Yahoo Sport 
Leicester Fan View: Foxes' rollercoaster season finally reaches end
As the dust settles on the 2016/17 season for Leicester City, I’m sure I won’t be the only fan who’s ready for a break. To take a step back and reflect on the last few years. It was another busy season. There were highs, primarily on Wednesday nights under the lights; and lows that were frequently highlighted on the road. For a Foxes fan, it’s rarely uneventful.
READ MORE: A game of two halves to close Leicester City’s season
READ MORE: Foxes can hold their heads high after Champions League adventure ends
The Good?
It would be impossible not to start with Leicester City’s Champions League campaign. Say what you will about our group, we earned the easier seeding by winning the league and despite the concerns, we didn’t embarrass the English league. Going further than all other Premier League sides and bowing out with our heads held high in the Quarterfinals is more than we could have hoped for. We played our best football and enjoyed most of our highs in the competition. It gave us a taste and something to dream of again. With no expectations on us, perhaps we were free to play our game, our way.
The matches saw trips abroad, new friends made and electric nights at King Power stadium. The displays, the atmosphere and the volume in which we cheered and willed our team on will stay with me forever. With each game it escalated and it will be incredibly tough to ever top that night at home to Sevilla. We played some brilliant football and scored some lovely goals during the competition too. It certainly brought the best out of the likes of Riyad Mahrez and Marc Albrighton will have his place in history as our first goalscorer in the competition. Along the way, we set some records too. Not least Kasper Schmeichel’s incredible form a particular standout and his two penalty saves against Sevilla will go down in legend, as will he.
All credit to the owners too for making easily the most unpopular choice of the season, sacking Claudio Ranieri. It made the footballing world hate us, but it was a burden they felt they had to bear, and they were right. At the point of his sacking we were relegation candidates, with no sign of improvement and looking more and more lost. To recover and to finish safely in twelfth vindicates their decision, no matter how heartbreaking it was.
There were other highlights in between. The 4-2 win at home to Manchester City was Leicester City on their counter-attacking best and a throwback to last year. The high-energy win against Liverpool reminded us why we had so much trust in this squad and signified that they were still together. It was the game that kick-started the revival and a tremendous start for Craig Shakespeare.
January onward saw the emergence of Wilfred Ndidi, our newest signing, a 20-year-old with amazing prospects who secured our Young Player award in just half a season. We were spoilt for choice by great goals too, from Demarai Gray’s rocket against Manchester United, to Ndidi’s against Stoke, that Abrighton goal against Sevilla and Danny Drinkwater’s volley against Liverpool.
The Bad?
The first defending Champions to lose their opening day match since the 1989. There’s no better way to dash opening day optimism than setting that record by losing away at Hull City. It was a terrible performance from the Foxes too, the formation and line-up looked all wrong and it didn’t get much better on the road either. The Foxes kept fans waiting until mid-March for a league away win and even that was a nervous 3-2 affair.
Losing week after week away from home is miserable enough but we never even looked close to doing anything but that. We looked dead and buried after the home side got their opening goal and we consistently gave ourselves a mountain to big to climb through terrible defending. Some of them were truly painful too. In particular the twenty minutes of madness at Manchester United that saw us 4-0 down before half-time. FA Cup gloom at Millwall was one of the last straws for even those of us still fairly patient with Claudio Ranieri.
Losing Claudio Ranieri remains one of the lows of the season. Even though it needed to happen, it was a horrible way for such an incredible story to end. The Italian will forever be cherished by Leicester City and its fans. He helped deliver a dream for us all, so to see it end in hate and accusations felt wrong. Just once, it would be nice to have an entirely controversial free season.
Perhaps luck was on our side last season in terms of injuries. We spent very few minutes without our key personnel, in stark contrast to this campaign. We’ve barely seen Wes Morgan in the last two months, and finished the season also missing Danny Drinkwater, Robert Huth. In the earlier months we had to make do without Schmeichel too and our most expensive signing, Islam Slimani, missed the majority of the season through injury or international duty. With these absences and our lack of squad strengthening last summer, we left ourselves too exposed in the later part of the season. Something we simply can’t do again.
Making a late entry was that 6-1 to Tottenham. Yes, the Spurs are in tremendous, free-scoring form but the manner in which we conceded them was simply embarrassing. As the penultimate game it was a bit of a mood dampener too. We desperately need some defensive cover if you didn’t notice last August and every month thereafter. Between that and a limp first half in the last game, it’s thrown some doubts over Shakespeare’s ability to be the right man on a long term basis.
The Future?
There’s a key decision currently being weighed up and discussed by our owners. Will Craig Shakespeare be offered the managerial role permanently after a mostly successful temporary reign, or will a bigger, tried and tested name seem a safer bet? It’s a debate that has carried over for some fans, with no unanimous decision either. Whether it’s Shakespeare or an unknown, there’s an element of risk. The longer we await a decision, the longer the recruitment is in the hands of our scouting team alone and that’s an equally key focus for the Foxes this season. That and holding onto the likes of Schmeichel.
It’s difficult to speculate on what next season will bring. After last season’s perfect outcome and this season being more successful than not, it would be nice to see us push on. We’ve had a taste of European football, so the ideal situation would be to strengthen our squad and push for a Europa spot next season. Yes, we’ll be the outsiders for it, but why can’t it be what we target?
After three crazy, action packed years, a quiet summer to look back on and truly digest what the club has achieved is needed. Truth be told, I still find it hard to take in the fact that last season I saw us as Champions and this season I saw us do the Premier League proud in Europe. The losses and drab away run was frustrating, but the highs, like that night against Sevilla, the Liverpool win and crowding around televisions awaiting Champions League draws, will be hard to top. There’s a lot to still dream about.
