Dilly Ding, Dilly Dong, Leicester City are Champions, Man! - An Ode to Claudio Ranieri

ByRahul Dev Bose, SportsCafe Editor

05/04/2016

“Why can’t we continue to run, run, run? We are like Forrest Gump. Leicester is Forrest Gump.” - Claudio Ranieri

Life is like a box of chocolates at the moment for the Leicester faithful and they have just stumbled upon a box full of England’s finest. One can only imagine a smile creeping onto those determined Leicester players’ faces as they saw Tottenham bottle a game they led 2-0 at half time to end up drawing, thus handing Leicester the title. The party has just begun, and the time is a happy one for Leicester fans and all the neutrals egging them on to the big prize.

One man, however, will probably be looking up to the skies and thanking the stars for granting him the one thing that was missing from his career as manager. Few have deserved it as much as he has.

The Journeyman’s Journey Before Leicester

Claudio Ranieri has been given various monikers all his life, ‘Journeyman’, ‘Tinkerman’ and ‘The Eternal Bridesmaid’ just to name a few. He has been the ‘nearly man’ in so many people’s eyes, owing to his ability to lead so many teams to the brink of glory but never past the finish line on such occasions.

Think of Roma in 2009-2010 or even Monaco in 2013-14, think of Chelsea in 2003-04 and you know why he was dubbed ‘The Eternal Bridesmaid.’ But think of what he achieved at all these clubs, and you would realize that what is essentially a taunt could’ve been taken as a considerate compliment.

Yes, he spent £120 million in a season on a Chelsea squad that came second but they came second to a team that broke a century-old record - Arsenal’s ‘Invincibles’. With that money, Chelsea had bought into a core of players that went on to win the title under Jose Mourinho. Frank Lampard, Joe Cole, William Gallas, Claude Makelele, John Terry, Wayne Bridge all had a word of debt to Ranieri for nurturing them or bringing them in.

Frank Lampard had this to say of Ranieri as he rose to the level of the footballing elite: “I love the man. If it wasn’t for Claudio I might not be where I am now. He brought me to the club, improved my game and showed me another side to the game. He brought me here and showed me those ways, and I’ve got nothing but thanks for him for the way he helped my career.”

At Roma, he rallied the team to a 2nd place finish. This despite Roma winning more points per game under Claudio Ranieri than any other team had won under their manager that season. Why did Roma lose out to Inter then? Roma losing their first two games of that season under Luciano Spalletti before Ranieri took over might be the answer to that.

However, after his team’s heroics that season, President Rosella Sensi paid tribute to the Italian manager : “I like Ranieri because he is one who looks you in the eye when speaking and he always speaks his mind. Having worked with him I understand why my father (Franco Sensi, he was president before her) for many years tried to bring him to Roma. He is a great man, a great technician, and it is hard to find in football a person like that.”

At Monaco, he took a team that had just been promoted to 2nd place in Ligue 1, after amassing 80 points, the highest tally by any club to have not won the title. They lost to cash-rich PSG who have been stamping their authority on Ligue 1 since.

Monaco’s Sporting Director Tor-Kristian Karlsen chose to highlight the principled nature of Claudio Ranieri during his time there and summarized him thus:

“Ranieri is a class act, he has time and respect for everyone. That's why you won't find anyone in the game ever say a bad word about him. He's a true gentleman, nobody deserves the success more than him… He’s an energy bomb, he just wants to work, work, work. He's unstoppable. His love for work and life is genuinely amazing. He's fun to be around, always energetic and positive.”

He continues: “More than anything he's extremely structured in the way he works and pays a great deal of attention to any minute detail. The training sessions are well-organised and timed to the second. The same goes for all the logistics surrounding the first team. The travel, the food, the hotels - everything is carefully planned.”

He kept a Napoli team, after the departure of Diego Maradona, safe from losing its relevance by consolidating their league positions. He drove Fiorentina from Serie B to Serie A and won the Coppa Italia and Supercoppa Italiana with them.

Claudio Ranieri developed a generation of players at Valencia that went on to win the La Liga and succeed largely in the Champions League. He got the team back on track from relative ignominy setting them up for subsequent greatness.

He even stabilized Juventus’ position in the Serie A after their return from Serie B post-Calciopoli before the burden of leading a team with such great expectations got to him.

He’s definitely been around doing a great job almost everywhere he goes (he’s had ill-fated tenures at Atletico Madrid, Inter Milan and the Greece National Team in between all the success). To be able to do what he did over and across 30 years, has been quite a journey for ‘The Journeyman’ especially if most of the people he has worked with have only good things to say about him. Leicester City, was about to find out first hand.

The Leicester Story: The Journeyman Arrives at his Destination

When Claudio Ranieri was appointed as the manager of Leicester City, he wasn’t even the club’s first choice. Leicester very publicly pursued Martin O’Neill and later even tried to talk to Guus Hiddink about taking over but somewhere Ranieri’s name came up. When he was indeed appointed, the owners had to ask Leicester City fans to have faith in the owners’ vision for the club triggered by the fans apparent confusion at the final choice.

Gary Lineker, Leicester’s favourite son, publicly expressed his disappointment as to the signing of Claudio Ranieri as he called it an “uninspired” appointment.

Claudio, though, had something special in sight for the year ahead.

Step 1: Keep it Simple

What makes ‘simplicity’ so difficult to grasp? That we tend to try and make bigger clenches of our fists than we need, to grasp it. And when we do, it just slips through the gap between our fingers and we end up thinking that maybe we needed to make bigger fists out of our palms to catch it, when truth be told, we needed to do the exact opposite.

To fathom a club managing to do it by being simple in its approach, is the very stuff of confusion for the pundits, coaches and CEOs who spend months planning, years executing and mere weeks destroying their ideologies in what is essentially a results oriented business.

Simplicity? That’s a one way ticket to hell if you consider this generation of football pioneers who need to imprint ‘a blueprint to their footballing ideas’, ‘build a team in their image’ and explain their sentiments in ‘footballing dossiers’.

Claudio though, did the unthinkable when he started things off at Leicester. He didn’t change much about how Leicester functioned.

As Kasper Schmeichel put it, “That (changing things) is something a lot of managers want to do, they bring their own people and do everything their own way. He came in the first week, he introduced himself and then didn’t say anything the following week because he just watched us and how we work. He recognised that he had a squad that worked well with each other, got on really well, played well and trained hard.”

Claudio hardly bought into the idea of changing the way Leicester functioned, at least not perceptibly. Leicester did, however, sign a few players in the window. In came the likes of Robert Huth (£3m); Christian Fuchs (Free); N’Golo Kante (£5.6m); Shinji Okazaki (£7m); Gokhan Inler (£3m) and Yohan Benalouane (Undisclosed).

A gross spend of approximately £20 million isn’t the stuff of amazement in this financial climate around the Premier League, and the names coming in weren’t really big on the wishlist of other clubs either.

Claudio also worked his magic on the likes of Jamie Vardy and Riyad Mahrez in training, as evident since but also got crucial performances week in week out from the likes of Wes Morgan, Danny Drinkwater, and Marc Albrighton as well. Most importantly, he let their team spirit and camaraderie develop at the right pace. Back in November, Riyad Mahrez handed teammate Jamie Vardy the ball to take a penalty that eventually led to Vardy breaking the long-standing Premier League record. Mahrez explained himself thus later,

"I could have taken the penalty but it would have been no good to him. I would expect the same from him if I’d been on such a run! It shows why we are together. We are all like brothers.”

Then there was the clever addition of a veteran like Robert Huth, who’s played it at the Premier League level for a long time now. The team needed a thug like him to balance out the nice guys. Huth was it (as Marouane Fellaini and Louis Van Gaal will agree).

The purchase of work rate monsters like Shinji Okazaki and N’Golo Kante were equally important. Most importantly though, he got them organized, taught them to hold their own against teams and vastly reduced the pressure off his players all through the season, right till the very end.

Step 2: Manage Expectations

Building a team for a title surge and leading a team through it are two different things. Claudio has delivered a fantastic lesson in that fine difference this season. Leicester were never primed to have a go at anything higher than mid-table. However, when it came to it, handling the pressure became paramount.

Claudio came in and told everyone who was listening, that their target would be to score “40 points”. He kept that the target till about they ended up scoring their targeted range of points which they reached in week 20 of the Premier League fixtures.

At this stage, the world was still counting on them to slide down into mid-table as the season wore on. They didn’t fade away though and went on to stay at the top of the table from week 22 through to the very end.

When the weeks leading up to the end surfaced, Leicester was still at the top of the table and when asked about his team’s chances of staying at the top of the table come season end, Ranieri finally declared the obvious, at a time when the attention and pressure would all be a positive influence on his players. The best part is, he did it in the most spectacularly quotable moment of the entire season, as he said:

“Now we go straight away to try to win the title. We are in the Champions League, dillyding, dillydong – come on. We are in the Champions League man, it is fantastic, terrific.”

His best bit of managing expectations, however, was oriented around him offering his team pizza and sausages if they team kept a clean sheet. This was at a time, when Leicester seemed utterly incapable of doing so. Why was it so cool? Apart from the fact that it worked, Claudio kept up his side of the bargain.

Step 3: Chat S*** Get Banged

Jamie Vardy’s incredible line of communication on social media which made him an internet sensation was exactly the way Leicester played all season. They ran and ran and ran at the opposition without the ball, remained compact when out of possession but if any team gave them the space to play, they tore into them.

Mahrez and Vardy formed a partnership that will be spoken of in the years to come with some fondness as the duo scored and assisted each other at will. Danny Drinkwater dictated play as N’Golo Kante tore into the opposition players, hounding them and not allowing them time on the ball.

Robert Huth and Wes Morgan put their bodies on the line and heads on the ball when it was in the opposition penalty box. Shinji Okazaki made the Duracell bunny look like a tired rabbit too old to run around. That team gave it everything on the pitch and they were no pushovers.

They weren’t just punching above their weight as they took advantage of every opposition team’s weakness. They had a bit of everything in their locker, and it took a man like Claudio Ranieri to recognize it and above all his courage to unleash all of it.

Leicester played fearlessly and have been justly rewarded. En route to glory, they beat almost every team in the top 5 at least once except Arsenal this season. They made their presence felt all across the Premier League and didn’t just sneak up on the title.

What Now, Claudio?

You want to think about next season, already? No, that’s not the way Claudio works does he? You should only think about the celebrations ahead. A fitting tribute to Claudio Ranieri would be along the lines of every fans saying exactly what Leicester City club ambassador, Alan Birchenall put it:“Claudio Ranieri should be getting a statue in the city and a bloody knighthood for what he’s done this season.”

We’re all ready to raise a toast to that!

Dilly Ding, Dilly Dong…Rise, Sir Claudio!