Very Specific Football Question No.20: Will Claudio Ranieri now return to his planet?

It was clear from his impassioned celebrations on the touchline that no victory in this extraordinary Leicester City season has given Claudio Ranieri more pleasure than Monday night’s dismantling of his former club Chelsea.

His joyous reaction to the 2-1 win at the KP Stadium brought to mind a Very Specific Football Question posed back in September, which alluded to Ranieri’s quest for revenge against the club that sacked him 11 years ago.

“In Leicester’s superiority over the Blues so far this season, we may be witnessing the final stages of Ranieri’s masterplan. To avenge Abramovich, to usurp Chelsea, to destroy Mourinho and use the Portuguese’s blood as a condiment for his hot dogs,” were the words written on this very page.

And for Ranieri, last night appeared to be the culmination of that ambition, with the exception of the hot dogs. But perhaps the Foxes manager decided to spare his opposite number that fate because he gains more enjoyment from keeping Mourinho alive and watching his post-match interviews.

“One possibility is that I did an amazing job last season and brought the players to a level that is not their level and now they can’t maintain it,” suggested Mourinho as he said he felt “betrayed” by his players for being so rubbish against Leicester. In fact this statement would be more accurately applied to Ranieri, who has lifted his squad to heights nobody thought possible.

But with the Foxes 20 points clear of the Blues and Mourinho floundering, will Ranieri unleash his final surprise and announce what Very Specific Football Questions suspected all along: that he is not of this world? That rather he is a superlatively intelligent and deeply warped cyber-being who has spent a decade merely pretending to be silly.

This is one of the few hypotheses that allow us to make sense of the events that have unravelled since the Italian’s arrival in the east Midlands in July.

From whence this creature came it would be folly to speculate upon. Perhaps the being we know by its human form ‘Claudio Ranieri’ is an extraterrestrial, or perhaps it is the construct of a restless scientific mind here on Earth. Maybe it is a species we could not begin to comprehend.

Whatever Ranieri 'is’, what now seems possible is that this 'thing’ has served its purpose. Namely, to vanquish Chelsea and leave Mourinho a paranoid, blabbering wreck. And in doing so, to achieve a victory for all football fans. The ones who disapproved when Ranieri was sacked by Roman Abramovich despite seeming like a nice man, and the ones who thought Mourinho was not as nice.

So will Ranieri now depart to whichever dimension it calls home?

After beating Chelsea, the manager repeated his claim that Leicester’s target remains safety. “We need another five points. Don’t laugh, it’s true,” he told reporters in trademark affable style, but perhaps this was just to give the club’s fans a sense of perspective before he leaves Leicester, leaves football, leaves the planet Earth.

The alternative explanation, that Ranieri is just a humble Italian football man reaching his peak as a tactician, is more disturbing for Chelsea and the rest of the Premier League’s established 'big’ clubs. For this would indicate that Ranieri is human, and he is staying, and he is better than all of them.

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