Premier League Autopsy - Leicester (1/3)

From falling titans to minnow-champions, 2015-16 has perhaps been one of the most exciting Premier League seasons ever. In this first part, I'll be looking back at Leicester City's sensational rise to the Premier League title.

Bloody Nora.

There's little original that I can add here, but it's still worth repeating: Leicester's success this season is nothing short of phenomenal, and almost unprecedented in professional football. They started the season on odds of 5000-1. Let me put that another way: if this exact season could be frozen in time and played repeatedly from now until the year 7016 AD, Leicester would be expected to win exactly once. At the end of March 2015 (FOURTEEN months ago!), they were rock-bottom of the league table with 19 points from 29 games, and favourites to go down. They leaked goals, and couldn't hit the opposition net for love nor money. They signed Robert Huth in January to shore things up at the back, and eventually put together a run of wins to ensure their survival that was as late as it was unlikely. 

Still, optimism was in short supply at the start of a new EPL season. Their one internationally renowned player left in the summer. The club's pre-season tour of Thailand was summed up with the two words "racist" and "orgy" (the worst kind of orgy, of course). As a result of the culturally insensitive pork-fest, manager Nigel Pearson was sacked and replaced by Claudio Ranieri. Perennial runner-up and all-round lovely old man, Ranieri was an odd choice, given that his most recent managerial tenure ended with him being dismissed by Greece after losing at home to the Faroe Islands.  This pessimism was reflected in the media:

• The BBC predicted Leicester would finish in 19th.
• 6/8 Guardian pundits predicted they would go down.
• Alan Smith in the Telegraph claimed they'd finish 18th, which goes some way to explaining why he's always incorrect in his estimation of my team on his FIFA 16 commentary.

In short, nobody was giving them much hope of staying up. Mid-table would have been a successful season. If you'd argued they'd be in with a sniff of European football, people would've laughed in your face; if you'd said they'd finish first, you'd have been carted off for urgent medical testing.

This image would later strike fear into the hearts of Premier League managers up and down the land.

Then the season began, and Leicester began picking up wins and setting a pace. This can happen for a short while in the Premier League, as a team is buoyed up the table by an initial burst of optimism and momentum until running out of steam some time around November. At this point, one of the traditional 'big' teams will give them a pat on the back and say "Well done, little buddy. You go and sit down in mid-table, we've got it from here". 

Don't you DARE say that to Jamie Vardy.

But Leicester soon turned from a plucky bandwagon to an unstoppable freight train, barreling their way through game after game and knocking aside established teams like stunned cattle who'd inadvertently wandered across their track. Vardy and Mahrez were on fire up front, Kante and Drinkwater were a finely honed metronome of passing in the midfield, and Huth and Morgan anchored the team at the back- though in reality, the entire squad put in Herculean efforts week after week as they played a wonderfully gung-ho style of football. Only 40% possession? Didn't matter, they'd bang you on the break (so to speak).

Perhaps the pinnacle of this style of play was their 3-1 away win against Manchester City. 

Man City were their closest rivals at the time, but the Foxes didn't give a damn. Huth, not for the first time in the season, scored a towering header after just 3 minutes and the outcome of the game seemed sealed.

This led to some armchair pundits to get a little over-excited.

Towards the end of the season, the roving counter-attacks were limited as teams dropped deeper to absorb the neck-breaking speed of Leicester's attacks, but the team still kept finding a way to win. The archetype of these victories was a 1-0 away win against Crystal Palace at Selhurst Park, a venue where Liverpool's title challenge had spectacularly imploded two seasons earlier. Watching on TV, you could clearly hear the Leicester fans singing: "We're going to win the league!". They knew it, and everyone watching could feel it too.

It was a season as miraculous as it was magnificent; as unlikely as it was awe-inspiring. Such a feat may never be repeated again, which makes the beauty of their achievement even more poignant: Leicester City Football Club, the rightful champions of England.