Every dog has his day,” is one of those patronising remarks bores in pubs reserve for teams or individuals who supposedly do not know their place. “Take Leicester City …” goes the refrain.
There is no doubt they are the dogs of this day and a few more to come in the Champions League next season, where they will start at 100-1, according to most bookmakers. Leicester, whose best top-flight finish in 118 years was second in 1929, were 5,000-1 to win the Premier League at the start of the season but they are now everybody’s favourite adopted puppy, it seems.
Not only are they winning with the sort of commanding elan rarely seen before at the club, but they are turning an entire sporting culture upside down. That is the underlying reason for their popularity. They are not Manchester United, Manchester City, or Chelsea, or Arsenal, or Liverpool or, dare I say it, Tottenham.
While the tale of their ownership and management is a complicated one, on the pitch Leicester have bloodied posh noses on a weekly basis. This is a fresh narrative, too long in coming and all the more welcome for that.
Leicester have injected the one ingredient that has been missing from English football since the “Big Five” created the Premier League in 1992: uncertainty. They have become universally acclaimed gatecrashers. Everyone loves an upset.
What a glorious journey Claudio Ranieri’s team have had: from irrelevant outsiders to the point where they will win the title if they beat the remnants of the once dominant Manchester United at Old Trafford on Sunday afternoon. It would close the most pleasing circle.
It did not look promising in Leicester’s second match under the Italian, when they drew 1-1 with Mansfield Town in front of 4,273 fans in a friendly at the One Call Stadium on 21 July last year. Nobody much noticed when Jamie Vardy came on just past the hour alongside Leo Ulloa, neither of them able to crack the home team’s defence. It was one of those “so-what” afternoons. There would be no more of them for the rest of the season.
Last Sunday, Ulloa stepped in for the brilliant but banned Vardy to help secure a 4-0 win over Swansea that put Leicester within one win of the prize. And Ranieri, the Tinkerman who had been restrained in his selections all season, tinkered elsewhere: on to the bench went Marc Albrighton, who had started in 33 of 34 league games, and in came Jeffrey Schlupp – who provided the ammunition for Ulloa’s second and the team’s third. When Albrighton reappeared, he stuck in the fourth. That is as near to managerial perfection as anyone is allowed to get. It was their biggest win of a remarkable season, a nerveless performance, exquisitely timed.
When they have drawn or lost this season, Leicester have invariably come back to win next time, the sign of a seriously good team. They beat Bury 4-1 in the Capital One Cup after drawing 1-1 with Spurs; when they could only draw at Bournemouth they rebounded to come from 2-0 down to beat Villa 3-2; Stoke City forced a draw next match – and Leicester immediately took it out on West Ham; Arsenal trounced them 5-2 in what many thought was the end of their fairytale, and they returned to beat Norwich 2-1; when Southampton got a draw, Leicester responded with a 1-0 win over Crystal Palace; Manchester United drew 1-1 at the King Power Stadium, and Leicester went to Swansea and won 3-0.
Even when Leicester hit a proper dip – one win in seven matches between Boxing Day and their 2-0 loss to Tottenham in the FA Cup three weeks later – they got up again. Only Arsenal have beaten them in 13 games since. In their past 17 matches they have kept 12 clean sheets.
To put their achievement in an historical context, only nine managers in the 117-year history of league football in England have won the top division’s title at the first attempt. Manuel Pellegrini two years ago at Manchester City was the last – but he had more money at his disposal than George Osborne. In their time, so did the previous debutant winners: Matt McQueen (Liverpool, 1923); Joe Shaw (Arsenal, 1935), Tom Whittaker (Arsenal, 1948), Joe Fagan (Liverpool, 1984), Kenny Dalglish (Liverpool, 1986), José Mourinho (Chelsea, 2005), Carlo Ancelotti (Chelsea, 2010).
Those managers were in charge of relative giants; Ranieri – who gave way at Stamford Bridge for the first incarnation of Mourinho – has moulded winners from losers, a team probably less loved in that city than their imperious rugby representatives.
I remember a conversation I had with Gordon Strachan in 2003, when he was managing Southampton and they were just about to play in the FA Cup semi-final against Watford at Villa Park. They won 2-1 and lost the final to Arsenal – 1-0, of course. The competition that year featured the usual upstarts, but old, rich faces bossed the league, and there was widespread resignation that this was the way it would remain.
Strachan smiled as he contemplated the hegemony in the game at that time. “You’ve got Man United, Arsenal and then you’ve got Newcastle, Chelsea this year. Then you’ve got Liverpool after that. None of these others are really going to be able to get anywhere near that. I think you can pop your head into the top six every now and then. But, on a permanent basis, I don’t think those top sides will be overtaken in the next 10 years.” It’s taken 13 years for Leicester to disturb the old order. Strachan wasn’t that far out.
This week, more than 6,000 Leicester Mercury readers, 54% of those polled, reckoned their team would wrap up the title on Sunday afternoon; 39% said they might not beat United but would finish the job over the concluding two matches. Many thousands of non-Spurs fans will be pulling for them. Has there ever been a dog more loved?