Listened to Saturday’s game on the radio …was agony, frustrating, emotionally paralysing and eventually exhilarating… I’m confident City would’ve achieved my 3 – 0 prediction but the spoiler ref blew for time after just the one goal! Still, either way we still got the full 3 points, and Norwich got Norfolkin points!
Later having had some recovery time I remembered there was a late game on so thought I’d check the scores… and bugger me it was 3 – 0 to our next relegation rivals! Then after seeing that even Piss-full Chalice managed to score twice I began to feel a little calmer and regain some perspective. Having watched the highlights, listened to various analysis and booked another session with the shrink, I was on the verge of deciding that the only way to get through this stubborn bubble was to not listen to or watch the remaining games, and basically become an ostrich until the end of the season, when I could finally lift my head out of the sand and have all my life long ingrained pessimisms confirmed!
Sunday I was working (…no I’m not a vicar!), my Arse mate said he didn’t want to know the days scores but would just watch the highlights ‘live’ on MOTD2, which suited the pessimistic me just fine. Got home about 6pm, but only saw the results by accident at 8pm
…about 4am I finally peeled myself off the ceiling and decided that no matter what happens between now and the end of this season I want to drink it in… yes I really want to put myself through the wringer, I want to ride every high, I want to climb every mountain! I’ve done the other stuff more than karma can compensate for over the years. And whether we win the bloody thing or not there will be tears, there will be pride, and nobody will say “who?” when I tell them where I’m from and who my team are. We’ll still be in the Prem£££ next season and should at least be invading some evolution forsaken part of Europe.
When I think back to the end of last season, the tension was incredible, even more so as results started to go our way and hope started to build and take hold, no one I knew expected us to actually do it, and even though I believed we could… well, we’re Leicester City… something’s bound to go wrong! But we did do it, and not on the final day either, but with points to spare, and without the last game fears or being reliant on other teams results.
This season we have an intelligent Italian in charge (…some would say it was another intelligent Italian who was the catalyst for last season’s heroics), we’ve improved massively at the back as the season has gone on, we’ve got more than just the two ‘superstars’ scoring goals, we have players on the bench who can come on and change the game, and we have supporters at the KP on a match day who can be heard in Nottingham and Derby! And we have the perfect smokescreen… ‘little old plucky Leicester City’.
Yes the pressures are different this season, I’m not superstitious, but there seems to be a certain serendipity (I won’t temp more than that!), call it what you will, but I’ve never known or felt anything quite like it at Leicester. We have a bunch of players who’ve worked their bollocks off, had tough breaks in the past, been generally looked down on by the ‘elites’, and are still considered to be a bunch of ‘misfits’, but they deserve every plaudit for their efforts and achievements as a team. More than anything …if we do win ‘Gary Lineker’s Pants’, the romantic in me thinks it would be fitting if the goal that does it is scored by Andy King (the only player in the squad with his name on every shirt)… off his shin!
So bring on our next challenge, I’d happily take a 1 – 0 (it’s still only 3 points). West Bomb will give us another tough game, and with Kante out we could be perceived as being easy pickings… so could easily be another 3 – 0 one nil lucky scraped win that will further confirm Londun’s undoubted dominance of world futball (...they’ve already won it you know!)