Claudio: Foxes have plenty fight
CLAUDIO RANIERI did the impossible last season when he led Leicester City to that miraculous Premier League title.
Now he has a big job on to avoid the unthinkable – relegation as defending Champions!
The Foxes have been struggling all season, but they had a miserable January run of one point from four games and no goals scored
That, coupled with an upturn in form from the clubs below, has them anxiously looking over their shoulders ahead of this afternoon’s clash with Manchester United.
This has all been done with virtually the same group of players as last year. But there is one notable exception with N’Golo Kante now driving Chelsea towards the title.
But Ranieri refuses to put all the struggles down to the little Frenchman’s departure.
“It’s not important that it’s only N’Golo Kante,” he argues. “He was one of the 24 players and he played well. But the others played well also.
“This season everything is wrong but we must also believe we can change. If I speak about Kante now, what can I change?
“I tried to change the team because we needed to try something different. But that didn’t work. I tried to help my team. It is normal for a manager to do that.
“Everything was right last season. The first XI played a lot of matches and there were just a few changes.
“If we are losers, then we will go down, but this team are not losers. They are winners and they will continue to fight.”
No one illustrates that golden spell better than Jamie Vardy. In this same fixture last season, Vardy broke a Premier League record as he scored for an 11th consecutive match.
He goes into this one having not scored for six matches since his hat-trick on December 10 sunk Manchester City.
But Ranieri still believes that Vardy can get back to the levels he had last season.
He says: “This is the life of a striker. “There are strikers who score every time one year and are up and down the next.
“We believe in Jamie and all our strikers. If he scores a goal, we have more probability of winning.”