a tribute to a time when football, and life, was much simpler ... Before the grab of money became so important, before the culture of the ego took root, before the arrival of the relentless pursuit of self-aggrandisement. It’s an achievement that reminds us that in football, as in life, hard work is rewarded, because what you put in, is what you get out.
Rugby writer JOHN GOLIATH says:
WHILE most lovers of the beautiful game, and even those who just like to see the underdog thrive, were cheering Leicester on over the last few months, I was hoping for my own happy ending.
As a long-suffering Tottenham Hotspur supporter, I was part of the less than one percent of the football world who wanted Leicester to fall apart, that they would finally wake up from their dream.
But that fantasy became reality on Monday night, after my team choked against Chelsea. It was hard to take.
But I’m hoping that these are the sort of moments that will make us stronger as a football club, because Spurs haven’t gunned for the league in decades. This was uncharted territory.
We have the youngest squad in the Premiership, and that inexperience showed over the last few weeks.
Our players just didn’t know how to gut it out at the end against West Brom and Chelsea, because we only knew how to play beautiful football.
That’s why I have a feeling that we haven’t quite seen the last of this Spurs side, because there is enough quality, depth and a top coach to compete to have our own fairytale ending over the next few years. We just need some backbone. - Cape Times