Leicester City have had an extraordinarily good start to life in the Championship, following relegation at the end of last season (the women have also been doing unexpectedly well in the Women’s Super League, but that’s a story for another day). I was cautiously optimistic we would do well this season, but the start has defied belief. After this afternoon’s match against Queen’s Park Rangers, we have become only the second team in the history of England’s second tier to win thirteen of the first fourteen games of the season (the first was Bristol City back in the 1905-06 season). We have now won nine league games in a row, and all seven away league games this season. So we have 39 points from a possible 42, and are five points ahead of Ipswich in second - though they have a game in hand, and given that they were in League One last season, their achievement (eleven wins and a draw from their first thirteen games) is, let’s be honest, even greater than ours, and has been unfairly overshadowed by it.
It’s fun following a team doing this well, finding different ways to win against different challenges. Leicester have won all of the six games I have been to this season - by coincidence, the only home game I have missed is also the only game we lost (the match against Hull at the beginning of September). (As it happens, the only home league game I missed in the Premier League-winning season, the 5-2 defeat to Arsenal, was also the only one we lost.)
But there’s an inevitable sense of ephemerality: the fans know it won’t last, so we are determined to enjoy it while it does. We will lose a game eventually, and it will be disappointing and frustrating when the run comes to an end. Even when it does, though, this season could turn out to be joyfully memorable, as we dominate a league with a squad and manager far better than most of our rivals’. But even assuming this season turns out well, there will be difficult days in future seasons, and we’ll look back on this time and enjoy the fleeting memories, as those who were there for the League One season still do.
So it looks increasingly likely that Leicester will be promoted and back in the Premier League next season. Last season Sheffield United (now doing excruciatingly badly in the top division - they have a solitary point from their ten PL games this season) got automatic promotion with 91 points (at the higher end of the total needed over the previous few seasons); we are 43% of the way to that figure with just 30% of the season gone. We could lose 14 of our remaining 32 games (which I confidently predict we won’t) and still get automatic promotion. Our target now should perhaps be the record 106 points that Reading got in 2005-06 (the most points scored by any team in an English 46-match season). We could lose nine more games and pass that record; or perhaps more likely lose another five and draw six, which sounds eminently plausible, if we were to keep doing well but have a couple of short runs of poor form. Enzo Maresca might be cross with me for getting this ahead of myself, but I can’t help it.
Leicester has been far from perfect this season, and watching (or otherwise following) the games has been frustrating at times. After the event, knowing the score, and relying on the highlights, it’s easy (and advisable) to forget the stretches - some of them long - when not much happens, or the team doesn’t seem to be able to string two passes together or recover the ball. But perfect football is exceptionally rare - even Pep Guardiola’s expensively-assembled teams only manage it sometimes: it is mostly a game of errors, fumbles, missed chances and luck (good and bad), given the inherent difficulty of controlling the ball, even for the most skilful players, and of getting it one way or another into the opposition’s goal. That is why it is rare for more than a handful of goals to be scored in a ninety-minute game. But as we look back, we need only remember and rewatch the great passages of play, particularly those leading to goals, when the team seems to be able to act as one to propel the ball up the pitch irrestistibly, like a sublime work of footballing art.
In any case, a good team finds ways to score more goals than they concede, and so win games; and even if each goal scored (or saved, or conceded) seems like a piece of luck, there are patterns: it cannot be a coincidence that, even not always playing well, Leicester has managed to win so many games, against many different types of opponents playing different styles, even when we have regularly seemed on course for a draw. Leicester’s players have the skills to take advantage of opportunities presented late in games to score, when opponents are often tired chasing possession - Leicester is able to keep hold of the ball for most of most games (after 20 minutes of the Stoke game a couple of weeks ago the screen told us we had had 90% of the ball) - so it is not a coincidence that we have scored so many late goals. It’s not always an easy watch, willing them on as the clock ticks down, but of course there’s a positive: if a team is not playing particularly well - though we are improving game on game - and still managing to grind out wins, we can be optimistic that when we get the hang of the style and can display our art more consistently, we are going to be almost unstoppable.
It is fair to say that many fans of other Championship clubs are not impressed with our achievement - what they see as a wealthy club landing in their league, supported by unfair parachute payments and a squad that should really be in the Premier League, and with which it’s hard for them to compete. They have a bit of a point, though Ipswich has none of those advantages and is making a better fist of competing with us than any other team, including the two who were relegated with us, Leeds and Southampton. And though it is true that our squad is probably stronger than several in the Premier League (we loaned left-back Luke Thomas, who couldn’t get a game with us, to struggling Premier League Sheffield United), we lost our best players in the transfer window: Maddison (I find myself unexpectedly pleased at how well he’s doing at Spurs), Barnes, Tielemans (yes he wasn’t great last season but he scored that goal for us, so), Söyüncü, Evans and Castagne and several others have all gone; though our income from player sales over the summer was far less than Southampton’s (and we’ve not been lucky with injuries this season either). And if money were the only thing that mattered, then every other relegated team would have stormed this league, which, sometimes with admirable ineptitude, most have failed to do.
It has required much more than just resources to achieve what Leicester has so far: Maresca, the Leicester manager, although only appointed in June, has somehow managed in his short time at the club to galvanise a demoralised squad, get them playing his distinctive brand of football with increasing confidence, flair and grit, and make us fans fall in love with him too. He has brought in some new players (our goalkeeper, Hermansen, seems like a big upgrade on last season’s Premier League options, and after years lacking attacking wide players we now have the luxury of a surfeit of wingers), and has helped some of our already good players, notably Dewsbury-Hall, to get even better; but he has also breathed unexpected new life into several players: in particular, Jannik Vestergaard had become a byword for the club’s poor recruitment, barely playing since he joined two years ago, but has become a rock at the heart of our defence this season; Wilfred Ndidi, known some years ago as one of the finest defensive midfielders in the Premier League, has been miraculously turned into a box-to-box player - leaving for dust those memories of putting my head in my hands as he skied yet another attempt on goal, as even I could see that scoring goals was not his forte, but he has scored three and assisted four already this season; and Ricardo, on course to become a legend of the club, has become a so- (and misleadingly) called inverted fullback: in possession he moves to the middle of the park alongside Harry Winks (I still can’t believe he came to play in the Championship - he was in a Champions League final not that long ago). I find it bewildering how, within weeks of arriving at the club, Maresca can have seen potential in these players that no one else could (I don’t just mean the fans - other football managers, coaches and expert commentators too), and been so emphatically and consistently right in his judgements, as demonstrated by our performances and results since the start of the season. It shows his footballing intelligence and courage; what a great appointment he was.
The result is a team that finds ever more ways to be impressive, but which also plays with a smile on its face; there seems to be a remarkable togetherness and unity in the squad, which transmits itself to the fans too, and it’s a much nicer atmosphere in the stadium. While the tactical approach is innovative in many ways, inspired by Maresca’s work with Guardiola (he was assistant at Manchester City last season when they won the treble), it is intriguingly traditional too, using the old-fashioned W-M formation in possession, with three at the back and front and a box in the middle. Maresca wants his players to keep possession as much as possible, playing the ball between them to force the opposition out of shape, and use the spaces created to get the ball up the pitch, sometimes at great speed; but he can be pragmatic too: in the early minutes of the game against Sunderland a few days ago, the players seemed taken aback by how high they were being pressed, and by the latter stages of the game there were lots of long balls being launched forward. The fans who objected (many fans will always find something to object to) to the short, patient passing that is our normal style now, even when it proved so successful over many weeks, were given a demonstration of the flaws of the alternative, as the long balls flew unpredictably forward and created chaos (of course, every style has its risks, as demonstrated with the goal we conceded at Blackburn, but I trust Maresca to judge the risk/reward balance better than any fan). And the goals we have scored have been spread around the team, with six players having scored three or more goals - it’s healthy not to be heavily reliant on one or two players.
So we play Leeds on Friday night. That’s going to be a tough game - Leeds, relegated alongside us last season, took a while to get going but they are on a good run now, and although they are 14 points behind us they are third in the table. We can head to the KP through the November night with some confidence, given what we have achieved so far - but that also creates pressure: we want to continue the winning run, and put off as long as possible the disappointment we will feel when it ends. So I’m looking forward to the game with some confidence and plenty of excitement, hoping for fireworks, but a little trepidation too, because I don’t want to see us lose again.
And I’ve still not answered the nagging question, and I don’t think I ever will: given how much fun this season is proving to be, as the best team in the Division - which we haven’t been for many years - am I actually glad we were relegated? Why was I worried about it? Indeed, do I actually want us to be promoted? As it stands, though, it doesn’t seem likely that we’ll have much choice, as the automatic promotion start to make themselves visible in the distance. So we should enjoy this while it lasts, and make as many memories from the ongoing cheers and smiles as we possibly can.
I'm not glad we were relegated, but we were relegated so we might as well enjoy it. We're winning, we're having fun, our manager seems to have a plan, and we're getting to visit some of the best football grounds in England and Wales.
Great piece!