On being relegated

I don’t really know what I expected when the final whistle blew and the win proved not enough, but the TS Eliot line ‘this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper’ came to mind. The club were clearly concerned there would be a bang, with the screens sternly warning us against going onto the pitch, but that didn’t feel likely to me. Most fans just stood there, perhaps not quite whimpering, but still: as quiet as the noise at the start of the afternoon had been loud, for we certainly weren’t going to be defeated for want of trying from the stands. Two hours later, though, and we were subdued: deflation, despondency, seething anger? - yes, all of those, but also perhaps some wistful reflection on an often glorious nine years that has now sadly - unnecessarily - come to an end, as well as on the grim ‘if onlys’ that have defined this season.

The phone signal in the stadium is of course (deliberately) as near non-existent as the hope we had at the start of the game (we shared gallows humour in the pub beforehand), so there was no way of telling whether and when the Everton game had actually finished; more than once during the game parts of the stadium had erupted in delight at an apparent Bournemouth goal, which it was impossible to double-check (it was quite unnerving being quite so off-grid in 2023), and it turned out of course that they were phantom goals, giving us moments of hope which soon dissipated into the shadows.

We knew when Everton had scored though, because the Hammers fans suddenly started cheering and taunting us, and then the atmosphere fell flat and stayed tense for the rest of the game; we hoped helplessly that Bournemouth might be able to recover and complete an emergency rescue mission at 120 miles’ distance, and we even tried cheering on the Cherries to provide a bit of remote encouragement, but they couldn’t oblige, and of course we shouldn’t have needed to rely on such favours, so we won’t hold it against Bournemouth forever. When Faes headed in from a Tielemans free kick we cheered out of habit, and then the away end copied the cheers mockingly, and proceeded to topsy-turvily enjoy their defeat much more than we enjoyed our win (if only we had played like that all season - if only! - we sighed). The West Ham fans on the train after the game were chatting nonchalantly about going to Prague, which brought home that it will be a long time before we have any sort of European adventure to look forward to again. Top flight football in all its forms will immediately and mercilessly treat us as history and leave us behind, and we shall have to watch it from afar.

We will not see many of today’s XI in a Leicester shirt again. That would have been partially true even had we stayed in the Premier League, given the fairly desperate contract situation, but the club now needs to buy most of a new squad, and that means selling the players we can get some money for and allowing others too expensive for a Championship budget to leave. The team has evolved slowly since the title win in 2016, each season bringing one or two new players to get to know and one or two departures to adjust to, so now only Vardy remains from that glorious memory (and perhaps he will be one of those still with us next season, his decline in form this season matching the club’s); but by contrast a necessary revolution is coming over the summer. Much of the talent the club has nurtured over the last few years, and which the fans have got to know and enjoyed watching and singing about, will be lost to us, off to try to make new fans happy. It will be poignant watching Maddison, Tielemans, Barnes, Söyüncü and co play in different colours in a better league and remember the times when they deployed their skills for us; but we must look ahead now.

That means that much of the starting XI when the new season starts in August will be players we’ve not heard of yet, and it will be tough for the manager, whoever that is, to mould them into a coherent team. Tough for the fans too: we will quickly have to get to know a new set of characters in this ongoing drama, and discover what they can bring us and what we should sing about them. And until we have some sense of who these as-yet unknown players are, and what sort of style they will play, and whether they will work as a collective, it is impossible to come to any judgement about how well we might do next season: the Championship is a tough league to get out of, we tell each other in insightful, wise voices, especially when you’ve no idea what team you will have to do it. I just hope the club has more of a plan for the summer than they seemed to for much of this last season.

So when we applauded and booed the players as they walked off the pitch this evening, hoping they were mostly feeling as gutted as we were, we were giving a complex message: saying goodbye and thank you and wishing them well but also showing we were more than a bit angry and disappointed at how badly they, along with the club, have let us down this season. I don’t know if that came across. And then we hung around for a bit and then decided (though we couldn’t check) that the final whistle must have gone on Mersyside with no last minute surprises. So we sighed and made our way out of the stadium and walked quietly up Raw Dykes Road each with our own thoughts, a procession of contemplation.

We’ll be walking the other way in just a few months, with nervous excitement rather than melancholy pondering, ready to begin a new volume of the Leicester City story, one which doesn’t even have a title yet. Too early to say it now, but if that volume is a quarter as enthralling as the one that’s just slammed shut, we might come to enjoy it, eventually. But we’ll need some time to grieve for our lost dreams first.