Leicester
This Leicester season has been a continued exercise in “Could they? Can they? Will they?” but as the games tick by there becomes less reason to think that they will simply slip limply away. From possible top-four challengers in November to probable title challengers in February. They have a three-point lead at the top with 14 games left.So bizarre is Leicester’s achievement that the statistics bear repeating and re-reading just to sink in. Only Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain in Europe’s top five leagues have lost fewer games than Claudio Ranieri’s side this season. That’s astonishing.
Only our disbelief stops Leicester from being title favourites. Change and difference is difficult to comprehend, and so English football’s most remarkable achievement since Nottingham Forest’s consecutive European Cups still feels like a fanciful pipe dream.
It’s time to alter our preconceptions. Leicester have one of the division’s in-form strikers, one of the division’s in-form midfielders and a defence that has conceded one goal in its last six matches. The conventional wisdom was that Ranieri’s side would fall away after Christmas. If anything, they’ve got stronger while others have stuttered.
On Tuesday, Leicester were not just better than Liverpool, they embarrassed Jurgen Klopp’s side. Simon Mignolet made tremendous saves, while some of Leicester’s passing play was as good as anything the Premier League has seen this season.
Of course there are still hurdles to clamber over. In their next two matches Leicester face Manchester City and Arsenal, the title favourites and one of the two teams to have beaten them in the league. Their last three games of the season are Manchester United away, Everton at home and Chelsea away.
Yet Ranieri’s side have not come this far to start playing with fear. To worry about Leicester missing out on first place is to spectacularly miss the point, because they were never meant to be in the same postcode as the Premier League title race.
As the Leicester supporter in Tuesday morning’s Mailbox wrote: ‘This is just getting so beautifully mad. Everyone, including us, keeps expecting the wheels to come off. But we now go into away games at Arsenal and Manchester City, where even losing both will keep us right in the title race. Europe seems a certainty now. I can’t wait, even if it is Europa League. Football is just brilliant joy at the moment.’
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