STAN COLLYMORE How Foxes limped into the relegation lottery
COLLY Major prize now is cash
Follow us on Twitter: @peoplesport REMEMBER Mickey Carroll, the Lotto Lout? Well, Leicester City remind me of him. Not individually. In that respect, they’re hardworking pros who have earned their corn.
And, as far as I know, none of them have blown their wad on racetracks in their back gardens.
But, collectively, the similarity is very much there, in that they look as if they have been dropped into a situation, a life, that is completely alien to them.
Just as Carroll (below) didn’t know how to handle his fortune, Leicester don’t seem to know how to handle being champions.
I’ll bet they went away in the summer not knowing what to do with their achievement and wondering, ‘Are we really champions of England? Is it a blip? Is it a miracle? Or are we really actually that good?’
The truth is, their triumph last season an anomaly.
But new contracts, book projects and movies were all added to the mix on the back of the title-winning campaign and no wonder it has caused most, if not all, of them to take their eyes off the ball.
The interesting thing about Leicester’s struggles this season is that they are giving us a potted football psychology lesson in 12 months.
This time last year, we kept hearing interviews in which Foxes stars said, “We’re a band of brothers, the dressingroom spirit is almost super-human”.
And the season culminated at Jamie Vardy’s house, where they were all there together, celebrating what they had done. I wonder how many times they have all been round to Vardy’s house this season.
Or how many times he has sat down with the group and said, “You know what, fellas, I need to stop being involved in this film, this book.
“I need to just get my head down and score some goals because that’s my job, that’s what this team needs from me and I’m on a massive contract here now.”
How many times have Robert Huth and Wes Morgan, who defended like lions last season, said to each other, “We put our bodies on the line last season and we’re just not doing it as much – that has to change”?
Blood
And I could be as scathing of Riyad Mahrez as I like, but he is only replicating this worrying trend of having a big season, then being awful the next season and not really caring because he’s been there and done that. It looks like Leicester’s player have all got a little bit fat, a little bit giddy on becoming the latest Miracle Men. From a player’s perspective, I can understand there might have been a little tail-off, but top six, top eight should have been easy. However, to find themselves in a relegation scrap is incredible and the one thing with the Premier League is that it grinds you down, week in, week out, if you’re not careful.
It will sniff blood and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Swansea didn’t win comfortably today to heap even more misery on Claudio Ranieri and his men.
No doubt that would lead to more stories of dressing-room unrest, of players questioning their manager, yet I bet he is saying nothing he didn’t say last season.
He is being made a scapegoat for what’s happening and, sadly, people rely on perceptions.
Last season, he was the Roman emperor, planting his sword in the ground after being the nearly man.
This season, he is almost being parodied again, The Tinkerman nickname raising its head, with people whispering, “Oh, here he is again, the idiot we thought was coming to Leicester in the first place”.
No. It’s the players who are the problem.
They need to say, “Gaffer, let’s get back to 4-4-2, to Schmeichel, Simpson, Huth, Morgan, Fuchs, Mahrez, Mendy, Drinkwater, Albrighton, Okazaki and Vardy and, as players, let’s say the next 14 games are even more important than the last 14 games last season’.
They have players who know how to win League One, the Championship, the Premier League and how to stay up in the Premier League, so they are very experienced in high-pressure situations. And if they can get their mindset right, they will stay up – with
ease. FOR Derby and Leicester to make 18 changes between them for their FA Cup fourth-round replay was an absolute disgrace – BBC pundit Alan Shearer called it right.
He said that while trophies matter to fans, only finances matter to clubs and, for a £1.8million prize that they might not win anyway, they just don’t give a damn.
I firmly believe we’re in danger of moving into an age when there are no trophies, no cups — we’ll just put a big, fat cheque up for grabs and let every team play for that.
It will be like the Stanford Super Series in cricket, with teams playing for a see-through pot filled with cash.
I’m adamant we will have that situation in football in my lifetime.