Deconstructing Brand Brendan

Deconstructing Brand Brendan

“When I came into here, this was a team just happy to stay in the league. Now it’s a team disappointed not to win trophies”. 

The Brendan Rodgers PR machine has been in overdrive for almost an entire year now. That the rising energy costs across Europe in that time have not seen a slowdown in its output is, in many ways, quite a remarkable feat. However, when you’re reportedly the joint fourth-highest paid manager in the Premier League - taking home more than Eric Ten Haag, Mikel Arteta and the vast majority of the rest of your peers on £10m a year - perhaps the cost of living crisis doesn’t have quite the same impact.

The date that pearler of a quote was delivered was 8th May 2021. Leicester City had just limped to a 2-1 home defeat against an Everton side fighting for their Premier League lives. A team in the kind of crisis to which Brendan Rodgers, in the mind of Brendan Rodgers, is seemingly immune.

At best, Rodgers has an unerring self-belief. Small in stature, but big in character. Brendan Rodgers does not stand on the shoulders of giants. Brendan Rodgers is a giant.

At worst, Rodgers is a conniving, self-serving egotist, gaslighting the footballing nation. Looking at the definition of gaslighting is like holding up a mirror to Leicester City fans’ lived reality right now: “a manipulative tactic in which a person, to gain power, plants seeds of uncertainty in another person’s mind. The self-doubt and constant questioning slowly cause the individual to question their reality”.

Are we?… Are we?… Are we being gaslighted by Brendan Rodgers?! 

Maybe it was all just a dream. Those 90s nights against Red Star Belgrade and Atletico Madrid. Matt Elliott’s brace. Claridge in extra time. The dilly dongs. The eleven, it’s heaven. When Ranieri told us to keep dreaming. And Bocelli. Beautiful Bocelli.

Do us a favour and bring us out of this distorted reality and back to a fair and just world where the entirety of time is segmented into that before Rodgers walked into Leicester City Football Club in 2019: Before Brendan (BB). And that from that fateful day onwards: After Brendan (AB). The start of World War Two? That would be 80 years BB. The 9/11 attack in New York? 18 years BB, of course. And what a time to be alive during the Covid-19 global pandemic: from 1 year AB to 2 years AB.

Forgive me for jolting us back to earth with a sharp dose of reality: Leicester City have just lost their fifth consecutive game. A wretched season has a squad crammed with players coveted by other clubs 3 points off the bottom of the table and dumped out of the FA Cup by the second string side of a team in the division below. The year is of course 2023, not 4 AB, but Rodgers is somehow still taking home his £10m a year.

In the coming months, one of a couple of potential scenarios will also become reality. Leicester City will be relegated. Leicester City will scrape survival and the malaise will limp in year 5 AB. Or Leicester City will finally sack Brendan Rodgers and avoid the disastrous outcome of scenario one. In any scenario, the football media will eulogise about what a great manager Brendan Rodgers is and what a great job he has done at Leicester City.

The truth lies somewhere between those inevitable platitudes - Brand Brendan has to be worth something after its careful cultivation after all - and those who will use those lazy labels disgruntled football fans love to use like ‘fraud’ and ‘charlatan’. The truth is that Brendan Rodgers is a good manager, who has done a good job at Leicester City (winning the club's first ever FA Cup of course), but he is not elite and it has long gone stale.

A reluctance to acknowledge this and make the necessary managerial change at board level is what could change stale to rotten.

This is not the first time that Leicester City have been in horrendous form under Rodgers. Prior to the World Cup, an awful start to the season saw them lose 6 of the first 7 league games. In consecutive seasons where they had played their way into the top 4 with seemingly unassailable positions, late season collapses saw them miss out on Champions League football. And for large parts of last season Leicester languished in the bottom half of the table whilst also struggling in a Europa League campaign that had started with them as favourites to win the tournament. If you find the words ‘European semi-final’ in the pros column when assessing Rodgers’ tenure, please give yourself a quick slap in the face, apologise to the rest of the class and remember it’s a competition we shouldn’t have even been in had we performed as expected in the Europa League.

In pursuit of his ‘philosophy’ (another 21st century football buzzword), Rodgers has filled his squad with nice boys who play pretty football. After a second top four collapse, he spoke about needing to bring in players with a winning mentality. His answer to this was to sign Boubakary Soumare - who is yet to show anything like the right mentality - and Patson Daka. League winners in substandard European leagues but far from the nous required to add some steel to a Leicester side with a soft underbelly.

It’s an underbelly that has oft been their undoing. When Leicester faced crunch games to secure Champions League football, they wilted. The wheels came off at Bournemouth where a 1-0 half time lead turned into a 4-1 defeat to a side who went on to relegation. A 2-1 lead over Tottenham with 80 seconds left somehow finished with a 3-2 victory for Tottenham. On consecutive occasions they’ve been humiliated away to Nottingham Forest, losing on both occasions to an opposition inferior in quality but vastly superior in grit.

This summer Rodgers elected to exit Kasper Schmeichel, one of the few with a winners’ mentality, from the club. In January he let Marc Albrighton, a man elected vice captain following Schmeichel’s departure, leave on the final day of the transfer window. Leicester are sleepwalking into a relegation scrap without the men who know what it takes to win.

The captain’s armband has been passed round more often than a parcel at a kid’s birthday party. The favoured candidate prior to his injury was Youri Tielemans. Tielemans has been sensational at times for Leicester - Rodgers’ ‘coach on the pitch’ as he likes to label him. But for two years he has refused to commit his future to the club. Winding his contract down with a clear intention to leave the club for nothing this summer. He is a man with no skin in the game regarding whether Leicester City are a Premier League club next season. The armband now resides with James Maddison who is now treading the exact same path.

Is this really the best this squad can offer up in terms of leadership?

Of course another reason why the armband has been passed round so many times has been thanks to injuries. In an era where sports science teams can predict with relative accuracy a player’s likelihood to sustain an injury, the injury record during Rodgers’ time at the club has been nothing short of a disgrace. At first it was supposedly due to Covid schedules, then the number of games being played due to European competition. But it continues to be a theme - exactly as it has at Rodgers’ previous clubs - and he made changes to a department that had delivered years of impressive injury records upon his arrival at the club. Whether through his training schedules or his team selections, Rodgers is running multi-million pound footballers into the ground.

Injuries have placed a huge strain on the squad. And it’s a squad already creaking under pressure thanks to poor recruitment and bad man management. Caglar Soyuncu has been cast aside in favour of Dan Amartey - a man who looks like the thought of anything more than a simple 10-yard pass absolutely terrifies him. Soyuncu meanwhile is reportedly wanted by Diego Simeone, a manager who has pretty much trademarked defensive solidity. Jannick Vestergaard, a man that Rodgers tracked for a year and a half but somehow failed to spot turned slower than planet earth (something sorely exposed when Rodgers asked him to play in a high defensive line), is the latest in the shadows, just as Rodgers has decided he wants to play with three central defenders again. What could possibly go wrong?

In recent times the likes of Nampalys Mendy and Ayoze Perez have been out in the cold then desperately thrown into the fire as Rodgers looks to address the short-comings created by his poor recruitment and that dire injury record. It is in many ways remarkable that any player would want to keep playing for Rodgers given that there remain not many buses in Leicester that squad members have not been thrown under by Brendan when things have gone wrong. 

That brings us to perhaps Rodgers’ biggest crime over the past 18 months: his serial disrespect of the club, its owners and its fans.

After being backed financially in the transfer market better than any Leicester manager in history, last summer the club made a decision to reduce the unsustainable spending that had been allowed to accumulate in recent seasons. Post-match interviews for the first four months of the season became a weekly whine. How could this £10m a year manager who prides himself on his coaching pedigree be expected to get a tune out of a squad containing the likes of James Maddison, Harvey Barnes, Jamie Vardy, Youri Tielemans, Timothy Castagne, Wilfred Ndidi and Kelechi Iheanacho? How could a squad that had been competing in European football for the previous couple of seasons be likely to achieve anything other than scraping Premier League survival?

Read any sports performance book and mentality or mindset will be mentioned as one of the most critical enables of high performance. This manager has repeatedly talked down capability, set a criminally low bar for expectations and showed a huge lack of faith in those expected to go out and perform for him week in week out. Where Ranieri once said “I don’t want to wake up. I want to keep dreaming”, Rodgers has been saying “This is a nightmare”. His latest soundbite being that it would be a ‘huge achievement’ to keep this team in the Premier League.

The fish rots from the head down.

Prospective signings: roll up, roll up. Come to a club with no money, a manager who has no faith in your potential new team mates and where, if the magician in charge continues to work miracles, you can hit the heady heights of 40 points. The self-preservation exercise that Rodgers has been on for some time now damages the club. Were he to find a bus big enough, the entire club would be under it before Rodgers showed any signs of accountability.

It all begs the question, how the hell is he still in a job?

The style of play has become laboured and unadventurous. Even the newest of signings are now getting long-term injuries. The recruitment has been poor (not identifying a need for a new goalkeeper in January a sackable offence alone in my book). The manager's conduct has unquestionably harmed the club's brand. Results and league position are massively out of sync with the calibre of the squad... Leicester City Football Club, what on earth are you doing to yourself?!

If this really is a club “just happy to stay in the league”, the board have to act now. It’s high time Brand Brendan found a new home.

The Moscow 25

It’s Friday morning. I’m averaging 3.5 hours sleep for the past couple of nights and the greeting at the Russian visa application center is as Russian as you can imagine: about as surly as Nigel Pearson in a post-match press conference.

Just a couple of hours prior, I’d touched down in London fresh from a disappointing Leicester City defeat to Legia Warsaw which left our European adventure looking in real jeopardy. European campaigns haven’t come around too often as a Leicester fan and we’d all mourned the loss of trips to Athens, Braga and Prague last season thanks to Covid so - although we’d been handed a group which felt like karma’s payback for a Champions League campaign in picture postcard destinations - I wasn’t going to miss out on the chance to see us playing European football away.

“Why nobody ever bring fast track forms?”. The lady behind the desk at the application center is exasperated now. She’s muttering under her breath in Russian and if looks could kill she’d be reading me my last rites. Admittedly, I’ve been complacent here. I’ve turned up at the visa application center in the mistaken belief that a £170 fast track application (the only option for anyone who went to Warsaw given the time you’d be without your passport for the standard application) means they do the leg work and things just get sorted there and then.

I’m glancing a checklist now that she’s printed and tossed at me across the desk. The four critical things she tells me I need for the fast track application: two blank pages in my passport (check), a letter of invitation to Russia from either a hotel or a stamped and signed form from an authorised Russian travel agent (no check), a hard copy of a passport photograph (no check) and a completed and printed visa application form (no check). It’s going to be a long day.

What follows next is an Apprentice-style task. Ringing round travel agents in London asking if they do the stamped and signed Russia form, walking to the nearest ones I can find on Google only to find they’re closed down (with the pandemic having curtailed a good number of the smaller/niche offices). Eventually, I get through to a lady who tells me “we don’t do it, but I think I have the details of someone that has done one for us in the past”.

I’m now 15 minutes across London in an Uber at a small office - The Russia House - down a back alley off Borough High Street. A nice old chap is asking me when I need this by. The answer is yesterday. He puffs his cheeks and tells me we need something back from Moscow and they’re not so responsive on a Friday afternoon. “Give me £50 and one hour and I’ll get this done”. This visa process is getting even more expensive.

True to his word, an hour later I have an invitation letter from a hotel I haven’t even booked yet with the stamps and signatures that should hopefully appease the surly Russian lady back at the visa center. Some passport photographs of a dishevelled looking post-Warsaw version of me and we’re flying through this now.

I’m in the corner of the visa application center again, three and a half hours after I first arrived here and tapping away on a computer filling in the final piece of the puzzle: the application form. Categorically the most ridiculous form I’ve ever completed in my life. “List every country you have visited in the last 10 year with entry and exit dates”, “give us details about your parents and where they were born”, “tell us if you have social media”, “declare here whether you’ve ever said anything negative about the Russian Federation”.

I’m tired, I’m done with this and I’m back in front of the surly lady from earlier who hates me slightly less now that I have what I need. Just the payment needed now. Oh, and all of your biometric data. Thank you.

Anyone who travelled to Moscow will have their own either more or less stressful version of this story. Many had tied their application center visit in with the away trip to Millwall. All had had to take a day off work to get this done and all had done it without any news from the club about tickets.

Flights had been booked (some flying direct, others priced out of those routes and having to do 9/10 hour stopovers) - £400 return for me - and hotels were a requirement for the visa application so everyone also had some form of reservation. The final piece of the jigsaw that we just couldn’t get our hands on: details from the club about a match ticket.

The next couple of weeks were a waiting game. Waiting to get your passport back in the post and waiting on any form of communication from Leicester City Football Club about the ticket situation. One week before the game, we’re asked to “register our interest” and word starts to circle that there might not even be any tickets. Communication from the club has been about as effective as in a Leicester City back four without Jonny Evans. “We’ve been speaking to Spartak Moscow for the past three weeks” we see in an email shared online - the fixtures were announced six weeks ago…

Eventually, we get a one day window of opportunity to buy a ticket. Another £13 on the Moscow (a) bill. Just hours before the tickets go off sale, it looks like about 14 have sold. There could be more Leicester players than Leicester fans in the stadium at this rate.

Our final pre-departure hurdle after the tickets is a PCR test in the 3 days before flying - throw another £78 on the cost list for that (with many having done it in Leicester before the Manchester United home match) - and then we’re on our way to Moscow.

Knowing that the away following was so small, I’d set up a WhatsApp group via the Foxestalk messageboard to arrange a pre-match meet so that we could have some beers together and head to the stadium en masse (if we even qualified for being a ‘masse’). The night before, Spartak Moscow announced 25 away end tickets had been sold and I realised I had about 50% of the away end in the group there and then. The beauty of a football messageboard in action.

It’s game day and in dribs and drabs Foxes fans start walking through the door of the bar. Some have come in groups, some alone, some are Leicester lads living in Moscow who just wanted a couple of hours hearing a familiar accent and some have family in Moscow that they’ve been visiting. Everyone has their own tale of getting here and the hoops they had to jump through to do so.

A couple of hours later, we’re on our way to the stadium. Some Russian journalists have come down to the meet up to interview us for tv and online articles and one of them escorts us on the metro. We’re even singing Leicester chants in the street now with the confidence a couple of beers and being with your own fans gives you.

At no point is there any hint of danger or trouble. Colours are kept under wraps but the group of blokes discussing whether Jannik Vestergaard is slower than a Russian visa application process or if Brendan Rodgers is really good enough for the elite is probably a bit of a give away. Some Russian lads offer a swig of their brandy and tell us that, if Leicester score, they hope it’s Jamie Vardy. Global icon.

The Russian police have laid on a shuttle bus (a minibus) from the metro to the away end and as we get off outside the turnstiles we’re greeted with the standard Covid document checks and two ladies in full traditional Russian dress (looking like when they’re done one will be stored inside the other and that if we opened the smaller one of the two up we’d find a series of progressively smaller Russian women inside) and offering us a local bread based delicacy. I sincerely hope any Spartak fans doing the return leg get greeted with a massive pork pie and Stilton cheese on toothpicks outside the away end at the King Power.

Up in the seats, the players are out on the pitch for kick-off and we arrive to find about 20 Zambians in the away end. Some claim they’re Daka’s family, others that they’re Zambian students in Moscow, others just that they are here for Daka and had bought tickets in the home end but then been offered a move to the away end. That’ll be two goal scorer global icons we now have in our ranks (more to come on that later).

Less than 10 minutes into the match, it’s +1 for the away end attendance. A Spartak fan has jumped the fence into the away section. The stewards look worried and fairly swiftly grab him and start to bundle him to an exit. As he’s being pulled away, he desperately shouts in Russian that he’s here to swap scarfs. We all look at each other like “anyone want to swap scarves?” and one of the guys eventually makes the trade. At least, with his Spartak Moscow scarf, one of our guys now has an alibi if the metro gets tricky post-match!

It goes without saying that the match itself was great to witness and a bit of an “I was there” moment. Patson Daka, to the delight of our Zambian friends, properly announces himself in a Leicester shirt with four goals which leave us asking each other if a Leicester player has ever scored four in a single game and if that makes him our highest ever scorer in Europe (the answer is ‘yes’ - although not exclusively - to both). 

And with the 4-3 thriller we’ve given ourselves a shot at more trips like this.

Competing vocally with thousands of home fans as an away end of 25 put us on a hiding to nothing but everyone gave it a good go and hopefully we were heard once or twice. The Zambians joined in with anything Daka-related and anything simple, but ‘When You’re Smiling’ was a bit of a stretch for them. Leaning over the railings at the front of the stand shouting “we want five” with accompanying hand gesture did however rattle the home fans on Vardy’s behalf given that he didn’t get on the pitch.

Reports from a Leicester fan in the WhatsApp group who was in the home end tell us we were heard a couple of times and the players acknowledged the away end at the full time whistle. Soyuncu was the first over and we saw that post-win James Maddison basking in the glory of it all in a way we haven’t seen for a while.

After a short wait in the stadium we’re escorted on foot back to the metro by the Russian police (at least one copper per Leicester fan/Zambian) and off into the center of Moscow to drink the night away with new found friends. Social media sees a flood of appreciation for ‘The Moscow 25’ from seemingly everyone but our own club. 

The club were, undoubtedly, about as helpful as Jon Moss with this trip and, having been in Warsaw and Moscow and seen nothing on the club’s official social media feeds, as you typically do with an away game, there is definitely something going on with them not wanting to publicise the following in Europe. It felt, many times, that the club didn’t really want us to be there both before and during the trip. Truth be told, it does leave a little bit of a sour taste.

That said, none of us were there for the recognition or the acclaim, we were there simply to see our football team try and earn the right to give us more trips like this, regardless of whether the club really want us there. Because this trip showed that if you bring like-minded people together, with a shared passion or interest, then, regardless of the logistical or administrative hurdles, good memories will be made.

The Moscow 25 are dead. Long live the Naples 1500…

Monday 2nd May 2016

Monday 2nd May 2016 - Chelsea (2) - (2) Tottenham Hotspur

The point at Old Trafford had left Leicester 8 points clear of Spurs with two games of our own left to play whilst they had three left, starting with a tough looking fixture against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. Their goal difference being superior by 9 goals effectively gave them another point over Leicester as well.

Chelsea had endured a bad season by their standards and were barely in the top half of the table having been champions the season before. Guus Hiddink had returned to take charge until the end of the season and it seemed that the only thing that Chelsea had left to salvage some crumb of comfort from their season was to deny Spurs the chance of a first-ever Premier League title. 

I’d particularly enjoyed some of the quotes coming out from the Chelsea players in the weeks before their game against Tottenham as Eden Hazard, who’d had an awful season, vowed that they would do everything that they could to beat Tottenham and Cesc Fabregas had done similar. A video had circulated online of their away end at Bournemouth singing: “Beat fucking Tottenham. You’d better beat fucking Tottenham!”. We seemingly had a side with some very good players vowing to do their best to help us to the title.

The game fell on a Bank Holiday Monday so I’d had a pretty chilled day after only getting back into London from Manchester fairly late the night before. I was going to watch the game by myself on my laptop in my room and toyed with the idea of getting some booze in (particularly questioning whether or not I should buy some champagne). I eventually decided on doing so and made a fairly late call when I was actually in the shop (without wanting to be presumptuous) of purchasing a bottle - this could be a once in a lifetime thing so a large part of me just thought “why not?”...

I settled down to watch the match and had learned my lesson from watching the Tottenham vs West Brom match that my computer screen would be a few seconds behind my phone and I would inevitably get messages through from mates as things developed. The phone was put out of reach on the side. For the next 90 minutes it would be just me, the computer screen and some bottles of beer.

Tottenham started very well. They came flying out of the blocks, the game was fast-paced and at times Chelsea were clinging on. In the 35th minute their pressure paid off as Harry Kane slotted a neat finish in to put them 1-0 up - this wasn’t how I’d hoped it would go. That said, all hope was not lost as just one goal for Chelsea would hand Leicester the title, but, just one minute before half time, that hope was ebbing away as Son struck to make it 2-0.

It was now looking as if we’d have to beat Everton at home to win the title and the prospect of that made me nervous. We’d be without Drinkwater who had been in many ways the heartbeat of the team and Everton had some good players despite the fact that they’d had a very mediocre season under manager Roberto Martinez. Even so, I’d seen all too recently how a dodgy refereeing decision could decide a game and I didn’t want us to be in the situation of needing to go to Stamford Bridge on the last day of the season needing anything (Spurs had two winnable fixtures to come in their remaining games of Southampton at home and relegation-threatened Newcastle away). 

At half time, as the pundits on Sky Sports eulogised over Tottenham’s first half performance (Graeme Souness in particular had appeared very pro-Spurs and pre-match had put just two Leicester players in a combined eleven), I was in touch with my dad who was at my mum’s cousin John’s house in Blackpool having stayed in the North West after the Manchester United game:

Me: Are you watching? Everton at home it is then!

Dad: Barring a miracle

Me: Be nice if Hazard puts his money where his mouth is! Told you we’ll draw with Everton and Chelsea and do it in a way that takes 10 years off my life

Dad: How long til a yellow card turns to red?

Me: Can see that Clattenburg doesn’t want to send anyone off so will take a lot but Dembele’s season is over retrospectively. Walker should be too

Dad: Come on Saints!

The match had been pretty enthralling for the neutrals just because of how spicy it had been. The Tottenham players were more than ready to do whatever it took to win and almost seemed to take exception to the Chelsea players wanting to beat them so much. Kyle Walker had already put in a pretty meaty challenge and in the midst of a fracas Moussa Dembele had tried to gouge a Chelsea player’s eye (something that would surely end his season with a suspension to come from the FA post-match). It felt like there could be a red card waiting for someone in the second half.

The second half got underway and instantly Chelsea looked better than they had been before the break. Eden Hazard had come on as a substitute and looked in the mood for it. The season before he’d been the best player in the league but this season he’d looked like he would only turn it on when it suited and that hadn’t been often. I was re-assured by the fact that it looked like tonight suited him.

Just 13 minutes into the second half, Chelsea put a corner into the box. The ball bounced around and with a slice of fortune dropped to Gary Cahill who lashed a shot into the back of the Spurs’ net. Game on. The phone was back in-hand now with it having looked unlikely that tonight was the night. Text from dad: “one more…?”.

The longer the game went on the more Spurs lost their cool but also their rhythm. All of a sudden the game had changed and Spurs were offering very little in an attacking sense whilst Chelsea were pressing on. Every Leicester fan, including myself, had their hopes up.

And then it happened. With just 7 minutes left Eden Hazard picked the ball up and drove towards the Tottenham box. As he approached he played the ball into the feet of Diego Costa who turned with it on the edge of the area, looking to get a shot away. As the ball ran away from him, realising that the best he could do to salvage the situation would be to find a team-mate, he slid to play the ball back to Hazard. With one swipe of his right boot he curled the ball into the top right-hand corner with an unstoppable shot past a despairing Hugo Lloris. In any season it would have been a ‘Goal of the Season’ contender and I’ve never cheered the goal of another team so loud in all of my life. Chelsea were back level and if they held on Leicester City would be Champions of England.

I spent the next 7 minutes of the match trying to stay calm, hoping that Chelsea could hold out for the draw and trying not to think too much about what it all meant. It’s all very well thinking that it would be nice to see Leicester win the league in a match they win or in front of the home crowd but, faced with the option of having it secured by Chelsea holding on for the draw, those thoughts soon went out of the window. There were some nerves but Tottenham had clearly lost their heads (they ended up racking up a Premier League record nine yellow cards) and did not look like they had anything left to muster up a winner.

With the score still at 2-2, for the dying minutes I muted the Sky Sports commentary and loaded up the BBC Radio Leicester commentary which was actually ahead of the tv due to being a quicker radio feed. It just felt right that, if there was to be the expected crowning moment for Leicester in a game that I was not at, I should hear it via the local radio. Just as I’d listened to many a Leicester match over the years from Yeovil Town to Manchester United on the airwaves.

The full-time whistle blew to spark celebrations from the Chelsea fans and players and then the tv pictures cut to Jamie Vardy’s house where the Leicester players had gathered to watch the match. They were going crazy, jumping up and down and shouting but my reaction was somewhat more subdued and I think I just sat there smiling taking it all in (without it having sunk in).

My phone began to go crazy with messages of congratulations pouring in and, just as I had my phone in hand to ring him, a call came through from dad. I can’t really remember what we discussed but I think it was along the lines of how good the game against Everton would be on the Saturday (as Leicester would now be presented with the Premier League trophy and crowned Champions of England) and just sharing a mutual delight in what had happened.

When I was off the phone, I cracked open the bottle of champagne that I had bought, took a swig from the bottle and sat back to savour the moment. And that’s when it hit me. I absolutely balled my eyes out! I couldn’t tell you why I was crying but they were happy tears. I’d invested so much time, energy and effort into following Leicester and they’d just achieved something that I never dreamed would be possible.

I thought about all of the crap times that I’d seen as a Leicester fan. Of a period in between 2005 and 2008 when year after year I turned up each week to watch mundane and dire football from bang average players, of trekking up and down the country to at times see them not turn up or even try, and the numerous times Leicester City had got my hopes up only to dash them. In that single moment, as I sat there in my bedroom, they all became worth it. Suddenly, none of them were wasted times because for what Leicester City had just achieved to feel so incredible they had to have happened.

As a Leicester City fan, I was part of a now privileged collection of supporters who had got to experience something that most other supporters would never get to. I wondered how many people would be thinking about me on that Monday night, enviously wanting to know what I was thinking, feeling and what this meant to me. In case there were any, I posted a status on Facebook: 

“I couldn't possibly encapsulate what this means in a quick status. I've followed Leicester since 1997, at times questioning why but I've persevered because it's about more than just the football, more than just the winning. Those of you who know me well will know that most of my weekends are dictated by where those 11 men are kicking a ball around that weekend. I've stood next to my dad through it all, good and bad, and the best thing about all of this is that, whichever one of us dies first, we'll look back and know that we shared in this most unlikely of stories together this season…”

When I stripped away the goals, the red cards and the final whistles, there was one thing that made following Leicester worthwhile regardless of the result, the horrendous place to which we had travelled or the cost incurred. In the main, I’d done it all with my dad and I appreciated that having watched this season unfold first-hand at many of the matches together, there were memories that would last a lifetime.

Dad had never been on Facebook so I copied and pasted the status over to him in a text message and, having made a good dent in the bottle of champagne, thanked him for taking me to that first ever game. He then thanked me and asked me if I’d seen the footage of the players at Vardy’s house so I replied: “You don’t have to thank me, I mean it. We’ve seen so much together and if it wasn’t for you taking me to see them then I could be sat here tonight enjoying the story as a neutral or disappointed as a Spurs fan. You (and mum) have dedicated so much time and money to allow me to experience this and we’ll get our reward next Saturday. Yeah, saw the players. Glad for them to have their party, bit of a shame it didn’t happen at a match but this was done over 36 games and we were there for most. How many people can say that about a story that people will talk about in 50 years’ time?” His response summed it up perfectly: “Not 50, forever”.

What followed was the best one-man party ever as I made my way through the rest of the champagne, finished the beer I’d bought and topped it off with some rum and RedBull that I had in - all to a soundtrack of ‘We Are The Champions’ by Queen and ‘Rocking All Over The World’ (Status Quo) and ‘The Best’ (Tina Turner), two songs that evoked memories of Leicester success as the paraded League Cups round Filbert Street when I was a boy.

I’ve no idea what time I got to bed or how I got up on time for work the next day and I was horrendously hungover (not that I cared). Upon his arrival into the office (I had somehow got there first) me and my Leicester supporting-collegue Tom shared a congratulatory hug and then recounted our tales of the previous night whilst predominantly male colleagues congratulated us. My mate Jonny messaged me at two o’clock to ask if I was getting much work done and I replied; “So hungover, no idea what time I went to bed! There were tears, there was vomit… Kind of wish I’d been in Leicester but Saturday will be one hell of a party”.

When I got home from work in the evening I put the Channel 4 news on and they were broadcasting the national news from the King Power Stadium: “Watching the first 15 minutes of the national news and it’s all about LCFC winning The Premier League. Somebody pinch me!” (via Twitter). It looked like the party in Leicester hadn’t stopped since the final whistle at Stamford Bridge the night before and a large part of me yearned to be there but I knew that the real party would be on Saturday for the game against Everton where they would receive the trophy and, in my new favourite phrase, be crowned ‘Champions of England’. It was all, without question, stuff that could be filed under: “never thought I’d see the day”.

We were the champions.

When The Truth Offends

When The Truth Offends

“When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there. But it is still there”.

This is a line from the excellent HBO historical drama ‘Chernobyl’ and, as the UK comes to the end of an unprecedented Easter weekend, it can at times feel like we are all living through a drama that is being written right now and which, when we return to some form of post-Covid normality, will be put forward for acclaim alongside those other television series and shows on which we binge to while away the banal hours of lockdown.

But how will history judge the lead characters of our time? Who will be the capable and who will be the culpable?

It feels very much to me, that those portrayals are already being subtly crafted now before our very eyes. At the end of a weekend where we reached the point of over 10,000 people in this country having lost their lives to Coronavirus, it has felt all too easy to lose sight of the magnitude of those figures. For they have become just that.

Read it again: 10,000 people in this country have lost their lives.

In a matter of days, it is likely that this number will surpass 11,000 and then 12,000. I wonder at what point that stops becoming digits rolled out at a daily briefing with some nice bar charts and graphs comparing us to other countries who are, in many way, incomparable. And I wonder if that point will bring the type of questions we need answers to around why this figure has been so high, whether we could have done things differently or better to prevent such fatalities and what the exact plan is moving forward to prevent any more avoidable deaths, especially to those working in our Health Service.

Had you read any of the major newspapers this weekend, you’d have done well – on any of the front pages – to find the real news. That 10,000 people in this country have now lost their lives to this virus in the UK. You would have, instead, seen that Boris Johnson was better. That Boris Johnson was out of hospital. That Boris Johnson planned to take a couple of weeks recovering at Chequers. That Boris Johnson had praised the NHS who had saved his life with heart-warming reference to nurse Luis from Portugal.

When any Head of State becomes seriously ill, of course this is news. But the truth – that truth which may offend but is still there in the background – is that this Prime Minister being ill should not be a free pass on facing the tough questions that need asking about the UK’s handling of this pandemic up until now and from here onwards. Do not let anyone tell you that it is not right to question your government during a pandemic.

Accountability keeps standards high, but I’m not seeing much of it right now.

What I see happening right now – and what frustrates the life out of me – is a mass distraction campaign. When our government should be delivering, they are instead campaigning. The dumbing down of serious issues – in the exact same way that ‘get Brexit done’ Brexit was broken down into simple numbers and phrases that could be spoon-fed to the population (see ‘oven ready’ and ‘take back control’) – we hear about ‘Herculean efforts’ and ‘ramping up’ when they are asked why, two weeks into the thick of this crisis, our National Health Service staff are dying because they are not supplied with the appropriate equipment to do their job.

When they are asked if they are sorry that doctors and nurses have died due to a lack of basic protection, they cannot even muster an apology to the families of those victims. Priti Patel does wear empathy and humanity well at the best of times, but there is only one answer to that question: of course we are sorry and we are doing everything we can to try and minimise the chances of this happening further (here’s how and here’s when).

History already has not been kind to the way this crisis has been handled in the UK. When scientists were advising we were on the cusp of an unprecedented pandemic, our Prime Minister was telling the world he was shaking hands with Coronavirus patients and smirking as he effectively declared Britain would “see this thing off in 12 weeks”. When Italy was telling us of the horrors it had been facing, we were somehow different because we were Great Britain.

There is the old saying that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. Well if you elect on slogans and personas rather than policies then you get... slogans and ‘good ol’ Boris’ personas. Something deep in the Brexit memory recess jarred when, asked about the UK’s comparatively low quantity of testing to other countries when the World Health Organisation had advised “testing, testing, testing” as the key to handling this crisis best, Matt Hancock replied: “No test is better than a bad test”. You don’t have to think too hard to remember which deal was better than a bad deal.

And if you elect a government that consistently shows an inability to care for the most vulnerable in our society (see ‘herd’) then don’t be surprised when your government initially pursues a strategy of immunity for our ‘herd’ (see ‘society’). Similar to how, if you also elect a government that has consistently voted against funding and pay rises for the NHS, you also get a health service that is on its knees.

So what of the state the NHS was in coming into this pandemic? When do we ask those questions?

An intensive care capacity of 7 beds per 100,000 of population – Italy and Spain were at 12+ just for comparison – shows that, however great the work to mobilise and build the Nightingale hospitals has been, we were in-part solving a problem we had already created for ourselves. It has also been very easy to forget over the past couple of weeks that the NHS is not a charity. Whilst clapping on your doorstep, running a 5k or shaving your head are admirable and easy ways to support – so too is holding your government accountable to our state funding that service adequately to begin with.

A simple search on YouTube brings up videos of Barrack Obama and Bill Gates a few years ago predicting in the next 5-10 years that a deadly virus would sweep the globe: don’t let anyone tell you it was impossible for a government to expect that this might happen.

Senior scientists were urging the government to raise the risk level of the coronavirus as early as December and January: don’t let anyone tell you that we didn’t have enough time to prepare more. 

Britain missed 8 meetings with EU Heads of State or health ministers in between 13^th February and 30^th March on the pandemic: don’t let anyone tell you that we’ve done everything we could have done.

Finally, this is also not a war. If you find yourself comparing Boris Johnson to Churchill or eulogising over a speech that pits us against an ‘enemy’ or puts us ‘in the trenches’ then take a moment to consider how the fallen in this supposed war are currently being treated (largely nameless and faceless in our national media). We are not fighting over land, freedom of speech or religion here – we’re tackling a virus.

Why are our national media - many of whom are in cahoots with the Conservative elite - happy to portray this as such? And why has it been too easy to lose sight of the devastating reality of those numbers of dead and how they could have perhaps been lower?

I know that right now may not be the right time for all of the tough questions to be answered but I just hope that, as our national press fails to ask the right questions or write the real stories, we don’t lose sight of what those should be. My fear, in a weekend where LAD Bible are allowed a seat at the table to ask the government on their Covid-19 strategy – whilst on their Instagram feed I can’t see ‘stories’ about a girl cooking her own McDonalds Big Mac from home and quirky dog videos (which probably speaks volumes for who the government is happy to have scrutinise their strategy right now) – is that they will be obscured in a haze or PR campaigning and distraction.

My fear would be that the responsibility falls to us, the British people, to somehow cut through the noise and the rhetoric and make sure that these questions are asked. Consider whether you had, thus far, been willing to ask them.

There is also a line in ‘Chernobyl’ – about failing to show accountability for the actions taken before and during an unprecedented catastrophe that brings huge threat to human life –  “Where I once would fear the cost of truth, now I only ask: what is the cost of lies?”

What is the cost if we do not ask the tough questions that currently sit unasked by our press and unanswered by our government?

Shakespeare's Final Act

It’s mid-December 2015 and, such is the cyclical nature of football, as one man’s story is just beginning, another’s is ending.

As Jose Mourinho, the man who had once famously described him as: “too old to change his mentality” and ridiculed the absence of a major trophy win on his CV, stood in the technical area adjacent to him, powerless to claw back any semblance of influence over his dissenting playing staff, Claudio Ranieri was about to prove that he who keeps learning stays young.

On that balmy night at the King Power Stadium, Mourinho’s second Chelsea chapter closed. The pen depicting Claudio Ranieri’s fairytale was about to start scribbling away.

In a season which dominated headlines and captured imaginations worldwide, this was the first result - a 2-1 home victory over the previous season’s champions Chelsea - that thrust Leicester City into the limelight.

The thing about limelight though, is that it can change complexions.

As this became a tale which just had to be told, football writers, journalists, pundits and supporters scrambled to try and construct the narrative. A club that had built steadily off the pitch and achieved a sumptuous blend of grit and finesse on it - thanks in no small part to the work of predecessor Nigel Pearson and his trusty aides Steve Walsh and Craig Shakespeare - were daring to dine at football’s top table.

The plucky underdog, the perennial underachiever, was wearing the dinner jacket of top dog.

After they’d stayed for the main course following this impressive starter, Leicester City got their just desserts. A maiden top-tier title.

When fairytales come with a dollop of enchantment, they have a tendency to capture the imagination of an entire globe and to break down those linguistic, geographical or political barriers that exist. The Leicester City story became everybody’s story.

Fast forward almost two years and that reader’s grasp of the story remains.

The fairytale came to end in the orange-infused streets of Seville when orange seemingly became the new black as Claudio Ranieri’s sacking led to the kind of widespread mourning reserved for treasures of a national proportion.

The obituaries were as glowing as the pointed words about Craig Shakespeare and the Leicester players were sharp. The fairytale had become a tragedy, the heroes the villains of the piece and everything had all gone a bit… Shakespearian.

Time has passed, Leicester City faded almost back into the background, and those who previously had no reason to speak of them returned to their ‘Big Four’ daily read.

That was until, after four months and 26 games, Craig Shakespeare was sacked earlier this week.
Everyone, again, had an opinion. Everyone wanted their say. This Leicester City story clearly still belonged to more than just those who had been travelling the country to watch underwhelming performances this season.

But had those who cared to criticise the casting directors in this tremendous tale of Leicester City’s, the Thai owners of the club, also taken such effort to travel up to Huddersfield to watch an abject display against a newly-promoted side who Tottenham Hotspur (the same Tottenham Hotspur who finished a full 11 points behind Leicester in the title-winning season) dispatched with ease a couple of weeks later?

Had they been at Arsenal for the season’s curtain-raiser to see what should been an opening day victory turned into ‘nul points’ through some questionable substitutions?

Had they consistently despaired at a sentimental reluctance to change from a predictable and dated 442 formation which only endured through an unwavering sense of loyalty to the self-policing dressing room that had delivered former glories?

As the sequel to the Leicester success story was written, Shakespeare was unable to break character. ‘Shakey’ to the players, he couldn't quite shift those unintentionally undermining tags; ‘nice guy’ and ‘great coach’. Andy King starting games in central midfield over three years after promotion to the Premier League caused some to question his ability to ad lib.

In the wake of Ranieri’s departure, Leicester fans had to endure the mud that was thrown in their club’s direction. The crazy notion that Ranieri had somehow earned the right to take their club to a point lower than that which it was at when he arrived. That consistently poor performances were acceptable just because of what had gone before.

Since Shakespeare departed, the afterword has been much the same. “How could they?” “The game’s gone”. “He deserved more time”.

But is there not something admirable about a club wanting to achieve again? To try and make that fairy tale that brought with it the world’s affection something more than a one-story series? To create, for the likes of Shakespeare and Ranieri, a legacy that reads as more than just one season of wonder instead of the club becoming the old drunk in the corner of the bar talking about how he was once everybody's friend and on top of the world?

It seems as quickly as people were happy to build Leicester up, they are content to just as swiftly tear them down. That old British thirst for a fall from grace.

There is no doubting that the decision to cast aside Shakespeare was ruthless. But also without doubt is the message that it sends: Leicester City are no longer happy to be perennial Premier League strugglers or bouncing between English football’s top-two tiers.

In years to come, as we dust off the cover of the old Leicester fairytale, Craig Shakespeare will be remembered with reverence. Managers will come and managers will go as that football cycle doesn't stop turning. But Shakespeare's name is written in Leicester City folklore.

Just as Mourinho found his, such a respected figure within the football fraternity as Shakespeare is, another role will come calling for ‘Shakey’. And when he looks back on his instrumental part in nine years of unprecedented success at Leicester City he’ll realise that such longevity was the exception and not the rule.

Enter stage left, Leicester’s next protagonist.

Time To Say Goodbye

Arms aloft, a wave, 2,500 buoyant fans singing his name, he turns and he is gone. As Claudio Ranieri strode across the turf at the Estadio Ramon Sanchez Pizjuan no one in that away end, where a defeat had never felt more like victory, would have envisaged that this was Claudio’s last stand. That as planes from Seville shakily touched ground in the chaos of Storm Doris another storm was brewing; a media storm that would follow the news that Ranieri had been sacked.

The decision to end the Ranieri era, a glorious and unprecedented era, was the correct one. As Leicester City fans we have had to become used to our club being global news. Of everyone wanting a piece of the big Leicester pizza pie yet only ever knowing half the recipe.

As the unlikeliest of footballing stories began to unfold in late 2016, football pundits and experts scrambled and bumbled - at a loss to try and explain how this unbelievable team was doing what it was. For once, eyes that had previously been fixed on United, Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea and Man City were looking the wrong way. It wouldn't last, Vardy and Mahrez would dry up, they hadn't played anyone good yet. Not one of them could accurately summarise the strength of that remarkable team.

Those same eyes have been caught diverted once more. They haven't seen the visible confusion of the players as Shinji Okazaki replaced Robert Huth and our final throw of the dice was to change our right back against Chelsea. They haven't travelled to Stamford Bridge, Anfield and Old Trafford to see us take a pasting because Claudio persisted with a 442 formation which just didn't work without Kante. And they haven't seen the persistence with the likes of Mahrez, Huth and Morgan who just haven't delivered this season whilst the likes of Damarai Gray and Daniel Amartey have sat, in-form, frustrated on the bench.

The success of last season was built, in large part, on an incredible team spirit. Eleven players working together for each other with the whole being greater than the sum of their parts in the season of their lives. It was the kind of spirit that pulled them through on a cold Wednesday night in January at White Hart Lane for a crucial 1-0 win (several of which would follow in the run-in) and in the early part of the season had them dubbed ‘Comeback Kings’ after resurrections against Villa, Southampton and Stoke City.

That spirit has ebbed away. Where players previously clapped good intentions they now point out mistakes. Riyad Mahrez, provider in chief last year, no longer seems to want to pass. The selfless work of Jamie Vardy for the team has been replaced by the kind of conserving energy, pointing and staying in shape that would never have been coached into him at Stocksbridge Park Steels or Halifax.

These are the things that we, the fans that follow this team home and away, see where others don’t. The reality is that Leicester City have been dire for months. No goals in 7 league games, no away win in the league all season and defeats against the likes of Sunderland, Swansea, Burnley and Hull. That’s without mentioning a defeat to 10-man League One side Millwall in the cup.

A big thing I have read is that Claudio should have been given more time, but what was going to change? He’d changed the personnel. He’d tinkered the formation. He’d not recruited in vital positions in the transfer window. He’d tried the carrot and the stick multiple times apiece to no avail.

This was not the Leicester City of their first season in the Premier League who were bottom of the league but competing in matches, scoring goals and running through brick walls for their manager Nigel Pearson. I have rarely seen so many abject performances over a prolonged period of time and questions would have been asked a lot earlier in the season were it not for progress from a poor Champions League group (not one of those teams was better than lower half Premier League quality) and for allowing a somewhat inevitable hangover from the party of our lives. Claudio had been given his time.

The accountability which keeps standards high had to come at some point.

It’s all very well Michael Owen or Jamie Carragher wanting him to see out the season. The ‘Twittersphere’, awash with fans of other clubs who feel it’s their business or their right to judge this decision or to slate our club, seemed to think Ranieri had earned the right to take us to a level lower than that we were at when Claudio first arrived. I assume that those people would be at Bristol City away on a Tuesday night with us in The Championship next season? That they were so entitled to an opinion on the merits of Mark De Vries or Elvis Hammond? That they put money in a bucket to save the club when it was in administration?

For the casual observer, relegation for Leicester would have simply been a shame.

Maybe Claudio’s biggest crime was to be too nice. The outpouring of emotion about his sacking has been akin to the disgust at an elderly grandad being pushed over in the street. He always stirred the emotions Ranieri and there’s no doubting his honour, his dignity and his humility. There is, however, plenty of reason to doubt that the players still felt this warmth towards him with rumours of changed training schedules, bewilderment at team selections and falling out with popular members of backroom staff.

Rightly or wrongly, Claudio had lost some of the players. Those players need to question what they have offered this season and in an ideal world they would be more accountable but you can’t sack 23 players and the way football works the manager should be culpable for poor results. Leicester's results (despite a ‘good defeat’ in Seville where, even then, they were poor for 70 minutes) showed no signs of change and they were in a downward spiral.

Ranieri will be a legend forever. Our most successful manager ever and a man who told us to dream and then delivered something beyond even our wildest dreams. Some of the days of our lives are thanks to Claudio but those days couldn't be a free pass to undo the good work of those who had gone before. He leaves with both his legacy and that of his predecessors intact.

As Andrea Bocelli sang on the pitch prior to our crowning glory against Everton last season, it was time to say goodbye.