Winning the title was his big mistake
He did too well, flew too close to the sun
DO you know the strangest thing? If Claudio Ranieri had taken Leicester to 14th last season, and 13th this season, he would still be in a job. If nobody had heard of them beyond these isles, if nobody cared outside Leicester, if the Champions League was as far removed from them now as it is for Watford this morning, the owners would think Ranieri had done just swell.
Success. That was Ranieri’s big mistake. Dragging Leicester above the morass of mediocrity that makes up the Premier League these days. He did too well, flew too close to the sun. It is a miserable truth, but success really isn’t for the likes of Leicester any more.
Managers everywhere will look at Ranieri’s plight and shudder. It has always been one of football’s pitfalls — the danger of heightened expectation — but never has the ruinous ricochet been so brutally felt. Ranieri could have plodded along at Leicester and picked up a salary into his dotage.
By winning the league, with the foolish egos that triumph unleashed in the dressing room, the added pressure of Champions League football, and the anticipation of sustained success, he sealed his own fate. Better keep your head down, best not frighten the horses. George Graham left Leeds United for Tottenham Hotspur on October 1, 1998, with the club in seventh place.
He was succeeded by his assistant, David O’Leary, who finished fourth that season. When the pair met up for dinner in the summer, Graham told the younger man to be careful. O’Leary was perplexed. He said it was going great. ‘It’s going too well,’ Graham warned. ‘If you can’t repeat it, they’ll sack you.’
The next season, Leeds had a tilt at the title, eventually finishing third, and reached the semi-final of the UEFA Cup.
The season after, O’Leary took them to the semi-final of the Champions League, losing to Valencia. In 2001-02, O’Leary finished fifth and Leeds qualified for the UEFA Cup. That summer he was sacked. It took a little while, but Graham was proved right. It only needed one season in which Leeds were perceived not to have progressed and all of O’Leary’s fine work counted for nothing.
So it was for Ranieri. The mitigation for this most unholy dismissal is that Leicester were going down with him in charge.
Yet a club need to be in the bottom three to get relegated and Leicester have not touched those depths once in this campaign. The owners may have thought that the drop into the Premier League basement was only a matter of time, but events can turn. At half-time in Seville on Wednesday, few gave Leicester a prayer. By the end of the match, they were a 1-0 home win in the return leg away from the Champions League quarter-final. Things change.
After the game, Ranieri was said to be happier than he has been in months. He has been willing Jamie Vardy to score, believing his loss of form is purely down to confidence, and the striker obliged with his first goal since December 10.
That it came from a pass by the similarly out of sorts Danny Drinkwater was an added bonus. Ranieri was pleased with the resilience his players showed against a superior side, too, and hoped this would mark a corner turned.
He had no inkling that he was finished at Leicester until the call came.
Foolishly, Ranieri believed that to win the league title as such an outsider afforded him credit, that he would be allowed to see out the Champions League campaign and that the owners shared his conviction this season could be turned around. He was wrong.
With the exception of Bob Bradley at Swansea, all Premier League managers sacked this season have one thing in common: at some stage in the last 12 months they did better than expected.
Alan Pardew at Crystal Palace reached the FA Cup final, and only lost to Manchester United in extra time.
Ranieri won the league. Francesco Guidolin took over Swansea two points from the relegation zone, and finished the season in 12th place, 10 points clear.
Even Mike Phelan, at Hull, started brightly — winning his first three games, before losing to Manchester United in the last minute. Most had Hull down as relegation certainties, and by some distance, but come mid- October they were still 15th. On January 3, with Hull now exactly where they were expected to be, Phelan was sacked.
Tomorrow, Claude Puel will walk out at Wembley as the first Southampton manager since Gordon Strachan in 2003 to reach a major final. Big mistake. He could have kept Southampton nicely under the radar, selling the best players to their bigger rivals but in no danger of relegation. Safe as houses. After this, then what?
As Ranieri considers what the hell just happened, it would appear the managerial landscape is changing.
They used to pay the price for failure: now success is equally cursed. For those outside the established elite, with Ranieri’s sacking, we may be witnessing the death of real ambition.