London: If Pep Guardiola is to conquer English football next season, it is looking increasingly likely that the rival manager who will have to be dislodged - to borrow a phrase - from that famous perch will be a bespectacled Italian on the brink of one of the greatest shocks in British sporting history.
Leicester City and Claudio Ranieri really are top of the league by five points with 13 games of the Premier League season to play. This was the Foxes of the King Power who dispatched the superstars of Manchester City in their own stadium. This is the club whose best previous top-flight finish was when Stanley Baldwin was in 10 Downing Street.
It has the makings of the most astonishing league season of modern times. For the first time in the improbable journey to the top of the Premier League table, Leicester are the bookmakers’ favourites to win the trophy, a significant shift in the mood. The big money is on Leicester now - Leicester with their squad that cost £55 million (Dh293 million) to put together, Leicester with their recycled Italian manager fresh from his Faroe Islands humiliation with the Greece team, Leicester who were in a relegation fight this time last year.
Not since Nottingham Forest won the first division in 1978, having been promoted in third place in the second division the previous season, has there been a league triumph to compare with a potential success for Leicester. In the football democracy of the Seventies, there was not the great cabal of European super-clubs that there is now. When Ranieri was asked about the bookmakers’ verdict, he said recent form made it difficult to trust their judgment.
“At the beginning, they said Ranieri was favourite to be sacked,” he said with a twinkle in his eye and wildly inaccurate pronunciation of the word “bookmakers”. But this is Ranieri, the man who came from nowhere, the underdog who is making these kind of victories look routine. Leicester have cleared every obstacle in their way and next Sunday they face what you might say is the ultimate test. Manchester City had disruption of their own last week with the announcement of Guardiola’s impending arrival from Bayern Munich, and whatever effect that might have had on the team.
Arsenal, for all their flaws, are arguably the steadiest ship currently afloat with a manager who, at the very least, has complete control. Even a point against Arsenal would put Leicester in a position where the league was theirs to lose. Perhaps it already is.
They have a run of nine fixtures after that in which you would make them favourites each time, before they face Manchester United, Everton and Chelsea at the end of the season. Maybe, we need to start looking at football differently. Perhaps Leicester can beat anyone. They certainly play that way.
Ranieri’s team are looking more like champions. They go to Arsenal in the form of their lives with the prize drawing closer, and a run-in looking kinder and kinder beyond next Sunday.
- The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2016
