Make no mistake, Leicester City's Premier League win no flash in the pan
Leicester City's emergence as the champion of the English Premier League must rank as one of the most remarkable and stirring underdog stories in sports. A year ago, the club was fighting to stay in the Premier League, a season later it is the champion. This is the stuff that sporting fairy tales are made of.
At the start of the season, smart money was on Leicester being relegated. Barring the League Championship, the side had never won anything of note in its history. The odds on its winning the Premier League at the start of the season was a mind-boggling 5000:1.
Manager Claudio Ranieri took charge with the express brief of ensuring that the team stayed in the Premier League. He started off on a shoestring budget, with a team sans stars. A year ago, not too many outside Leicester had heard of Jamie Vardy, Riyad Mahrez or Wes Morgan. Today the sporting world is singing their names.
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| Jamie Vardy has been Leicester City's talisman. |
What makes this turnaround even more remarkable is that there is no one reason one can pin point as the turning point. Not just the individual brilliance of Vardy and Mahrez, or for that matter the solidity of Leicester's defence, or the never say die attitude of Christian Fuchs, and Shinji Okazaki - the diminutive Japanese.
Perhaps it is a combination of all this and more. Perhaps we will never truly know.
What is undeniable is the consistency of the brilliance of the Leicester players and their ability to sustain it for an entire season. Make no mistake, this is no flash in the pan, nor a purple patch-like winning of a tournament spread over a fortnight.
To be able to sustain this level of excellence makes this victory so much more exceptional. To Leicester's bespectacled Italian manager Ranieri must go the credit of being the alchemist, and turning base metal into gold. The world must salute the Vardys and Mahrezes, the Schmeichels and Morgans for turning a dream into a miracle, and providing football lovers an opportunity to witness history being made before their eyes.