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A look at Leicester City’s unsung heroes

“We’ve only got two men, we’ve only got two men…” this is the very self-aware, but brilliant, chant that Foxes fans sang for a few minutes at Manchester City last weekend. It’s inevitable that with 31 goals and 12 assists between them, Jamie Vardy and Riyad Mahrez continue to steal the headlines as well as the attention and they entirely deserve it too. But what about everybody else? After all, it takes a lot of work both on and off the pitch to enable a team to top the Premier League.

The record the duo have achieved between them is more than impressive and had they been achieving this but we were struggling, hanging onto them in January would have been tricky. There’s been so much talk about what will happen should either, or both, be injured and how would we cope. They’re incredibly important, but no team has ever topped the table for long relying on just one or two players only and both are the first to credit the entire team and club for the reason that they’re able to be so prolific.

This season Leicester have almost been scoring for fun, 37 goals in our first 19 games, a stark contrast to the same spell last year where we managed just 16 in the same number of matches. It’s no coincidence that a slight shuffling of players and a more dramatic tactical change have enabled this. It’s also credit to our back-line that the players up front are allowed such freedom and the opportunity to be creative. There was early concern that although our back five was of a good quality, we weren’t keeping clean sheets. This is something Claudio Ranieri sought to fix and achieved quickly. To sit alongside the goals we’ve scored, we’ve now kept 8 clean sheets, helping our goal difference significantly. Our defenders and goalkeeper have got more, much overdue, praise over the last month or so, but it’s still minimal in comparison to our strikers.

Jermaine Jenas wrote a great piece on here about our captain and centre-back, Wes Morgan, this week (https://uk.sports.yahoo.com/news/jermaine-jenas-exclusive–wes-morgan-has-taken-the-tough-route-to-the-top-but-now-is-key-to-leicester-s-title-hopes-144154412.html) that highlights what Leicester fans have been saying all season. This is the best Morgan we’ve ever seen. Stronger, faster, bulkier and a defensive rock, he’s been crucial to our season so far. To look at him, you’d be forgiven for expecting him to be very physical but he only just one yellow card to his name this season and while not afraid of putting his body on the line, he’s not an overtly dirty player. Being punished with a yellow card against Manchester City on Saturday actually ended a 36 league match streak without a card for the Jamaican international.


After two goals on Saturday, it was impossible to not talk about Morgan’s partner, Robert Huth, I looked at him in slightly more detail already and how much of an impact he’s made in the last twelve months at the club. While both full-backs have caught the fans’ eyes, the media have been fairly quiet about them. For all his on the pitch efforts, Christian Fuchs has made more media headlines for his funny, and very down to earth, antics on social media. He’s taken to the Premier League like a duck to water and it’s definitely no coincidence that our clean sheets began around the time he came into the first team. He appears to be the missing piece to the puzzle that our defence needed and for a player who didn’t even know whether or not he’d be wanted, after the manager he signed for left before they’d even had one training session; it’s a testament to his character. Danny Simpson has been even more overlooked what with Fuchs contributing to our goals with some superb assists, the right-back has gone about his job more quietly. For a player who was on the fringes last season and couldn’t even impress for the under-21s, he’s also arguably in the form of his life. He made a rare mistake with a sloppy back-pass that nearly put Sergio Aguero through at the weekend, but has been pretty faultless otherwise.

With a goalkeeper like Kasper Schmeichel behind them, it’s comforting at the moment watching this set-up as a Foxes fan. Schmeichel barely had a save to make at the weekend, so effective were the men in front of him. I’ve covered off his qualities in length already but the five of them deserve more of the credit than their clean sheets suggest. Leicester would not be able to play the fast, counter-attacking football that we’ve drooled over this season without a solid, trustworthy back-line behind us.

Further up the pitch, Danny Drinkwater and N'Golo Kante have also find themselves in the spotlight. It took the general media longer to catch up, as Leicester fans have been raving about both from early on, but their hard work and tenaciousness are pretty impossible to ignore. There was a great quote from Ranieri earlier in the season about how Kante is the engine and Drinkwater, the driver, and that has been the case in almost every game. Whether defensively, or attacking, at least one of them is always present. Both have ensured that while Esteban Cambiasso’s presence is missed, we have not missed him as a team. I suspect that it will come down to one of these players as to who’ll take the club’s internal player of the year award and I wouldn’t be surprised if Kante snuck it away from Drinkwater. Knowing how much running and work he does, he has to be a dream team-mate and working twice as hard as players we’ve seen in the past, he allows Mahrez even more freedom to drift from the wing when needed.




Then there’s the other supporting units that we have going forward in Shinji Okazaki and Marc Albrighton. The latter had a very bright start to the season, getting a goal and some assists under his belt in the first couple of games. Since then, his assists have petered out a little, but it’s not through a lack of effort. Often used as a scapegoat, Albrighton is often overlooked and undervalued. Like any winger, he has moments where what he tries doesn’t work, but he is always looking to get a cross into the box and to cause problems. Hard-working, he does cover a lot of ground in a game and certainly chips in when we’re not in possession or when we’re defending. Okazaki’s had a reverse situation to Albrighton, taking slightly longer to really settle in and definitely coming into his own in 2016, he’s turned into a key player for the Foxes. While yet to score at the King Power, his displays away from home have been vital. It’s only a matter of time until he begins to score more.

Then there are the fringe players. The ones who were brought to the club for their experience like Gokhan Inler, who may have struggled for game time but still seem happy and are having their influence off the field. Keeping the players who aren’t getting games happy is always a challenge but one that Leicester are so far navigating easily, or so it appears. With cup games out of the way, we’ve taken the chance to loan two players who have really found their season limited to being on the substitutes bench, Yohan Benalouane and Richie De Laet, neither of who appeared to demand such a move. Every single player in the squad seems positive, still smiling and wanting the team to do well and to win. It’s one of my favourite things about the season, to watch a squad who work so hard for each other.

Players aside, there’s the entire network of staff behind the scenes. Scouts are those who rarely get mentioned in the media and while they’re successes shine on the pitch, they tend to remain in the shadows. Not so much of a problem for Leicester’s scouting team. A sure sign that they’re doing a lot of things right is the fact that Arsenal seem intent on poaching most of them. It seems they launched an attempt to get head scout, and assistant manager, Steve Walsh, but instead settled for technical scout Ben Wrigglesworth. Disappointing for the Foxes but not as devastating as losing Walsh would be. He’s been credited with us signing virtually every single one of our regular scouting eleven and most praised for spotting Riyad Mahrez and for helping us get him at a bargain price of less than half a million.

We also have a team of coaches and sports science specialists to thank. While the coaches take care of their different areas and various tactics, our sports science staff have ensured our injuries this season have been minimal. Their management of Jamie Vardy’s injury saw him miss just one game, a cup tie he’d never have started in, and had him fighting fit for the league very quickly. Many would suggest luck has seen us notch up so few injuries but there’s a lot more to it behind the scenes than that. Ranieri has worked closely with the likes of our head of fitness, Matt Reeves, and physio, Dave Rennie to look at recovery time, recovery methods and it shows. Rarely this season have our players ever looked tired or jaded. A statement that sounds more impressive when you consider that we are the side who have used the least number of different players this campaign.

While it might be less than a year since Nigel Pearson’s departure (and a year since we sort of sacked him then didn’t by coincidence), some Foxes fans have long forgotten him, so has been the roller-coaster we’ve been on since that time. Surely he deserves part of this credit though? Yes, Claudio Ranieri is the man in charge and brought in some of his own names since taking charge but this side is still predominantly the one that Pearson led to survival. Whether he could have achieved the same heights is unknown, but he is a big part of why the players are so together. Even last season when struggling, our team spirit was strong.

It’s difficult to mention Pearson without thinking of our owners and how they don’t always get a mention either. Now almost five years since they took over, they’re more than delivered on what they told us they aimed to do when they first came in. There were initial hiccups, their earlier managerial choices didn’t quite work out, but when they made a bold move to bring back Pearson in 2012, it all clicked. They bought back our stadium, upgraded the training and youth facilities, rewarded the fans and invested where needed with the squad, though never excessively. People smirked when they talked a plan that would see Leicester achieve a top 5 finish by 2017/18, but now people can see what they were aiming for and why they felt it was achievable. Finding your club in safe hands is not guaranteed when there’s a takeover and you only have to look at other clubs of a similar size, Leeds, Nottingham Forest et al., to see how differently things could have gone.



Of course, Ranieri would put it back onto his players if you asked him, but he has been a revelation that Leicester needed, even if not everybody necessarily thought it when he first took over. He passed his biggest challenge quickly, keeping the players, a large majority who were saddened to lose Pearson, happy. Wise enough to keep the back-room staff, from assistant manager, Craig Shakespeare, to sports science staff like Matt Reeves. He gained the squad’s respect and gave himself an instant advantage of having people around him who knew the set-up, the strengths, the weaknesses. For a manager who was predicted to fail by almost everybody outside of the club, he’s so far done the exact opposite. I struggle to think of many occasions this season where I have doubted any of his decisions or choices, with the exception of removing Okazaki for De Laet against Aston Villa. Perhaps he is truly the unsung hero at Leicester for unlocking the potential of our club and for helping us into a position we’d only dreamt of.