Daily Mail, Tuesday, May 3, 2016 Daily Mail, Tuesday, May 3, 2016

fant astic mr fox72

It’s fitting that Vardy has been crowned Player of the Year. . . he has sprinted to the top in the same way he leaves defenders in his wake

@Ian_Ladyman_DM

More than one king in Leicesterfrom today

Seven years to the day since Leicester City won 3-0 at Crewe in League One, the city of

Leicester headed down the pub last night to see if their team could become champions of england.

And when Tottenham failed to win at Chelsea, Leicester — the city — erupted. The river running through it could hardly have been better named. Soar.

Jubilation, consternation, even though the title has crept closer and closer over the past weeks and days, amid the celebration disbelief remained.

Mark Masters was down his local, the John O’Gaunt on the Stadium estate north of the city centre and called it ‘surreal’. Masters, 35, had been at Crewe in 2009 — ‘It was the last day of the season and we went dressed as Mexicans’ — and is struggling to take in the transformation. ‘It still hasn’t sunk in, you know?’ he says. ‘It’s strange, surreal.

‘Ranieri wasn’t the name people were hoping for last summer, but he started well and the team kept going. You think, “They’re going to fade and maybe get europa League”, but they didn’t. I took my boy — Lee, he’s five — to Man City. When we won there I really started to believe.’

Winning at C i t y, a n d Tottenham, is a long way from Crewe. H e n c e t h e incredulity. Masters, whose first Leicester game was a 1-1 draw with Luton in 1986, describes the Foxes as ‘a yo-yo club’, as do many others, and that stigma perhaps explained reticence.

As kick-off approached, this was a city on hold. Last Satur-day’s Leicester Mercury back page headline was: ‘Immortals’. Yesterday morning, after the 1-1 draw at Manchester United, it was: ‘Immortals must wait . . .’

It didn’t feel like a problem. After all, they have been waiting to be champions of england since the formation of Leicester Fosse in 1884. So there was not much gnashing of teeth. As Saturday’s Mercury editorial said: ‘Leicester isn’t always the most demonstra-tive of cities. It has a reputation

for being understated and its people aren’t easily impressed.’

Patience did not deter a couple of ‘entrepreneurs’ from setting up a stall on Gallowtree Gate yester-day lunchtime, though. They were selling blue flags with “Leicester Premier League Cham-pions 2015/16” on and T-shirts stating: ‘Kings of england’.

That is the slogan which brings you back to where some say this all began 12 months ago, when Richard III was reinterred in Leicester cathedral and people began talk of ‘king power’.

In Leicester’s first game following that cere-

mony they won 2-1 against West Ham

— at the King Power stadium. That v ictory kick-started the recovery of n i g e l Pe a r-s o n’ s t e a m . The scorer of the winner was a man called

King, Andy King. no wonder con-

nections started to be made between

the return of Richard III and the rise of Leices-

ter City. Jamie vardy’s middle name, it turns out, is Richard.

‘The reinterment of Richard was huge for the city,’ says emma Lay of the King Richard III visitor Centre. ‘And what Leices-ter City are doing after 132 years is the same. It’s historic.

‘It’s hard to point to something tangible but it feels like the city’s been uplifted. Richard and the football team have put Leicester on the map, given it a new iden-tity. We’ve had people in from Australia, South Korea, Brazil, America — some didn’t even know how to pronounce Leicester.’

The geography of Leicester is such — 100 miles from London,

100 miles from Manchester — that even a local history book says: ‘It is said of modern Leicester that it is a place people go through to get to other destinations.’

It was built on shoemaking and textiles — there is a statue of a seamstress on Friar Street — and was known at different times for Joseph Merrick, the elephant Man, who grew up on Lee Street, or Showaddywaddy.

When 17-year-old Don Revie signed, he turned up at Filbert Street to be asked: ‘You from the north, son?’ Superstitious Don, who had the owl removed from Leeds United’s badge because he did not trust birds, would proba-bly have thought there was some-thing in the Richard III theory.

Y eT it is quite a claim that the club has altered geography this season. Another is that

it has changed perceptions within Leicester regarding eth-nicity, a city where the 2011 cen-sus showed the population to be 45 per cent ‘white British’, down from 61 per cent 10 years earlier.

Leicester born and bred, Masters, who installs double-glazing, is one of them. He does not dispute this. ‘The city’s a nicer place to be,’ he says. ‘So I do agree with that claim. It’s brought people together and there’s quite a few Asian families at the matches now in a way that there wasn’t in the 1980s and 90s.

‘Look at somewhere like nar-borough Road, it’s got every nationality in the world and you might think people would strug-gle to get along. But they do here. Those riots in places like Brad-ford and Oldham, they didn’t reach us. Trouble passes us by.’

For decades, so did trophies, especially titles. But no more. By the banks of the river, Leicester City soar. The kings of england.

GIven the way that Leicester City play and i n p a r t i c u l a r t h e amount of time they spend without the ball,

either of this year’s Player of the Year awards could easily have gone to captain Wes Morgan. Leicester’s strength this season has been just as much about defending as it has been about scoring.

Defending remains resolutely unsexy, though. Only once in the last 23 years has the PFA’s annual award gone to a defender — John Terry 11 years ago — while you have to go back further through the history of the Football Writers’ Association to make a similar discovery. Steve nicol of Liverpool in 1989.

Morgan did receive some votes in the FWA ballot and he deserves them. Goalscorers win matches and generally win awards, however, and it is hard to look past this year’s winner Jamie vardy when seeking those who have made a defining contribution to Leicester’s incredible surge towards the Barclays Premier League title.

vardy will be back on the field after suspen-sion on Saturday when Le icester receive their trophy after their f inal home game of the season against ever-ton. It is hard to bet against him scoring, given he has done so in half of his team’s league games so far.

But it was watching Leicester without him at Manchester United on Sunday that provided an insight into just how fundamental he has been to Claudio Ranieri’s team.

All teams miss great goalscorers when they don’t play but vardy has been more than that to Leicester. The 29-year-old — all pace and energy and direct-ness — has enabled Ranieri’s side to play devastating counter-attacking football, to stretch opposition and worry defenders even when Leicester don’t have the ball.

vardy has been the cog around whom Ranieri’s system has been built. On Sunday in his absence Leicester were not impotent but they were limited. They were familiar in every way apart from when they looked to spring from their own half.

Without vardy there was often no way forward, no way of turning United around. Ranieri had days earlier described him as Leicester’s ‘RAF’

and it is vardy who has given the champions their wings.

Last week on television, pundits Rio Ferdinand and Ian Wright spoke of how perfectly vardy would fit into Diego Simeone’s counter-attacking Atletico Madrid team. They pointed out Fernando Torres was being asked to provide his side with the ‘out ball’ from the back but that the great Spaniard no longer had the pace to do it consistently. This has been the beauty of vardy this season.

Relatively free of serious injuries through the years and new enough

to the top level to be alien to the weariness and cynicism that can drag down even the very best, vardy has played with his blood up and the wind at his back all year. It has been this uncomplicated approach to scoring goals that has set him apart.

Some centre forwards approach the act of scoring like artists, others like bulldozers. vardy belongs in the latter category and rarely takes two or three touches in front of goal when one big one will do. This is one of the things that — like players such as Alan Shearer and Ruud van nistelrooy

before him — makes him so irresistible to watch.

When he gets on a roll, he seems unlikely to ever stop and though it seems a while ago already, we should remember that vardy scored in 11 successive Premier League games back in early winter, a modern record in the top flight. The last of those goals — the one that broke the record — came against United at the King Power Stadium and was in many ways

the classic Leicester/vardy goal, beginning with an opposition corner and ending with the ball swept in at the near post approximately 12 seconds, and two passes, later.

With the record there to be broken, vardy was playing under pressure that day but you would not have known. There was a purity and a certainty about the right-foot shot struck beneath David de Gea that typified the manner in which he was playing his football at the time. Since then not much has changed. vardy’s rival for an england starting place is

Tottenham’s Harry Kane. The Londoner may be a better all-round footballer — better in the air and with back to goal — but vardy concedes ground to nobody when it comes to instinct. Those present in Berlin to see him score with a back flick three minutes after coming on against Germany will agree.

There have been some dark moments in vardy’s recent past. To revisit a video of him racially abusing a man in a casino last July is to be reminded of just how dreadfully he behaved that night. It is interesting how matters such as that one are allowed to exist largely unreferenced when we have a new english hero on our hands.

nevertheless, vardy has apologised and we can only hope that he under-stands just how grave that stain on his record is.

Interestingly, he was a guest at the 2016 Asian Awards last month which would appear to indicate an attempt at least to view multiculturalism in a slightly more broad-minded way.

That night should not be allowed to define vardy. He is a sportsman first and foremost and will not be the first recipient of either the PFA or FWA award with the occasional blemish sullying his back story.

From a sporting perspective, his journey towards legend should only inspire. vardy has raced to the top in the same fleet-footed way he races past defenders. Four years ago last weekend, he finished the 2011-12 season playing for Fleetwood Town at home to Luton in the Blue Square Premier. They lost and he didn’t score.

vardy’s story is straight out of a comic book and is ours to savour. His like may not come this way again for a while.

All smiles: Vardy celebrates beating Sunderland with Ranieri geTTy iMages

37At this stage last

season, Leicester were 15th in the Premier League table with

37 points — 40 fewer than they have

now (a 108% increase)

by Ian Ladyman

73

Red mist: Vardy reacts angrily to being sent off against West Ham afp

High life: Vardy scores in the top flight — a far cry from his Fleetwood days (left) geTTy iMages

Beer we go: supporters in a Leicester pub celebrating their team’s incredible season reuTers

MichaelWalker

reports from Leicester

Football Editor

LEICESTER’S MIRACLE MEN

J A M I E VA R D YSHOTS

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