REMEMBERING THE GREATEST SPORTING MIRACLE
I know what it’s like to experience a miracle.
Five years ago, my football team, Leicester City, won the English Premier League. Famously, the bookmakers odds of us winning the league were 5000/1 - supposedly the longest odds ever paid out on a single event, in any genre, ever.
This is a taste of what it was like to be a fan that season, told in four acts.
SERENADED BY THOUSANDS
The miracle happened on May 2nd, 2016 at Stamford Bridge in West London.
Chelsea were playing their arch-rivals Tottenham. Second place Tottenham needed to win to prevent my team, Leicester City, from winning the Premier League.
I hadn’t actually planned on watching the game live especially given Leicester weren’t actually playing. But by coincidence, I was going to dinner round the corner from Stamford Bridge, where the game was being played.
My friend was puzzled. “Why aren’t you going to the game? It’s the biggest game in your club’s history!”
It wasn’t a hard argument to resist and I soon found myself walking down Fulham Road asking people randomly if they knew where I could buy tickets.
Before long, I was ushered to a street corner where I told two men I wanted one ticket for the game.
“How much money to do you have?” one of them said.
“£100,” I replied.
“Not a chance! This is a big game. Tickets are £150, £200.”
I imagine I looked somewhat disappointed because one of them spoke. “Why should we sell you a ticket at that price?”
I shuffled nervously for a few seconds before opening my jacket and revealing the Leicester City shirt that was underneath.
Now knowing my allegiance they smiled, snatched my £100, and within seconds I was being marched towards the stadium.
“Today, we’re all Leicester City fans,” one of them beamed.
As I was taken into the stadium I was somewhat nervous to see my seats were in the Shed End. I was sandwiched between Chelsea fans, who had no love for Leicester City (and vice-versa), and Tottenham fans, who, at least for this evening, were the sworn enemy.
My shirt was once again hidden away beneath my jacket. My neighbours knew though and gently smiled.
This was it!
After 22 years of being a Leicester City fan. I was within touching distance of the greatest moment of my life as a football fan. No matter how many years came after, this was undoubtedly going to be the pinnacle.
Except it didn’t quite go like that.
The half hour mark came and Harry Kane opened the scoring for Tottenham. And then just before half-time Son Heung-Min tapped in a second.
The footballing gods had grabbed the remote control and pressed pause.
I started thinking ahead to Leicester’s game at Everton. That would be where the most unlikely title race in history would be decided.
I justified the turn of events: perhaps it was right that we were meant to win the title on our home turf and because of our own actions.
But my racing mind was stopped by the arrival of the second half.
It was a feisty match. It seemed like every few minutes players were squaring off with one another. So much so that the game actually became known as “The Battle of Stamford Bridge.” The stats bear this out. An incredible 12 yellow cards were dished out compared to the average of just over one per game.
The first sign the miracle was back on the cards came around the fifty-eight minute mark. Chelsea’s defender Gary Cahill stabbed home Chelsea’s first goal during a corner. To slightly paraphrase Gandalf, hope was kindled.
Chelsea were in the ascendancy.
At this point, my neighbour told me not to worry and take off my jacket to reveal my Leicester shirt.
A kind interpretation is that they wanted me to feel free to express my footballing identity. The other interpretation is that I had become an unofficial mascot, a tool to wind up the Spurs fans sitting only metres away.
Five years later, what lingers in my mind is the silkiness of Eden Hazard.
At 21:44, I remember him dancing past three Spurs players near the halfway line, laying off the ball and improbably ending up in space just in front of their box.
He charges into the box anticipating the ball. As it comes towards him, he winds his right foot back at an angle before striking the ball.
Everything about his movement is the embodiment of footballing perfection.
The ball spins into the top right hand corner of the Spurs goal.
Cue pandemonium.
I don’t actually even put my arms in the air in celebration. Instead a lot of grown men jump on me. My glasses are on the floor somewhere.
I’m helped to my feet and everyone is shaking my hand, smiling. It’s almost as if for these few minutes I’ve become a proxy for the entirety of Leicester City.
People are shaking my hands. Taking pictures with me. They sing, “there’s only one Ranieri,” in honour of Leicester’s soon-to-be title-winning manager who once led Chelsea.
Near the end, I’m hoisted on to someone’s shoulders. Everyone around me sings and points, “Leicester City we’ll win it for you.”
Even though they aren’t singing my name, basking in the warmth of the crowd, I imagine this is what dictators and gladiators of time past must have felt like when they are feted.
After the game, I’m continually mobbed as I walk back to my friend’s house. Another Leicester fan at the game runs into me screaming with joy. I also collide into some unhappy Spurs fans. But before anything happens, a bunch of Chelsea fans have formed a protective phalanx around me.
First, the impossible became possible. And, that night, the possible happened.
The team I started supporting aged four years old after my uncle took me to my first Leicester City game have won the Premier League.
With my brother and Filbert the Fox, Leicester City’s mascot.
DAVID AGAINST THE GOLIATHS
We weren’t meant to win the title.
Despite winning seven of our last nine games, we had spent four and a half months of the previous season rooted to the bottom of the table.
To say our pre-season preparation was far from ideal is an understatement. Three of our players were sacked after being filmed in a racist orgy during an end of season goodwill tour in Thailand, the home of our billionaire owners.
One of three players involved was the son of our inspirational and popular manager, Nigel Pearson, who was also soon to be sacked on the basis of “fundamental differences in perspective.”
Enter Mr. Nice Guy, Claudio Ranieri, whose last managerial outing in charge of Greece (24th ranked international team) ended in a humiliating defeat to the Faroe Islands (104th ranked international team).
And, in economic terms, we were David, up against a squad of Goliaths.
The higher your wages, the higher in the league you tend to finish. In the 2015/16 season, we had the 15th highest wage bill out of 20 clubs.
While our title-winning team cost £54 million to assemble. Arsenal, Tottenham and Man City’s squads, which finished 2nd, 3rd and 4th, cost £250, £161 and £418 million respectively.
All this led to odds of 5,000/1 being offered for Leicester City to win the title in 2015/16.
Elvis Presley being discovered alive (2,000/1) and Simon Cowell becoming the Prime Minister (500/1) were seen as more likely.
Leicester City’s title win actually formed one part of a hat trick of once unlikely events: a £1 accumulator bet when odds were at their longest on Brexit, Trump winning the 2016 US Election and Leicester City winning the title would have netted you £4.5 million.
But for Leicester fans, these facts and events alone don’t explain why we weren’t meant to win the title.
It was about what came before.
The crushing lows.
Like when we played Stoke City on the final day of the 2007/8 season. We needed a win to avoid relegation to League One, two divisions below the Premier League.
Never before in our then one hundred and twenty-eight year long history had we played in the third tier of English football.
That day, it was to be a case of two clubs going in different directions. We drew nil-nil and our opponents were promoted to the Premier League. While we were relegated to the third tier of English football for the first time in our then one hundred and twenty-eight years of existence.
I remember applauding the Stoke City fans who had invaded the pitch to celebrate in front of us. They replied with mocking hand gestures and chants.
But it wasn’t just the lows that defined recent experiences as a Leicester fan. Even our “close, but not quite” moments had a way of unravelling beyond our worst nightmares.
My most painful moment as a football fan was watching Leicester play Watford in the 2012/13 Championship Playoff Semi-Finals.
In the second leg, with seconds left we were awarded a questionable penalty.
Score and we would go to Wembley, just one win away from returning to the Premier League after a nine-year absence.
I turned to my best friend and uttered the words, “If there is a footballing god,” gesturing to the skies in a sort of reverential prayer.
What followed is one of the most spectacular passages of football I’ve ever had the misfortune of seeing.
Anthony Knockaert, the Leicester City striker steps up to take the penalty. The Watford goalkeeper saves the shot with his feet.
The rebound falls to Knockaert, who takes another shot and again the shot is saved.
A mere four passes later the ball somehow finds its way up the field and the Watford striker, Troy Deeney, hammers it into our net.
Everywhere I look Watford fans pour onto the pitch. Their manager, the legendary Gianfranco Zola, is on the floor, much like our dreams.
From ecstasy to agony in a mere twenty seconds: the footballing gods weren’t listening to my prayers that day. One might even say that they spat in my face.
But scenes like the above are why I and so many others love football.
Life, at least for most of us, doesn’t offer the types of thrilling climaxes that you see at the movies. Moments where the outcome of our decisions are visibly at stake.
Instead, most lives are the slow aggregation of little moments. Football is the same. It can pass by unremarkably. But every so often, football creates moments of drama, where the success or failure of your team is at stake. Like my own experiences, it can come down to seconds of play.
In these moments, the fourth wall shatters.
That separation between player and fan melts away.
It doesn’t matter that you aren’t on the pitch.
It doesn’t matter that you can’t really play football.
For those brief moments, you are one. With your team. With your fellow supporters.
Ask any football fan and they’ll have their own set of storylines made up of different footballing memories and moments.
Memories and moments where they totally lost their minds like those Watford fans.
DEATH FORETOLD DESTINY
Winning the title in 2016 felt like destiny. Even when we faltered, I had an inner confidence that we were going to win it.
Early on in the season, my uncle died of cancer. The same uncle who took me to my first Leicester City game in 1994.
We celebrated the Indian festival of lights, Diwali, together on November 11th, 2015. We spoke excitedly of whether Leicester could sustain their run of good form that had seen us rise to third place in the league. Our striker, Jamie Vardy, was also on a hot goalscoring streak. These were to be our last conversations.
I never realised how serious his cancer was even at this stage I think because he was protecting us from the worst.
Just days later he was in the hospital unable to communicate.
Amidst many painful memories, I remember bringing in The Sunday Times on the morning of November 22nd, 2015. The day before Jamie Vardy had hit his tenth goal in ten games, equalling the Premier League record for consecutive goals scored. I held up the sports pages fully spread to show him the headlines and he smiled at me. The last time he ever did.
The question on every Leicester fans lips was whether Jamie Vardy would break Ruud Van Nistelrooy’s record of eleven consecutive goals. The next week on November 28th, 2015 we faced Man Utd where Nistelrooy himself had made the record.
Vardy duly delivered. I’ll never forget the commentary when he scored:
It’s Vardyyyyyy! It’s eleven, it’s heaven for Jamie Vardy. Hold the back pages, hold the front pages, a Leicester player has smashed the record!
But my uncle never got to see the record-breaking goal. He had passed away two days earlier.
Like most Leicester fans until the events of 2015/16, the heady days of Martin O’Neil’s two League Cups, a Uefa Cup appearance and a smattering of top-half finishes in the late 1990s represented the peak of my uncle’s time as a Leicester fan.
From the moment he passed on, supporting Leicester was imbued with a new significance.
Along with his son, I became the torch bearer for our shared love for Leicester City. And every time I carried that torch, I’d remember him.
But strangely, in his death, at least to me, it felt like Leicester City had gained something special. A fan with supernatural powers, who directed the lifeforce of some of his unspent years to help drive them on to a title win. One that he would witness, albeit not as a mere mortal.
THE EVERYMEN
At a time when football’s greed and tolerance of racism are seen as some of its defining features, it’s easy to forget what football is at best: a true engine of meritocracy.
There is perhaps no player who exemplifies this more than Jamie Vardy, Leicester City’s attacking no. 9.
At the start of the 2010s, his first game was for non-league Stocksbridge Park Steels. This is football far beyond the glitz that many are now more accustomed to. Seven hundred and sixty-one fans watch on at the Bracken Moor ground, which lies at the foothills of the Pennines. The next day, Vardy works a 12-hour shift at the Trulife factory manufacturing medical splints and crutches.
Fast forward six years later, now aged 29, Jamie Vardy scores one of the best goals I’ve ever seen a Leicester City player score.
Our diminutive Algerian winger, Riyad Mahrez, brings the ball under control in our half, before swivelling away from the Liverpool player he is duelling with.
He then launches a precision aerial bombardment with the ball dropping in front of Jamie Vardy who is rapidly advancing in Liverpool’s half. It bounces once a few metres outside of the Liverpool area.
And then Vardy volleys it. It’s a thirty yard scorcher that catches Liverpool’s goalkeeper off his line.
I remember watching the game in a bar in Washington D.C. having snuck out of a conference I was attending.
When the ball hits the back of the net, I lose my head running up and down a bar full of Liverpool fans at three in the afternoon.
Only months later, Vardy would make his tournament debut for England against Wales at the 2016 Euros. He scores a goal that ignites a much-needed 2-1 turnaround. He’s now reportedly paid £120,000 a week - a far cry from the £30 per game he was paid at the start of the decade.
Vardy and Leicester City’s ascendency was not just significant for our fans.
It had implications for the rest of the footballing pyramid.
For fans of other clubs unaccustomed to success, they could once again dream of what might be possible.
As manager Alan Pardew said, “we all have to sit down after what Leicester have done and think about how to go forward, because for chairman, chief executives and football club boards it has changed the concept of what it is possible to achieve.”
For players whose careers had not ignited in their early twenties or who were languishing in the lower leagues, they too could dream of stratospheric success inspired by Vardy’s own peripatetic path to the top.
But if our title win breathed fresh life into the cliche that football is the beautiful game, it also awoke some of the more ugly realities of football.
“We don’t want too many Leicester Citys,” said an executive at one of the “Big Six” clubs in the aftermath of our crowning.
Our victory represented a threat to the business models of the bigger teams that were heavily dependent on the revenues unlocked with continued success.
So despite achieving the seemingly impossible, we weren’t to build on our success in conventional terms by winning more trophies (although, writing five years later, we have perhaps penetrated the so-called “Big Six.”).
In the aftermath of the miracle, our merry band of brothers slowly departed, with over £300 million worth of Leicester City players being sold to bigger clubs in the seasons to date after our title win.
So if I’m asked, “will it happen again?” My answer is a resounding no.
There is a reason why the odds of us winning the title were 5000/1.
At the same time, it’s also important to not forget that Leicester City are not paupers. Our owners have fortunes estimated at over £3 billion. The English Premier League more than any other league is one where the table stakes increasingly demand a billionaire backer.
On any given day, a team may beat another, but over time, money talks.
Football, like so many things, has fallen prey to that seemingly most modern of afflictions: everything that was once great - and uncomplicated - is now problematic.
But amidst all of this, as Leicester City fans experienced in the most seismic of ways, every once in a while, football gives you a chance to live your dreams.