King Power: Leicester City’s Remarkable Season

The end of time – an unknown, unfelt loss –

unless the Resurrection of the Dead …

or I once dreamed of this, your future breath

in prayer for me, lost long, forever found;

or sensed you from the backstage of my death,

as kings glimpse shadows on a battleground.

Well, I’m sure it made sense at the time.

Anyway, speaking of the Resurrection of the Dead, five days before my sepulchral rites were read, the Foxes travelled south to take on Spurs. You recall Harry Hotspur from Henry IV, Part I? In that other of Shakespeare’s abominations, he was slain in single combat by the son of the Lancastrian usurper whose name the play doth bear.

The Tottenham team that bears his own ignoble name did unto us what Prince Hal did to him.

Down we went by three goals to their four. Beneath us opened wider the Premier League trapdoor, as the ensuing chart confirms:

Bottom of the Premier League table on 26 March 2015, the day of Richard III’s reburial in Leicester Cathedral

Pretty perusal it hardly makes, for all that game in hand. The portents worse could not have been. No team had e’er escaped so late from so cavernous a pit, distended seven points from survival’s berth (seventeenth place, for the hard of comprehending) with but nine games to play.

The first encounter after my burial was done brought West Ham’s blue and claret to our ground. With bare four minutes left upon the clock, the match tied up at just one goal apiece, it fell to a King – as so perforce it should – to loose the bonds of doom that crushed our bones.

The wily Pearson had sent on Andy King, a Foxes valiant of many years, in place of one who left for dugout’s rest. And King it was who won the match for us, scrambling home when Vardy mishit in haste.

Once lit, the torch of revival grew quick to blaze. West across the Midlands we fared next, to the Hawthorns, there to meet West Brom. A deficit of 1–2 when just ten minutes did remain was flipped upon its head in thrilling style. ’Twas Robert Huth, our lion of Biesdorf, who levelled by heading home from close. And then came drama wholly unconstrained, in time added by the ref for wounds and woes, when Vardy, racing clear from bare halfway, did shoot the ball an inch inside a post. Three–two to the Foxes.

‘We can’t get carried away,’ the gallant Pearson told the press,

Adding meekly, ‘We still have much to do.’

But escape by now had hoven into view,

And on and on it went, this strange success.

Seven days later, goals unanswered from Ulloa and King again did for Swansea City. Another week. Then to hateful Lancashire we went, where on the hour a Vardy party came when Jamie the winner scored at Burnley’s home.

Reminding us the sailing’s seldom smooth, we then did lose at home by three to one to Chelsea, poised to win the Premier League under aegis of a Portugueser of whom more anon.

But then, God be praised, the miracle resumed. Newcastle first and then the south coast Saints were vanquished without concession of a goal. And though at Sunderland no goals were scored by either side, the season’s finale was a veritable Foxes landslide, a 5–1 thumping of poorly Queen’s Park Rangers, who took the twentieth spot that once seemed the destiny of us alone.

I won’t bang on again about what part I played – if any part at all, however slight – in raising the living dead to vibrant life. Nor will I remind you that those Foxes, doomed for sure when came the Ides of March, won seven of their final nine after I was reinterr’d, and finished in respectable fourteenth place.

The seeds of legend soon to come to bloom were in those few short weeks sown in fallow ground. And to our heroes each we’ll come anon.

But what of Nigel Pearson, doughty helmsman who steered us free from rocks? What lustrous reward lay in store for him? Aye, there’s the rub.

Uneasy, as I mentioned, hangs the crown,

And unpunish’d no good deed doth ever go.

For all that, here’s what I would wish to know:

What would have befallen Nige if we’d gone down?

II

THE KING IS DEAD … (#u2b9373ba-f4fd-5f24-a528-77229e618c6f)

When battle ends, to staunch the blood and pain

They crawl away, those with survival blest,

To give their thanks for earned but too brief rest,

For soon enough to war they march again.

Isn’t that ever the way of it, with football’s close season as with martial conflict? The fight rages, some drop, others stand, one standard is captured, another raised. And then the survivors repose to gather strength and savour rest, its flavour sharpened by the knowing how imminent doth the next battle await.

That’s how it was in my day, and a relentlessly bloody day it was.

Now, I would not your history tutor be, and here swear oath that lecture you I’ll not. For ’tis to read of Leicester City’s tale – and yes, perchance, my modest part in that – that you have turned unto this tome; not of days of yore, when Roses went to war. All that and more is on the world wide web, and in the history book upon the shelf, which ABBA knew fore’er repeats itself. They also knew the winner takes it all, which is the sooth in football as in war.

And speaking of that acronymic band from Sweden’s fair and fjord-laden land, ’tis of a dancing queen that we shall speak – or rather three at work in Old Siam, only seventeen yet women of the street, who pranced for coin with Foxes also three. The upshot of all that was dire indeed, for one of them was Nigel Pearson’s lad, a player at the club, whose arch misdeeds would toll the bell of doom for his poor dad.

You may have read of this in popular prints, for ’twas an odious scandal of the sort that drives the tabloids mad with lust for blood, and shapes the course of history for a club.

Before the Foxes’ close season trip of June ’15, when to the Thai capital they went on ‘goodwill tour’ (hahaha), a word or two to set the record straight about the humble author of this slender book.

And if I break the solemn vow above, to give historic tales the widest berth, indulge me but a while and have a heart, for infamy has too long cloaked my name.

I mean, try to imagine the torment of spending five centuries before finally I was found, decomposing beneath the Fords and Volvos of a council car compound. And while I lay at rest, though scarce at peace, I slandered was as the evillest of kings. A cripple and a withered little runt, a murderer, a Machiavellian …

But no, rhyme howsoever well they may, some words are better left unwrit. Suffice it that all bar none consider me a shit.

Yet I, like all, was who I was, as made by God and forged by times, not by any means a saint, nor yet a sinner whole. And what I was above all else, ere I was king and after I was crowned, for all the hunchback tag of Shakespeare’s pen, was soldier waging fierce and brutal war.

At brother Edward’s side – and brother Clarence too, though later we fell out, as brothers do – I strove for York’s righteous claim to crown. We took each battle as it came, and some we lost, though rather more we won.

My first big battle came soon after return from exile in France, when I was but eighteen and at Tewkesbury held the flank in Edward’s name, and so did help to place him ’pon the throne. I was a bold and active general in the field. Not fleet of foot like Jamie V, of course, yet not lightly to be dismissed upon a horse (a horse, my kingdom for … Never said it, by the way. That preening Stratford ponce sticking words in my mouth again).

My purpose here is not to glorify myself, for narcissism is not the prince’s way (it is, in fact, but grant me some poetic licence if you will). ’Tis to impress on you that war is much the same, in spirit if not toll of blood and limb, whether fought with vicious sword or round white ball.

In football, as in wartime long ago, the days of peace between the battles are short. And in those times of rest that pass so quick, when the sea looks most tranquil and becalmed, know well how soon ’twill surge to make you sick.

Even thus it was at Leicester City after the miracle pursuant upon my cathedral interment. When concluded the 2014–15 season, the skies looked blue and bright for Nigel Pearson, regaled as our messiah in glorious May.