HISTORY LESSON!
Club legend Norman hopes Foxes don’t slide like his team did way back in 1963
LEICESTER have been given a warning from history when a previous shot at glory was left in tatters by a season ravaged by delays.
Brendan Rodgers’ third-placed side have had a disastrous restart, failing to win in four games.
They’ve been dumped out of the FA Cup quarter-finals at home and seen their hopes of Champions League qualification cast into doubt.
For club stalwart Richie Norman, who is being honoured this year with an award for 50 years of services to football, it has brought back painful memories.
Norman, 84, had a shot at the title as a defender in the Foxes side in 1962-63, in front of legendary keeper Gordon
Banks. City also reached the
FA Cup final that season against a Manchester United team battling relegation.
But after the fixture list was devastated by the ‘Big Freeze’, the Foxes suffered from games piling up and a long list of injuries. They lost their last four league games, all away, to miss out on the title and end up fourth.
Leicester then lost the FA Cup final 3-1 to United at Wembley in front of 99,604 fans. And Norman told Mirror Sport: “It could have been a double, but unfortunately we ended up losing them all. Some of the lads got injured and we didn’t have the squad to cope back then.
“Hopefully, the club’s team today will cope better because to be in the top four at this stage is still terrific. Fingers crossed they can get back into Europe because we all enjoyed going to see them in the Champions League after they won the title.”
That remarkable Premier League win under Claudio Ranieri in 2016 may never be eclipsed, but early signs of life under Rodgers raised hopes they could mix it with the best in the league.
Earlier this term, the Foxes equalled the club’s record run of 10 successive wins in all competitions set in 1963. But now they cannot buy a victory, with Crystal Palace next up.
Back in 1963, it was the cold rather than coronavirus that hit football hard as UK temperatures plummeted to minus-16. The FA Cup third round took 66 days to complete amid 261 postponements.
Norman (left), who played for Leicester from 1959 to 1968 and still lives locally, recalled: “It was a terrible winter. Some teams didn’t play for weeks and people really missed football, up and down the country.” Leicester were one of the few clubs to get by after groundsman Bill Taylor treated their old Filbert Street pitch with a blend of fertiliser and weedkiller.
Norman said: “We had a special pitch because the groundsman put some chemicals on it. It was a horrible smell.
“The opposition hated it, but we enjoyed playing on it. One end was always frozen. So we used to change our boots depending which way we were kicking.
“But the opposition didn’t and were sliding and slipping all over the shop in one half of the pitch.”