Ranieri, a rare bit of sunshine in the gloom
WHO could blame Claudio Ranieri if he has decided to turn his back on the Premier League after the way it has treated him?
Ranieri has been appointed the new manager of Nantes, who finished seventh in Ligue 1 last season, after Leicester City sacked him and various English clubs ignored him.
This is the man who delivered the greatest miracle the game in this country has ever seen.
What Ranieri achieved at Leicester was so far beyond anyone’s realm of expectation that there seems to have been a concerted effort to paint it as a pure fluke.
The Italian’s part in the club’s title win has been reduced to that of the affable uncle, who shook everyone’s hand at press conferences and said silly things like: “Dilly-ding, dilly-dong.”
All the proper coaching work, apparently, was done by his assistant Craig Shakespeare. Player acquisition was down to Steve Walsh. All Ranieri did was turn up and be nice to people. This is, of course, a scandalous re-writing of the facts. Ranieri may not have won the League by himself, but there is no chance that Leicester would have won it without him.
He’s been available to work since he was sacked, immediately following a decent Champions League knock-out stage result in Seville in February. But no top-flight English club seemed interested.
Not Middlesbrough, who preferred caretaker Steve Agnew when they got rid of Aitor Karanka and still went down.
Not Watford, who opted instead for flavour-of-themonth Marco Silva, who’d been relegated with Hull, nor Crystal Palace when Sam Allardyce walked.
Big Championship clubs, such as Sunderland and Leeds United, ignored him too. No wonder Ranieri opted for France. Perhaps he feels there’s precious little gratitude or respect here. If he does, nobody could blame him.
He certainly departs a climate in which clubs that have no logical right to success don’t hesitate to sack managers when that success doesn’t come.
He will have noted that Southampton have just jettisoned Claude Puel, despite him reaching the EFL Cup Final and taking the club to eighth in the table, the highest position anyone could realistically expect Saints to reach.
English football chews up managers and spits them out. Maybe Ranieri, at 65, has had enough of that.
Whether his exile is his own choice or that of others, he’s a big loss.
In a League populated by scowling, prickly, selfimportant managers, Ranieri was a rare beam of sunshine.