The Remarkable Rise of Leicester City 2015/16 Premier League Champions
E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-909245-44-0
Verlag: deCoubertin Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Wasserzeichen (»Systemvoraussetzungen)
David Bevan has written for The Guardian and The Daily Mirror. He is a season ticket holder at Leicester City and attended every game home and away in the club's most incredible season. The Unbelievables is his first book.
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1: SUNDERLAND (H) Saturday 8 August 2015 WHAT A GAME. WHAT A DAY. A DAY THAT BEGINS WITH THE England cricket team winning The Ashes just up the road and ends with Leicester City sitting top of the Premier League. Cricket continues, but the ball that takes Australia’s final wicket to seal victory in the Fourth Test at Trent Bridge before midday acts as something of a bookend to the summer sport. Just over three hours later, City open the 2015/16 Premier League season with a home fixture against Sunderland. Fans troop back to The Gateway, The Font, The Local Hero, The Robert Peel, The Counting House. Outside The Swan and Rushes, supporters of both clubs are sprawled on the pavement enjoying sunshine and heat that has been in short supply for some weeks. Team news is keenly anticipated. The Japanese forward Shinji Okazaki will make his debut but the main talking point is the decision by new Leicester City manager Claudio Ranieri to switch from the effective 3-4-1-2 formation that helped bring survival at the end of last season to a more conventional 4-4-1-1. The first one is Okazaki; the second is Jamie Vardy, playing his first competitive game since making his England debut in the summer. Kasper Schmeichel is the obvious choice in goal. The two banks of four read from right to left: Ritchie De Laet, Robert Huth, Wes Morgan, Jeffrey Schlupp; Marc Albrighton, Danny Drinkwater, Andy King, Riyad Mahrez. As the players take to the pitch, the Kop is transformed into a gigantic graphic of two supporters – one with a scarf, one with a flag – made up of thousands of shiny foils held aloft in a display organised by fan group Union FS. At the front of the stand, a banner reads: ‘Your colours are in our hands. Our dreams are in yours.’ Game on. Sunderland start brightly, going close three times in the first ten minutes, but that only serves to make the next twenty even more painful for the thousands in red and white stripes in the away end. They have a good view of their team’s abject surrender as City score three times to effectively end the contest before the half-hour mark. Vardy gets the first, darting onto a Marc Albrighton free kick to loop a header up and over the giant frame of Costel Pantilimon with eleven minutes on the clock. He celebrates with a somersault, already one-fifth of the way to matching his total from last season. Another arcing Albrighton cross is glanced in by Riyad Mahrez to double City’s lead and Mahrez is soon taken down by Cattermole just inside the penalty area before placing the spot kick beyond Pantilimon. 3-0. We’re up and singing now. Three points in the bag against one of our relegation rivals? Lee Cattermole, Sunderland’s captain and midfield lynchpin, is sacrificed after half an hour to make way for a second striker, the Scottish international Steven Fletcher, as Advocaat moves to 4-4-2. The veteran Dutch manager, persuaded by Sunderland to shelve impending retirement, has been bested by his opposite number. This is the first tactical victory of the season for Ranieri, who had been written off by large sections of the press after being appointed by City. Their chief gripe, that he was the polar opposite to his predecessor Nigel Pearson, is already shown up as under-thought nonsense just half an hour into a 38-game season. Ranieri may act the fool occasionally in press conferences but he is a considered tactician. Mahrez, who had played centrally at the end of last season, is back on the wing rendering Sunderland’s defensive midfielder redundant and replaced, instead tormenting left-back Patrick Van Aanholt to an extent that borders on cruelty. The second half begins with more of the same. Vardy and Mahrez both create magnificent openings for themselves from tight angles but neither brings the fourth goal of the game. That eventually comes at the other end when a rare Sunderland attack sees Jermain Defoe find the corner of the net for his 129th Premier League goal. The visitors are visibly buoyed and set off in pursuit of a second goal, only to concede yet again. This time it’s Albrighton, albeit returning from an offside position, who takes advantage of slack play by Sunderland’s new centre-back Younes Kaboul to fire past Pantilimon. The Sunderland debutant Jeremain Lens then makes his first notable contribution of the match when he sets up Fletcher for a second consolation goal to offer brief hope for Advocaat’s men. False hope, as it turns out. The three recent City purchases who had been enjoying the show from the bench – Christian Fuchs, N’Golo Kanté and Yohan Benalouane – all come on to help strengthen an increasing rearguard action by the home side. Vardy and Mahrez are withdrawn having given everything to establish the advantage. The final whistle brings confirmation not only of victory but also City’s status as Premier League leaders. Fittingly, the key duel in the game sees one of Nigel Pearson’s many astute signings completely dismantle one of Sven-Göran Eriksson’s many indifferent ones. Mahrez has seen off better defenders than Sunderland’s Van Aanholt, who was temporarily a City player when signed on loan by Eriksson in 2011, but few have given up with so little fight. Van Aanholt’s lackadaisical approach to defending, often walking back to his position while City attack, is symptomatic of Sunderland’s problem. Frankly, City want it more. That’s nothing new where the likes of Huth and Vardy are concerned, but we were keen to see how hard-working our arrival from the Bundesliga would be. The answer was emphatic. Shinji Okazaki slotted straight into the withdrawn striker role as though he had been playing in the Premier League for years, hassling opponents and setting up counter attacks in bustling fashion. David Nugent, City’s top scorer for three years running as we fought for promotion, is on the verge of completing a £4million move back to the Championship with Middlesbrough, and Okazaki’s impressive debut plays a big part in reassuring City fans. Nugent may have been relegated to fifth choice by the signings of Okazaki, Leonardo Ulloa and Andrej Kramaric over the past twelve months, but his work rate could have been hard to replace. It is clear why the scouting team kept tabs on Okazaki for so long. He is the heir apparent to a popular player who proved effective in a winning team for many years. City fans waking up to the exciting sight of our team sitting at the top of the Premier League table for the first time since October 2000 are soon brought crashing back to earth by a headline in The Sun on Sunday. Jamie Vardy has been filmed making a ‘racial slur’ in a casino in the early hours of a pre-season Sunday morning. It barely seems credible after the summer that Leicester City have been through, but the evidence is incontrovertible. Vardy uses the term ‘Jap’ repeatedly in reference to a Far Eastern man he is accusing of trying to see his cards. The nationality of his new strike partner adds to the plot line. The tabloid exposé is a long tradition. It is hard to believe City didn’t firmly ‘remind their players of their responsibilities’, to borrow a well-worn media relations phrase, after the farce in Bangkok. Vardy’s misdemeanour merely causes them to repeat the message. There’s never any question that one of City’s most important players will meet the same fate as Tom Hopper, James Pearson and Adam Smith did in the summer. Vardy issues a swift apology and Ranieri confirms at his second pre-match press conference that there will be no sacking. City, having been bumped off the top by Manchester City’s win at West Bromwich Albion in the opening Monday night game of the season, prepare for a final ever trip to an unhappy hunting ground. Our first away game of the season takes us to Upton Park. Leicester City 4 (Vardy, Mahrez 2, Albrighton) Sunderland 2 (Defoe, Fletcher) Team: Schmeichel, De Laet (Benalouane), Morgan, Huth, Schlupp, Mahrez (Fuchs), Drinkwater, King, Albrighton, Okazaki, Vardy (Kanté) THE WILDERNESS YEARS 2002. AS AULD LANG SYNE RANG OUT FROM TINNY SPEAKERS across the East Stand into the night sky and the lights went out at Filbert Street for the last time, we tried to remember better days. For the older fans, that may have been Ken Keyworth’s hat-trick against Manchester United. Some recalled Keith Weller’s dancing tights of the seventies, the 5-0 play-off semi-final thrashing of Cambridge United in 1992 or Muzzy Izzet crashing a volley into the Tottenham Hotspur net on the night we pleaded for Martin O’Neill to stay in 1998. In the end, O’Neill’s departure was the catalyst for the club to implode and Filbert Street’s last days were not happy ones. We looked forward to the future and the move to the shiny new Walkers Stadium just a wind-assisted goal kick to the south, but dark times were ahead. Soon we were meeting in backstreet pubs forming organisations to help save our club, shaking buckets outside home games and waiting anxiously for news. In the short term, Gary Lineker rode to our rescue with the help of his friends, Emile Heskey among them, as a group of local businessmen stumped up the cash to save our club. The 2002/03 season had seen the future of the club threatened but it ended with promotion. In retrospect, that year feels like the odd one out. For a generation raised on the success of the O’Neill era, propped up...
