Ulloa has some nerve taking shot at Ranieri the genius
AS USEFUL as he was last season, it is doubtful there will ever be a statue to Leonardo Ulloa at the King Power Stadium. That is what separates him from Claudio Ranieri.
Ulloa did some good things as Leicester won the title. He converted a last-minute penalty to snatch a draw against West Ham; he filled in for Jamie Vardy and scored twice in the 4-0 win over Swansea that put Leicester on the brink; he got the only goal of the game against Norwich on February 27.
Even so, of Ulloa’s 29 league appearances last season, only seven were starts — the same number as Ritchie De Laet. He was a squad man, not the main man. Ranieri, by contrast, was a genius. He was the first to give credit to his players — all of them, even those on the fringe — but the more this season unravels, the more his brilliance in keeping a successful title campaign together a year ago becomes apparent.
Some have used Leicester’s poor form this season to decry Ranieri’s work as a fluke. It was nothing of the sort. You can’t fluke winning the league by 10 points. If anything, Leicester’s reversion to relegation candidates this season only shows how outstanding Ranieri’s leadership was. He inspired average players, he constructed a game plan that his rivals underestimated, and he drilled his group until they rode it all the way to victory.
Where Leicester are now is where we expect them to be. Where they were then was the work of a master. It is easy to credit a player — N’Golo Kante, for instance — with Leicester’s high performance level, without acknowledging that he was under instruction throughout.
From Kante at the top, to Daniel Amartey, who started a single game, there is not a player at Leicester who does not owe Ranieri ( right) a tremendous debt of gratitude.
So, whatever happens from here, a statue may one day stand in his honour in a corner of the stadium, and rightly so. Meaning, he deserves more respect than just about any manager in the Premier League. Meaning, he most certainly does not deserve the petulant outburst of Ulloa’s agent Horacio Rossi, who branded Ranieri a selfish egotist and a liar because he would not grant his client’s transfer request this January.
‘The manager is destroying Ulloa’s career,’ said Rossi. ‘He wants him to stay to play two games a year. We will not allow it.’ Remind you of anyone? Rossi has all the charm of Dimitri Seluk, a man we are thankfully hearing less and less from since Yaya Toure decided that Pep Guardiola probably knows more about football than his mate the agent.
Ulloa signed a contract that expires in summer 2018, so it is not really up to Rossi what is allowed, but the idea that Ranieri has destroyed the career of any player at Leicester is laughable.
Before signing for Leicester, Ulloa had spent one season in a top division in Europe, with Almeria in Spain, who were promptly relegated. And while Ranieri preferred to start other strikers, events last season made his judgment unquestionable, and he still involved Ulloa as a fringe player. As a result, he won his first medal since the 2007 Copa Sudamericana with Arsenal Sarandi.
Now there is a sniff of a move to Alaves, a mid-table La Liga club, Ulloa’s agent thinks he has the right to play Ranieri for a fool.
He isn’t the first. Ranieri did not get enough respect at the end of last season, when some of his players drowned him in champagne in front of the world’s media. Who do they think they are? This is the 2016 Coach of the Year. This is a man who has achieved a feat in the English game that may never be revisited in our lifetime, taking the Premier League title from the elite. He has subsequently steered Leicester into the Champions League last 16, by the way, which is more than Louis van Gaal ever did with Manchester United, or Mauricio Pochettino with Tottenham.
Not for the first time, Leicester’s manager merits more esteem than he is afforded. He has the right to ask anything of his players, and if he wants Ulloa to stay until the end of the season, he is owed at
least that.