Champion Foxes return to training
Print Edition
EVEN being the first championship winners in Leicester’s 132-year history didn’t get the jubilant players out of training yesterday.
After partying late into the night, the squad had to swiftly swap beers for bibs as they resumed training, preparing for the final two games of one of the most astonishing seasons in English football history.
The squad clinched the Premier League title without playing on Monday, watching at top-scorer Jamie Vardy’s house as second-place Tottenham Hotspur’s challenge ended with a 2-2 draw at Chelsea. “The boys were standing on furniture,” captain Wes Morgan said as he arrived at Leicester’s training. “I hope Vards’ house is all right.”
Fans with “champions” flags gathered outside the training ground as media crews from around the world blocked the narrow approach road which is surrounded by rows of houses.
It is a day of celebration that supporters of this unheralded club never anticipated.
In the second tier two years ago, in a relegation fight last season, a 5,000-1 long shot last summer, Leicester is champion of the world’s richest soccer league. Claudio Ranieri’s task when he was hired as manager last year was just keeping Leicester in the top flight. Now the 64-year-old Italian has his first-ever major title, 12 years after he was fired by Chelsea.
“The emotion was at the maximum level,” Ranieri, who was fired from his last job with Greece in 2014, said before training. “It means the job is good. I am very, very happy now because maybe if I won this title at the beginning of my career maybe I would forget. Now I am an old man I can feel it much better.”
“It’s the greatest achievement in the history of English football and it was led by an Italian,” Matteo Renzi, the Italian Prime Minister, tweeted.
The trophy will be handed over to Leicester on Saturday when it hosts Everton in the penultimate match of a season that began with Leicester tipped to be relegated. Instead, the east Midlands team is preparing for a first-ever campaign in the UEFA Champions League. It had not even finished higher than second since 1929. “We made a lot of dreams come true,” midfielder Danny Drinkwater said.
English soccer has not had a first-time champion of the top flight since Nottingham Forest in 1978. And for the last 20 years the Premier League trophy has never left London or Manchester, with Arsenal, Chelsea, United and City sharing the trophy between them.
Unlike that title-winning quartet or 1995 champion Blackburn, Leicester has achieved its success without spending big.
Tottenham had to win at Chelsea to keep its bid for a first title since 1961 alive and led 2-0 thanks to goals from Harry Kane and Son Heung-min, before Chelsea staged a second-half rally to draw in a fiery London derby where tempers frayed and tackles flew in from everywhere.
“What a game,” Leicester defender Robert Huth tweeted. “Makes me look like an angel! CHAMPIONS!!!”
Center half Gary Cahill pulled a goal back for Chelsea early in the second half, and with Tottenham clinging on, Eden Hazard got the equalizing goal.
Hazard’s goal was almost a year to the day since his strike won the title for Chelsea, which is 29 points behind Leicester. Chelsea’s collapse has been as astonishing as Leicester’s surge to the top of the standings it was bottom of last April.
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