Yahoo Sport 
Ranieri's secret, West Ham D-Day and trying to kick star man - truth of Leicester City title triumph
Forget Jamie Vardy’s goals, the towering defensive displays of Wes Morgan or the inspired goalkeeping of Kaspar Schmeichel, the true hero of Leicester City’s against-all-odds title success of 2015/16 has finally been named.
In a team full of club legends, it is not only hard but also probably invidious to select one man over another in the Foxes’ one-in-5,000 Premier League triumph. However, few people are better qualified to do so than another member of the City title-winning team.
Robert Huth formed an almost impenetrable barrier at the back for Leicester alongside skipper Morgan, frustrating some of the best attackers the Premier League had to offer at the time and providing the platform on which the likes of Vardy prospered.
And in conversation with talkSPORTS’ Andy Goldstein, Huth discussed the key men in Leicester’s success, when they thought winning the title was a realistic ambition - and how it felt to realise what for many of the team would have been an impossible dream.
Here is what Huth had to say…
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On the title…
“It’s probably the best time I’ve been involved in football because everyone wanted you to win, even Liverpool supporters. Tottenham supporters maybe not, but everyone else in the country was supporting you. It was really strange. Normally when you fill your car at the petrol station you get a bit of rubbish from people, but it was the exact opposite. People really wanted you to push on and win the league.
“But in terms of our expectations, that was never the case - we got to 10 games and were looking good, got to 20 games and still looking good. Then we realised we were really in the push for it.”
How late into the season did title realisation dawn?
“Probably the West Ham game was the one when I thought we had a chance. That was about six or seven games to go. For me, that was the first time. You don’t want to jinx it, don’t want to mention it, you just want to bat it away, but you get to that point and you can’t.
“I think the West Ham game when we got back to 2-2 felt like a win and when we got back to work on the Monday morning everyone felt, ‘It’s on boys.’ It wasn’t that we weren’t focused prior to the last six games, but something sharpened up. Training got a bit more intense, everyone was a bit more serious - just dialled in to the maximum. Realistically we knew we weren’t going to be in that position again and certainly not me at my age, I think 33. Wes was probably 34. So we all knuckled down and got on with it.”
Who was the most important player that season?
“I think it’s got to be N'Golo Kante. Wes was absolutely awesome too. Kante was so dominant and amazing the whole season, so people rightly speak about him a lot, but Wes was brilliant too. He dug us out in a few games when we struggled, he put in man of the match performance. Kante was just a joke of a player though.
“I remember the first time I met Kante. If I say underwhelming I don’t mean it in a disrespectful way, but going among the big boys, he was smaller than the average player we had at the time.But it only took 10 minutes of training to realise he was not to be messed with. I remember everyone looking into each other’s eyes and saying, ‘Ooof, this kid’.
“Session one we did possession and he just kept nicking the ball. The harder you tackled him, the more he thrived on it. He always wins the ball. I don’t know how he does it. For a short player he’s got the longest legs ever. He just nicks it. Players were getting so frustrated with him and by the end of the session they were just trying to kick him and they couldn’t even kick him because he was so nimble, so quick.
“We had to find a way to get him in the team. At first he was playing on the wing because he was so good. He was playing on the wing, playing in the middle, he was playing everywhere. The first couple of games we had meetings after the game and it was just him winning the ball back for us. That was the team meeting after the game. That’s how good he was.
“He would cover positions that were unbelievable in a game. If you were out of position and thought you were in trouble, he’d be there. His understanding of the game was second to none. He could see a position on the pitch three passes ahead. You’d think, ‘Where is he going?’ and all of a sudden he’d intercept the ball.”
The manager
“Claudio Ranieri was certainly funny. I’d had him at Chelsea too so he was there at the start and end of my career. I thought, ‘If he trains us as hard at Leicester as he did at Chelsea then I’ve got no chance of playing.’ But he really fitted in.
“The club was set up so well with Craig Shakespeare and all the staff. Ranieri was a figurehead, but he let us get on with it from what we’d had the previous season when we stayed up. He just gave it a go and we kept winning and winning and winning.”
What a team you had?
“The lads who left Leicester did well, it wasn’t just a one-off for them. Kante went on to be an absolute superstar, Mahrez equally. Drinkwater went to Chelsea for big money and it didn’t work out. But it was a good team. We were not superstar names but there are good players in the Premier League and if you get them together with good coaches and with momentum and belief, a lot of things can happen.”
