Just ask the Atlanta Falcons: once the prospect of career-defining ignominy heaves into view, it can be pretty damn difficult to stop the old noggin from whirling lickety-split, find a moment to compose yourself, take a breath, and snap out of the death spiral.
So what should head-addled Leicester City do to avoid spinning out of this season’s Premier League? Make a tactical switch or two? Possibly. Hold full and frank clear-the-air talks at the training ground? Perhaps. Change the manager? It’s an option, sure, but let’s show a good man some respect. Maybe it’d be easier to tackle the problem at source: isolate and reduce the fear, and in doing so, make the bogeyman far easier to dodge. Here’s the question, then: would going down really be the end of the world for Leicester?
The alarm bells were not pealing as loudly as this – a fresh spin on dilly ding, dilly dong, who says Claudio Ranieri has no Plan B? – a couple of years ago. Nigel Pearson’s struggling side were odds-on to slip out of the division in 2015 alongside Steve Bruce’s Hull City and Chris Ramsey’s QPR, and their relegation would not have resonated too far past the conurbations of the midlands. But then they masterminded an escape for the ages, and everyone knows what happened next: the greatest smash-and-grab in the entire history of English football.
(And it was, you know. Alf Ramsey’s Ipswich Town won their title at the tail end of an era during which the likes of Portsmouth and Burnley could conceivably become champions, and did. Nottingham Forest were a surprise in 1978, but the club had come very close to the league title just 11 years earlier, and it wasn’t as though Brian Clough and Derby County hadn’t made a reasonably similar journey in between times. Events like Leicester just weren’t supposed to be witnessed by the Premier League generation. Though admittedly this is an argument for another day. We digress.)
Either way, a Leicester relegation now would represent a catastrophe of an altogether different stripe. Should the Foxes become only the second English club in history to get themselves relegated as reigning top-flight champions, the fall would be heard all around the world.
That goes some way to explaining Kasper Schmeichel’s hot-faced admission in the wake of their miserable home defeat to Manchester United at the weekend that Leicester were an “embarrassment” and in real danger of the drop. The Sky Sports pundit Jamie Carragher, joining in on the vibes, launched into a passionate free-form riff, warning of the dangers of legacies tarnished, titles “tainted”.
The logic is obvious enough, and hard to argue against in the short term: the critics, from paying punters all the way down to the paid punditocracy, won’t be too kind come May should the worst happen. But they can’t have it both ways, and if tarnishing legacies is such a hot-button issue, then surely the bigger picture should be the primary concern.
Take Manchester City’s championship side of 1936-37, who are getting an awful lot of press right now. Have any pre-war title winners enjoyed a higher profile in the internet age?
Granted, this is all down to their subsequent tumble into the Second Division, just 12 months after becoming English champions, a fall from grace which, for now, remains utterly singular and deliciously Cityesque. But does their demise take anything away from the 80-goal antics of Peter Doherty, Eric Brook, Fred Tilson and Alec Herd which brought the championship to Maine Road in the first place?
If anything, it adds to them. Put it this way: who’s talking about Raich Carter masterminding Sunderland to the 1935-36 title right now? Arsenal signing George Hunt from Spurs and winning the league in 1937-38? Not very many people, that’s who! City’s legend by comparison is writ large, in letters big, bold and brassy enough to be clearly read nearly 80 years down the track. Now that’s building a legacy. Give it time, Leicester could do the same.
It’s not as though other English champions haven’t suffered quick and painful plummets from atop their pedestals. Portsmouth won league titles in 1949 and 1950, and were in the Third Division by 1961. Derby County embarked on a similar journey; champions in 1975, they became a third-tier concern in 1984. Blackburn Rovers got themselves relegated, with a little help from Mr Roy Hodgson, a mere four seasons after winning the 1994-95 Premier League.
But so what? Try telling supporters of any of those clubs that their titles, memorable all, were somehow retrospectively devalued by future antics. You’d get a volley of fruity language, and like it, too.
Ipswich very nearly went down as champions in 1962-63. In fact, it is arguable that Alf Ramsey’s team were knocked off their perch even quicker than City’s 1937 vintage, given they were tactically undressed by Bill Nicholson and Tottenham Hotspur at the 1962 Charity Shield. That 5-1 thrashing was their first outing as England’s champions, and even though they survived the season by the skin of their teeth, then crashed out of the division a year later under the yoke of Jackie Milburn having suffered 7-2, 9-1 and 10-1 drubbings along the way, the Charity Shield humiliation stands as their symbolic toppling. Their first match.
Even the giants of the game have not been immune to the swift decline, and none came any bigger than Everton and Dixie Dean. Everton scraped survival a year after Dean’s famous 60-goal blitz won them the 1927-28 title; a year later they were rock bottom and down. Two seasons later, they were back up and champions again, Dean scoring 45 this time round. All part of the Dean legend – the successes would not have been half as stellar without the crazy failures – and something for Jamie Vardy to chew on should the worst happen.
Of course none of these examples, other than City, show a club going down as reigning champs, as Leicester might. And that, some will argue, is the whole point: this would be, statistically, a once-in-a-lifetime event. Though really, as we have seen, we would just be splitting hairs; plenty of champion teams before Leicester have lost their mojo pretty much overnight.
But in any case, to castigate a club like Leicester for getting themselves relegated would be to miss the point. This would be news if the club under threat was Manchester United, or Arsenal, or indeed Chelsea (as to be fair it was for a fleeting moment last season). But battling relegation is what Leicester have always historically done. Their title was always going to be a one-off. And that’s just fine: not every squad has the collective energy to begin construction of a lasting empire; not every club has the wherewithal, or is of the required size, to build on championship success.
So it’s a bit of a cheek to threaten to retrospectively downgrade Leicester’s astonishing over-achievement should they somehow fall back into old habits this time round, a punishment for an understandable reversion to the norm. That’s the sort of myopic big-club thinking that got everyone pushing for Leicester last year in the first place.
So they might go down? So what? Bottom line is, nothing can ever be done to taint or tarnish the Leicester City championship season of 2015-16. (Short of disgracefully sacking Ranieri, that is, but that’s a slightly different issue.)
Apologies to Pats fans, but it’s the greatest sporting story ever told. Relegation would add a bittersweet footnote, it’s true, but that’s the only downside; take a step back, and they would be adding to the legend, putting the finishing touches on a three-season act of narrative purity, unlikely ever to be repeated.
All of which is easy to say when it’s not your team, of course. Leicester fans – plus the majority of neutrals countrywide – will be praying for Ranieri’s team to regain a little historical perspective, compose themselves, and with the panic off, ease away from the drop zone. A relegation low after last year’s high would be too cruel, even if the story would read well in 2055. Although what if the fates offered a relegation and Champions League double? Now that’d be a legacy, almost impossible to match or tarnish. Come on, Foxes, make it so!