Leicester’s sacking of their title-winning manager follows a pattern of leaders achieving glory after loosening an iron grip before disappointment follows“However much you liked it,” a former Manchester City director once said, “you wouldn’t put the man who runs your corner shop in charge of a multinational.” He was explaining his belief that City should have replaced Joe Royle as soon as he had led City to promotion, but his argument has more general application.It is an awkward truth because it does not fit with the comfortably meritocratic notion that you can work your way up from the bottom. Nor does it fit with the manager-as-messiah image that still dominates the English conception of the role. There is a sense...
Unpleasant decisions have to be made at this time of year when club owners decide whether a change could ward off relegationThere is no doubt the Premier League lost one of the good guys when Claudio Ranieri was sacked and, as José Mourinho rightly says, the Italian’s towering achievement last season will never be forgotten, though the key element in that sentiment is “last season”.Last season is history, last season counts for nothing in football, the game is all about the present. Mourinho knows that better than most and if Ranieri did not see what was coming he is not quite as sharp as he is portrayed. Related: Leicester City getting rid of Claudio Ranieri now is hardly madness |...
The Foxes’ title-winning manager deserved better from Leicester’s players and the club’s ungracious ownersIt was the headline in Gazzetta dello Sport that jumped out from the news stands on the morning after the kind of newsflash that made it easy to understand what Gareth Southgate meant when he talked about loving the sport but not necessarily liking it. Claudio Ranieri had become another managerial statistic and it was quickly becoming apparent there were players at Leicester City who would be glad to see the back of him. “Inglesi Ingrati,” was the verdict in capital letters on the front page of Italy’s biggest-selling sports daily.A touch rich, you might think, in the country where some of the more trigger-happy football club...
Italian’s team won the title last season by being ruthless and clear-sighted so their manager’s exit with only 13 league games left makes sporting senseLike all the best fairytales Leicester City’s title story came to an end on Thursday night with a bracing little touch of cruelty. This is usually the way of these things: poisoned apples, hungry wolves, the doomed gingerbread house. Or, as in this case, someone getting the chop.And so farewell then, Claudio Ranieri. We’ll always have Leicester city centre on a muggy night in May. We’ll always have Robert Huth leaping above the floodlights to score at Spurs. Not to mention those oddly foggy memories of Riyad Mahrez sending Joe Hart and Martín Demichelis halfway to...
Leicester owners lose faith in manager’s ability to keep team in Premier League but many will be saddened by the decision and puzzled by its timingIt felt like a brutal decision to sack Claudio Ranieri, cruel in so many ways and also desperately sad in the context of everything that the Italian achieved last season, yet in the end it came down to the simple fact that Leicester City’s owners no longer had faith in the 65-year-old’s ability to keep the English champions in the Premier League.Whatever the rights and wrongs of that argument – and as things stand Leicester are sliding towards the Championship – the bit that makes so little sense to anyone, including people at the club,...