When I saw that Matteo Darmian, the Italian footballer, was playing for Inter Milan last night, part of their heroic but fruitless attempt to stop Manchester City winning the Champions League and the Treble, I was taken back three-quarters of a decade to when he was a Manchester United player, and had an incidental role in a piece of commentary I (and all Leicester fans) have heard uncountable times since.
It was 28th November 2015 and Leicester - after narrowly avoiding relegation the previous season - had, under new manager Claudio Ranieri, had an astonishingly good start to the season. So the match at the King Power stadium against Manchester United was a top-of-the-table clash. The capricious early weeks of a season, given a kind fixture list and a bit of luck, can put unexpected teams towards the top of the table. But by the end of November we were fourteen games in, and somehow our relegation favourites were still up there, playing confidently sparkling counter-attacking football, and had only lost once all season. Obviously we knew it wouldn’t last, but we were enjoying it while it did.
Moreover, Jamie Vardy, Leicester’s number nine, had scored in the previous game at Newcastle, so he had goals in ten consecutive games, and was hoping to extend that run to eleven and take the Premier League record. The clap-banners that had been left on the home fans’ seats (a tradition dating back to the West Ham game at the start of the previous season’s Great Escape at the beginning of April) showed Vardy celebrating his Newcastle goal underlined with ‘10/10’.
Early in the previous season, newly-promoted Leicester had earned an astonishing comeback victory in this fixture; that game is still the most memorable I’ve ever been to, despite everything that’s happened since. Leicester had been 3-1 down with half an hour to go, and then scored four times against an increasingly chaotic United to win 5-3, with Vardy either scoring or assisting all our goals. A year on, we weren’t expecting that to happen again, but victory against Manchester United seemed a much more plausible ambition, given how well we were playing.
In 2015 the fixture was a late Saturday kick-off, so it was just before 6pm in the floodlit late-autumn evening when Kasper Schmeichel - son of the Manchester United legend Peter - caught the ball from a rather poorly-taken United corner in front of the Kop, about halfway through the first half. Leicester’s counter-attacking instinct kicked in, and after bouncing it, Schmeichel rolled the ball quickly (the referee, Craig Pawson, had to jump out of the way) to his right, where Leicester’s left-back, Christian Fuchs, ran from the centre of the pitch and swung behind to collect it to start the forward charge. Fuchs kicked the ball once, twice, three times (by which point he was already on the halfway line), and a fourth time; and paused briefly as Vardy, who had been loitering ominously in Manchester United’s half, pointed to where he wanted the ball played…
The run of ten games in which Vardy had scored had started at Bournemouth at the end of August, the fourth game of the season. We were on the beach (literally) at Weston-super-Mare, struggling with a radio with unco-operative reception attempting to listen to the game. It looked like we were going to lose to the Premier League newcomers, but Vardy won and scored a penalty right at the end of the game to secure a 1-1 draw. At this point we were behind only Manchester City and Crystal Palace in the Premier League table.
The next game was in mid-September - we played atrociously against Aston Villa (who would go on to be relegated), who were 2-0 up with only twenty minutes to go (two sumptuous long-range strikes, the first of which was Jack Grealish’s first goal for the club). But then we scored three, in a comeback with echoes of that Manchester United game a year earlier: the first was a header from Ritchie de Laet which needed goalline technology to confirm whether it had crossed the line (so we spent a few seconds unsure whether to celebrate - VAR had yet to teach us to celebrate anyway); the second was turned in by Vardy from a Drinkwater cross; and the third was a header right at the end from Swansea loanee Nathan Dyer, who was knocked down worryingly as he scooped the ball in, so the goal was barely noticed at first as the Leicester players crowded round Dyer in concern.
The following week, Vardy scored the second as we drew 2-2 at Stoke, and then both Leicester’s goals in the loss at home to Arsenal (which turned out to be our only home league defeat that season, and - coincidentally, of course - the only home game my daughter and I missed, due to a family birthday). He scored three goals in the next two games, away to Norwich and Southampton, and then the winner against Palace at home - the first time in the season Leicester had stopped the opposition scoring, after which Ranieri made good on his promise to provide the players with clean-sheet pizza, though they had to make it themselves. We got Vardy’s autograph on a clap banner after that game (you’ll have to believe me).
Vardy enjoys scoring at The Hawthorns, so his goal against West Brom in the next game was predictable, and then he took the ball off Mahrez to score a penalty at home against Watford and keep the run going - people were starting to notice it now (and at that point Leicester were the only team in the league to have scored in every game of the season). The tenth game was was at St James’s Park: Vardy drilled in the first of three Leicester goals to which Newcastle had no reply (they were not very good in those distant days, and ended up getting relegated).
And so to that Manchester United game. Vardy scored, of course, to take a record he still holds. It took less than 12 seconds from the ball leaving Schmeichel’s hands for the striker to put Fuchs’s perfectly-weighted, defence-defying left-footed pass into the Manchester United net. Even Erling Haaland, Manchester City’s goal machine, did not come close to breaking the record this season (he managed goals in seven consecutive games): the very best players (of which Vardy was certainly one) will always have games where the opportunities don’t come, the opposition goalkeeper proves unbeatable, or they’ve just not got their boots on the right feet. So to score with such relentless consistency for that many games in succession is remarkable; I fully expect Haaland to break Vardy’s record at some point over the next few seasons, but even with all his other achievements, it will be particularly notable when he does.
On BBC Radio Leicester, Ian Stringer was calling the goal. ‘From non-league prince to Premier League king!’ he cried memorably, as Vardy eased the ball under United keeper de Gea and into the net. It was a line that referenced Richard III, whose body had famously been found under a Leicester carpark a few years previously, and who had been buried in a strange Royal funeral earlier in the year, just before Leicester’s Great Escape started. (The coincidence is the starting point for the short children’s book ‘The Fox and the Ghost King’ by War Horse author Michael Morpurgo.)
Such was the interest in Vardy’s achievement that the Radio 4 Today programme got Michael Sheen to declaim Stringer’s commentary in the style of Laurence Olivier playing Shakespeare’s Richard III. It’s a nice idea, but to me (and with apologies to Sheen) it just sounds a bit…odd.
Meanwhile over on Sky, Martin Tyler was commentating, his immortal words accompanying the clips used by the club when they reshow the goal for yet another time:
Kasper Schmeichel…
…this is the left back, Fuchs…
…the ball, in behind Darmian…!
[…and so Matteo Darmian’s name is the eternal prelude to that record-breaking moment, etched forever in the minds of every Leicester fan as they teeter expectantly at the top of the roller-coaster…]
VarDYYYYYY!
And then Vardy turned right, away from where my daughter and I were on our feet cheering with 30,000 others, and ran with justifiable arrogance towards the Manchester United fans in the opposite corner: ‘it’s mine, all mine’, he mouthed at them, pointing at himself, with a few expletives inserted: as they will all have known, he had taken the record off former United striker Ruud van Nistelrooy, who had scored in ten consecutive games over a decade earlier (van Nistelrooy’s own response on social media to his record being broken was magnanimous: ‘You're number one now and you deserved it’)1.
Tyler continues, as Vardy’s team-mates leap on him in delight beside the pitch:
It’s Eleven, it’s Heaven for Jamie Vardy…!
…hold the back page…hold the front page…!
[…this is not just a sports news story…]
…a Leicester player…
[…a Leicester player! - we all share your bewildered astonishment, Martin…]
…has smashed the record…!2
Happy, happy days.
Vardy also went on to score in eight consecutive games in 2019/20 - he and van Nistelrooy are the only players to have scored in eight Premier League matches in a row twice. That’s another record I would be surprised if Haaland doesn’t break.
Charlie Eccleshare nicely analyses why Tyler’s commentary works in his book, ‘The Beautiful Poetry of Football Commentary’.