VARDY IS HAVING A LAUGH

LEICESTER V WEST BROM

Today, 4.30pm, Live on Sky Spt 1 CLAUDIO RANIERI has told Jamie Vardy that his importance to Leicester City is measured in more than merely goals.

The Foxes’ chief believes the England international needs to stay calm and his current 11-match barren spell will come to an end.

Vardy (below) was in the firing line in midweek when former England great Michael Owen insisted that one of his successors was “lucky” in front of goal and was not “a natural-born scorer”.

But Ranieri has placed his talismanic forward, 28, on a pedestal alongside other great forwards with whom he has worked during his career – and says that there is no need for his star man to panic.

He said: “When strikers don’t score for a while, you see them becoming nervous. When I see Jamie, I don’t feel he is nervous.

“I’ve spoken to him and said, ‘Don’t worry, the important thing is the job you do for the team. Sooner or later the goals will come’.

“He’s not anxious at all. He’s normal, always laughing, battling on the training pitch, the same as last season.

“Sometimes goalscorers have to pay for what happened in one season when the next one starts. Jamie has always scored a lot of goals throughout his career.

“But in his first season in the Premier League, he got five.

“Last season, all those goals. It goes up and down. So it’s not important. The important thing is his job for the team. He’s not playing on his own.

“He has adapted well. If you remember the goal against Porto, it came from Jamie on the flank.

“He put a good cross towards the post and Islam Slimani headed for Riyad Mahrez. That was a goal for the team.”

Twelve months ago, Vardy was well on the way to emulating Ruud van Nistelrooy’s record for scoring in 11 successive Premier League fixtures.

Now he has not found the net since a tap-in against Liverpool two months ago. Former Reds’ striker Owen was disparaging when he said: “Even when he was scoring all those goals last season Vardy wasn’t convincing me.”

Ranieri added: “Scoring 11 goals in a row isn’t easy to do. I think by the end of the season he will have goals in double figures. “I have worked with some very fantastic strikers in my career: Batistuta, Careca, Fonseca, Hasselbaink, Zola, Del Piero... big champions always know they can score. They all knew it’s not possible that you are going to score 20 goals every season.

“But I am not anxious for Jamie. Not anxious at all.”