Dilly-ding, dilly-dong

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Everybody loves an underdog.

Outside of the long-gone armies of the Philistines, Goliath doesn’t have a lot of fans rooting for him. The poor man, a giant felled by a tiny young Israelite’s slingshot with what in boxing terms can only be called a lucky punch, is probably one of the figures in humanity’s memory with the worst PR ever. Check out the story in the Old Testament, 1 Samuel 17.

David, by contrast, has become the timeless blueprint for that beloved figure, the little guy who beats all the odds to achieve something nobody had thought was possible, in the process overcoming seemingly unbeatable opponents. History, quite simply, is always written by the victorious.

This week Monday, the world of sports witnessed such an event of almost biblical dimensions, and for those of you who are not interested in or familiar with (English) football, please just believe me this once when I tell you it was a unique, never-to-be repeated experience for all involved, for all concerned, and for most others who had nothing to do with at all really as well.

The story that transcends athletics goes as follows, and we do need first to get the background straight, so please bear with me.

There’s this mid-sized English East Midlands town, situated on the River Soar, called Leicester (for our American friends: pronounced “Lester”), the County Town (administrative centre) of Leicestershire (“Lestersher”).

With a population of ca 330,000 today, until Monday 2 May 2016, it had been rather unremarkable throughout its history that does, to be fair, in all likelihood go back two millennia. The Romans already found a settlement when they arrived there around 47 AD and subsequently extended and expanded and embellished it during their reign, as they were wont to do. After their hurried departure from Britain in the early fifth century, the place somehow survived, albeit on a smaller scale. In the Middle Ages it was predictably first occupied by the Saxons, then by the Vikings, and finally by the Normans, pretty much like large other parts of the country. In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a collection of annals written in Old English and dating back to the late 9th century, its name is rendered as Ligora-ceastre and variations thereof.

By the way, and because I know you are wondering, seven of the nine surviving manuscripts and fragments of the Chronicle now reside in the British Library. The remaining two are in the Bodleian Library at Oxford and the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Now that’s what I call a draw; in the United States, a “tie”, which Americans so do not enjoy – they like the concept of winners and losers, which is one of the reasons why Football (“Soccer”) just will not take off there.

Well, until now that is… What we are about to reflect on is the stuff of Hollywood movies, and rumour has it one of its protagonists has already been approached for a biopic of sorts on his improbable exploits.

Coming back to the Pearl of the East Midlands, in the Domesday Book of 1086, the town’s name is recorded as Ledecestre.

Enter stage left, Geoffrey of Monmouth (c. 1100 – c. 1155), a Welsh cleric and one of the major figures in the development of British historiography and the popularity of the tales of King Arthur. He is best known for his chronicle Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain), published around 1136, which was widely popular in its day and credited, uncritically, well into the 16th century, having been translated into various other languages from its original Latin.

While it may nowadays be considered historically unreliable, we do take note, however, that in it the author named a mythological, pre-Roman Celtic King Leir as an eponymous founder figure of our little town. According to Geoffrey's narrative, Leir’s daughter Cordelia buried her father beneath the river in a chamber dedicated to the ancient Roman god Janus – in charge of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, doorways, passages, and endings; hence the modern word “janitor” – and his feast day was an annual celebration.

Lear? Cordelia? Rings a bell, right? Even the great William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) had to get his materials from somewhere.

Anyhow, another three-and-a-half centuries after Geoffrey of Monmouth, in 1485, in the final, decisive battle of the War of the Roses, King Richard III – again of Shakespeare fame, this time historical, and with the timeless quote, “A horse, a horse / My Kingdom for a horse” attributed to him; you see, he lost his mount in the fight and was trying to flee from the battle ground as things went south for him – was killed nearby in Bosworth Field. His death marked the end of the House of York, the demise of the Plantagenet dynasty, and the curtain call for the Middle Ages in Britain – what an historic triple whammy, and all in one bad day. But we shouldn’t feel too sorry for King Richard as, by all accounts, Shakespearean and other, he was not the nicest of people.

Anyhow, after the battle dust had settled, Richard was unceremoniously interred in Leicester’s Greyfriars Church – the ruins of which, fast forward to modern times, are nowadays located beneath something as banal as a car park. In September 2012, an archaeological excavation project discovered a skeleton there which subsequent thorough DNA testing showed to be related to two distant descendants of the King’s sister. Bingo!

Finally, on 26 March 2015, 530 years after his violent death, King Richard III was reburied in pride of place near the high altar of Leicester Cathedral. And according to the resident sages, analysts of the local lore, and guardians of all indigenous superstitions, this is where it all begins.

Well, not quite yet, because in order to complete our historical tour de force through the millennia, by way of setting the scene for what follows, one more series of epical events that evolved in Leicester must be mentioned:

In 1884, Leicester Fosse Football Club was formed, the name linked to the field near Fosse Road where their games were originally played. The club moved to a ground on Filbert Street in 1891, was elected to the Football League in 1894, and adopted the name Leicester City in 1919, proudly reflecting the fact that its home town, the Borough of Leicester, had just been granted City status – and please don’t ask me how that all works, but it was obviously a cause for celebration and commemoration.

Much later, in 2002, they moved to the newly constructed nearby Walkers Stadium. In August 2010, following agreement on a three-year shirt sponsorship deal, the club was sold to the Thai-led consortium Asian Football Investments (AFI) fronted by Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, a Thai billionaire businessman who founded and still runs the King Power Duty Free group. Subsequently, Vichai became Chairman, his son Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha was appointed Vice Chairman, and the stadium was renamed the King Power Stadium.

In case you are asking yourself whether King Power could afford such a high-profile investment into a professional English Football club, and to spare you the effort of researching it for yourself – allow me to quote from the Forbes 2016 List of Billionaires, where Vichai is ranked 612th in the world, up from 714th in 2015, and Number Four in his home country:

“Thailand's duty-free king Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha's King Power has a monopoly [my emphasis] on retail operations at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi and Don Muang airports. King Power's revenues were up on a rising influx of Chinese tourists, its biggest customers. It also runs three shopping complexes in Bangkok. Vichai owns English football club Leicester City, which was promoted to the Premier League after a 10-year absence in 2014. An avid polo player, he owns dozens of ponies and sponsors the All Asia Cup.”

As I am writing this, Forbes calculates his “Real-time Net Worth” at US$ 3.1 billion. Great fun, this index! And next time I pass through one of Bangkok’s airports, I will know that if I buy anything, it might go towards a new player for Leicester City.

And while consulting Forbes, I can’t resist: Donald “The Donald” Trump, after Tuesday’s Primaries in Indiana now officially not just the “presumptive”, but the sole candidate of the Republican Party following the embarrassing exits of Messrs Cruz and Kasich, is at # 389 with US$ 4.5 billion. Like the Thai King of Duty Free, he can afford his expensive hobbies – running a Presidential election campaign doesn’t come cheap, and winning is anything but a certainty. There’s still Hillary “It’s my turn” Clinton blocking his way to the White House. With her dynastic approach to democratic politics in The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, she no doubt views herself as the “presumptive” Queen, and all the while daughter Chelsea is carefully being groomed as the Crown Princess, the heir-apparent in waiting. Not in my lifetime, I hope.

Speaking of winning: Throughout their 132-year existence since 1884, Leicester City FC – aka “The Foxes” after the image of the animal first incorporated into the club crest in 1948, as Leicestershire is known for foxes and fox hunting – accomplished the remarkable achievement of never really winning a thing. After a long history of ups and downs, they were only promoted back to the top echelon of English Football, the Premier League, in 2014.

During the following 2014–15 season, a dismal run of form saw the team slip to the bottom of the league table with only 19 points from 29 games (out of a possible maximum of 87 – you get three for a victory, one for a draw), making an immediate return to the tier two Championship almost a certainty. After a 3-4 defeat away to Tottenham Hotspur on 21 March, they were seven points adrift from safety, but then an amazing turn of Fortune, with seven wins and one draw from their final nine league games, meant that the Foxes finished the season snugly secure in 14th place with 41 points.

This completed, mathematically, the best escape from relegation ever seen in the Premier League, as no team with fewer than 20 points from 29 games had previously stayed up.

The turning point of the season was a 2-1 home victory against West Ham United on 4 April.

What, pray constant reader, had happened between these two dates, or rather, match days?

Exactly – on 26 March King Richard III finally found his rightful burial place, and as soon as he had acclimatised to his new lodgings, now truly befitting the last of the Plantagenets, he attended, if only in spirit, the next home game of the Foxes. One King helping out another, in old-fashioned royal solidarity. Gotta have each other’s back in this egalitarian age after all.

But while merely avoiding disaster was a traditional talent Leicester City FC had been honing, with varying success, since 1884, it took a third monarch to move mountains and make history for them.

Joining King Richard and King Power, please meet King Claudio (and finally, an alliteration).

You see, following the Great Escape of a year ago, during the summer break of 2015 Manager Nigel Pearson – an old Foxes stalwart who had already been in charge between 2008 and 2010 and returned in November 2011, short-tempered and a controversial figure at the best of times – was fired over a rather unsavoury affair involving his son James' role in a racist sex tape made by three Leicester City reserve players in Thailand during a post-season goodwill tour. King Vichai, predictably, was not amused – in the words of the club’s official statement published on 30 June 2015, “the working relationship between Nigel and the Board is no longer viable”.

But whom to turn to at such short notice, with the new season only weeks away, the majority of promising new players already signed elsewhere, and the market for successful coaches and managers pretty much depleted?

The Board of Leicester City FC came up with one of the most unlikely, unexpected, and unintelligible recruiting decisions ever. They rang a certain Claudio Ranieri, 63 years-old at the time, and just freshly sacked by the Greek Football Association following a disastrous qualification campaign for the UEFA European Championships tournament to be played in a few weeks’ time in France that culminated in a 1-0 defeat against the Faroe Islands.

Well, admittedly they are hard to beat, especially on their own turf – it’s always very windy, and to mow the grass they let the sheep onto the national (and only) stadium’s playing field before important games. But to make matters worse and totally unacceptable to Ranieri’s proud employers (they gave us Democracy some 2,500 years ago, and don’t we ever forget it) – Greece lost at home to the islanders.

Looking back on a long coaching career spanning almost thirty years, including gigs at clubs in Italy, Spain, France, and England (Chelsea from 2000 to 2004), and with the reputation of being a decent man, Claudio Ranieri had never once won a national champions title, ever, instead repeatedly finishing runner-up.

Remember Napoleon’s question regarding a highly regarded general that was being pushed on him – “But is he lucky?”

Ranieri arrives in Leicester on 13 July 2015 (no, not a Friday), and every self-respecting pundit asks themselves – what are they thinking / smoking? Gary Lineker, a great former Leicester City player, England international, and now top football analyst for the BBC, tweeted: “Ranieri? Really? Really!”

In the words of The Guardian journalist Marcus Christenson: “If Leicester wanted someone nice, they’ve got him. If they wanted someone to keep them in the Premier League, then they may have gone for the wrong guy." (“Claudio Ranieri: The anti-Pearson… and the wrong man for Leicester”;   14 July 2015)

What’s more, Ranieri finds a squad (American: “roster”) of players he has not signed, whom he doesn’t know, who had just narrowly escaped relegation, and who, by general consensus among the cognoscenti, could best be characterised as “a bunch of misfits, rejects, and journeymen” – none of them had ever made it anywhere else, few of them showed any promise for the future, and for many of them Leicester was the footballing equivalent of “last chance saloon”.

But who had also bonded over the emotional roller-coaster of the previous two seasons, first winning promotion after a ten-year absence of the club from the top flight, and then twelve months later dramatically escaping immediate relegation by the narrowest of margins, at the last possible moment, and in the most spectacular of fashions.

And so the Miracle of the Midlands unfolds, becoming much more than a mere story about a football team and their manager.

As this blog post, having already meandered at length into the area of local English history, is now long past just threatening to drift off into a football piece, and I hope I haven’t lost too many readers already, I will spare you a game-by-game account of the long 2015/16 English Premier League season – 38 matches in all, with two still to go, but Leicester having an unassailable lead in the table of seven points – because since Monday night around 22:00 UK summer time its outcome has been one of the most highly publicised, commented on, and marvelled at phenomena in a very, very long time. And, importantly, not just in the context of sports and its often hysterical, overblown, and out-of-all proportion media brouhaha.

Which I hope will keep it interesting and relevant, maybe even entertaining, to those of you who struggle with the offside rule.

To put things in perspective: If you were to have placed a bet last August before the beginning of the season on Leicester winning the English Premier League title, you would now be a very rich person as the odds were at 5,000-1. At that time, online betting company Paddy Power thought it statistically more likely that the Loch Ness Monster would be discovered, with odds of 500-1. At 2,000-1, you could have put money on Kim Kardashian becoming U.S. President (now there’s finally a worthy opponent for “The Donald”) or Elvis Presley still being alive. Accordingly, bookmakers have now had to cough up the biggest pay-out in British sporting history, amounting to something in the region of £ 25 million.

I have just heard a colleague of mine has bought a Porsche from his winnings – but then, he works in Finance. Good for him!

So how was it possible?

Ranieri did the only sensible thing on arrival – he basically sat back and observed. He fed the already good team spirit by “bribing” the players: For their first “clean sheet” (a game without conceding a goal) he promised them an invitation to a pizza restaurant, and of course they delivered as did he (not the pizza – he just paid for it). And once he had worked out what individuals he had at his disposal, with his long-time experience and in-depth understanding of The Beautiful Game, he developed a system that worked to their strengths and mitigated their weaknesses.

The two central defenders, for example, were encouraged not to do anything beyond defending because that is all they are capable of – but believe me, once told to stay in their positions and concentrate on their strengths, Jamaican Wes “Captain” Morgan and German former, long-time ago international Robert “The Berlin Wall” Huth became an almost insurmountable obstacle in protecting their goal. Instead of inviting them to initiate intricate offensive moves, their marching orders were clear: “When in doubt, put it out!”

Next, he identified the three guys that could make a difference (“impact” rather than “role” players) and sculpted the team’s tactical Game Plan around their capabilities. And he stuck with it match-by-match, 36 times to date, regardless of the opposing team’s make-up and way of playing, thereby instilling confidence in the whole group as they internalised the principle of the others having to adapt to Leicester’s game.

Of course, the longer the season went, the more the squad believed in themselves – success feeds on itself and produces a level of performance that no-one would have dreamed possible at the outset, not individually nor as a team.

It is no coincidence that these three “impact” players (striker Jamie Vardy, English; midfield anchor N’Golo Kanté, French; and creative genius Riyad Mahrez, Algerian) not only consistently delivered like never before in their careers (and, realistically, maybe like never again in the future), but consequently were nominated to the short list of five for the two “Player of the Year” awards bequeathed at the end of the season – one by the Professional Footballers Association, their peers and therefore the more valued one; the other by the Sports Writers Association (and what do they know). Of the three Leicester City players, one (Mahrez) won the first, another (Vardy) the second accolade.

In addition to making his team realise after a short time of sniffing-each-other out that “this guy knows what he’s doing” (which, given his huge experience gained while working for three decades in four different national leagues, should not have come as too much of a surprise), Ranieri made sure to develop a personal relationship with them, both individually and as a group.

Having mentioned the literal “Playing for Pizza” ploy – and please do read the novel of that title by American author John Grisham, published in 2007 and a New York Times # 1 bestseller like all his books, about down-and-out American Football Quarterback Rick Dockery whose agent can only find him a gig with the Mighty Panthers of Parma, Italy; it’s educational, hilarious, and touching all in one, not a bad formula for a work of light or indeed any other type of literature; I recall reading it in one go on a flight from Newark, New Jersey, to Houston, Texas, fired up by more than just one gin-and-tonic – Ranieri further “humanised” and endeared himself to his United Nations squad by displaying certain foibles and sticking with them consistently. Emotional Intelligence at work.

The most famous one? Let me refer you to the title of these ramblings – “Dilly-ding, dilly-dong”.

This is Claudio Ranieri’s “imaginary bell” that he vocally sounds in training when he has the impression his players are “sleeping on the job”. To quote the Leicester City website: “Why do we love it? It’s ridiculous and genius in equal measure.” Simplify, simplify, simplify.

And you know what? For Christmas he gave every member of the team a small bell to symbolise the understanding they had built. I can just picture the players’ WAGs (Wives and Girlfriends) terrorising their small children at home with that gadget – one chime means dinner is ready; two chimes, have you brushed your teeth; three chimes, time to go to bed.

It’s the simple things, applied consistently with sensitivity to the situation, the timing, and the audience, that cement credibility, instil common purpose, and generate a spirit of “togetherness” that enables a bunch of David’s not just to take on, but to vanquish the Goliath’s of this world.

To wit: Leicester City’s squad cost a fraction of their title rivals’ – an estimated £54.4m in transfer fees, according to ESPN, the sports channel. By comparison, Tottenham Hotspur’s cost £161.1m, and Manchester City’s £418.8m. The team’s wage bill was equally dwarfed by their competitors. Both these stats reflect the shrewd recruiting by the club in the years before Ranieri’s arrival.

Analysts have likened it to the pioneering work of Billy Beane, the general manager of the American Baseball club Oakland A’s, who was the first to apply Wall Street traders’ metrics and computer-generated analysis to the task of building a strong team on a meagre budget. In a nutshell, he was successful by understanding that the market for acquiring players was inefficient, so gains could be made by hiring talent that had been undervalued elsewhere. His story is told in the book by Michael Lewis, Moneyball (2004) and the eponymous movie of 2011, starring Brad Pitt, Robin Wright, and Jonah Hill. I can recommend both.

Coming back to Claudio Ranieri, I’m not sure if he has ever read any of the books by management gurus that literally fill whole libraries. What he did demonstrate admirably on his arrival was the ability to cut through a very complex situation. And he is clearly a master in the art of motivation, of absorbing pressure and thereby keeping it away from his players, and of reinforcing the mechanisms of a functioning team. Plus, a shrewd strategist, he taught them how to maximise their potential beyond all expectations.

Claudio Ranieri will in all probability never have heard of Bob McKillop, born 1950 and of the same generation, the Basketball Head Coach at tiny Davidson College in North Carolina. In over 27 years of tenure with the “Wildcats” now, he has consistently produced teams that punch above their weight, taking on successfully the “big guys”. In the process, he has also developed Steph Curry, currently the best player on the planet (check out the Golden State Warriors, NBA Champions of 2015 and on their way to repeating that success this year).

McKillop builds and leads teams on three very simple, straight-forward, and not-for-discussion principles – Trust, Commitment, Care (TCC in short, displayed boldly above the entrance to the locker rooms of the Davidson Wildcats; and also now at the Warriors’ Oracle Arena in Oakland, California – good things travel).

If they were ever going to meet, and I don’t think they will, I’m sure the two would have an instant liking for each other – it takes one to know one.

Three Kings were needed to make Leicester City’s improbable, outrageous, yet so logical success happen. Could it be repeated elsewhere?

Picking up on the unbelievable betting odds of 5,000-1, the Executive Chairman of the Premier League, Richard Scudamore, said, “If this was a once in every 5,000 year event, then we've effectively got another 5,000 years of hope ahead of us.” And Gary Lineker describes his feelings as follows: “I got emotional. It was hard to breathe. It’s the biggest shock in sporting history.”

Well, we know the Winning Formula: “Dilly-ding, dilly-dong.”