Ranieri fairytale deserved better than a tragic ending
THE news that Shakespeare was briefing the media yesterday on the Claudio Ranieri affair at Leicester was appropriate considering the nearoperatic scale of the tragedy that has unfolded in this corner of the East Midlands in the past few days.
In fact, the man in question was Ranieri’s former assistant Craig – who will take the team into Monday night’s Barclays Premier League meeting with Liverpool – and not William, but even the bard himself would have had his work cut out writing a pot-boiler of a plot line like this one.
Nine months after presiding over the closest thing football comes to a miracle, when he led a team of 5000-1 outsiders to the Premier League title, this 65-yearold from Rome is back out there looking for a job. After the fairytale, this was a reminder that the beautiful game is mainly a brutal, unforgiving business; the sinister sequel to Jamie Vardy’s saccharine Hollywood feature.
As much as the dandy, debonair figure of Ranieri beguiled the media with his Dilly Ding, Dilly Dong routine, it was his players who made the hard yards. It was they who ran themselves into the ground for their team-mates, carrying out Ranieri’s ruthless tactical plan to the letter. Basically, their formula was sit behind the ball, condense the space, win it back, then spring the quicksilver Jamie Vardy, Jeffrey Shlupp, Riyad Mahrez, Marc Albrighton and sometimes N’Golo Kante on the counter attack.
Now, most of those same players are responsible for the manager’s departure. Whether or not they explicitly went behind his back to complain to the club’s board as was suggested yesterday, their actions alone have demonstrated that they were no longer too bothered whether he stayed or went. If they did meet, Hibs-style en masse, to undermine him in the eyes of the board, this was a rare display of unity of purpose from a club where personal egos have been allowed to run rampant during this campaign. While Kante’s departure for Chelsea was a body blow, Vardy and Mahrez agreed to stay on. But their effectiveness this season has been inversely proportional to their improved four-year contracts.
A team that wins the title quite simply should not fall away as badly as this, and a place in the Champions League last 16 – where they were lucky to escape from Seville with a 2-1 defeat – is scant consolation when you stand just one point above the relegation places. While Roberto Mancini was quick to recognise yesterday that replacing his countryman was poison, that job won’t be vacant for long. Whether Rangers target Frank de Boer would consider ending his sabbatical early to go there is one source of intrigue.
“It is inexplicable to me,” said club legend Gary Lineker, although in fact it really wasn’t too difficult to explain. “I shed a tear last night for Claudio, for football and for my club.”
It was left to former Leicester goalkeeper Peter Shilton to put an alternative spin on things. “If they stay in the Premier League then they’ve made the right decision,” said Shilton. “A lot of people will say there’s no sentiment in football and look at what he’s done for the club, but he’s had a lot of the season to get things going.”