When Leicester City announced the appointment of Claudio Ranieri over the summer, it was greeted by almost universal amusement. Having survived relegation under the iron fist of Nigel Pearson a few months ago, the Foxes' hierarchy had opted to head into the notoriously difficult second season under the slapstick stewardship of Mr. Bean with a chalkboard. According to newspaper columnists up and down the country, it was certain to end in disaster.
Claudio Ranieri is exceeding all expectations at Leicester City
Leicester’s win over Aston Villa on the weekend moved them up to second place, and manager Claudio Ranieri is exceeding all expectations.
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Skip forward a few weeks, and the Foxes are exceeding all expectations. In the space of five matches, his side have picked up more points than Nigel Pearson's had until late December. And what's more, he's done it without resorting to the cautious, defensive game that is the refuge of many of the lowly Premier League clubs: they've scored as many goals as league leaders Manchester City on their way to second place in the table.
Of course, no one's predicting that Leicester's challenge for the title is a sustainable one, and it's true to say that they're yet to play any of the league's top sides (we'll know much more about quite how good they are after a brutal run of games in December, in which they consecutively play Manchester United, Swansea City, Chelsea, Everton, Liverpool and Manchester City). But in a way, Ranieri's already proven the critics wrong. His characterization as a bumbling buffoon, as a cuddly André Villas-Boas, has been totally discredited. Leicester look more potent now than they ever did under his predecessor.
The question is thus: how did the pundits get it so wrong? Well, just as football has a tendency to accentuate most of popular culture’s worst traits, so its bicep-kissing anti-intellectualism has long been a crucial component of its tabloid culture.
With his round glasses and bright suits, Ranieri doesn’t look like a football manager should; with his warm, professorial voice, nor does he sound like your average coach. When he arrives at press conferences, he doesn’t do so with a terse professionalism, but a disarming conviviality. And most suspiciously, when he first arrived in English football with Chelsea at the turn of the millennium, he did so with the academic approach that challenged conventional wisdom. He applied thought to a game of masculine instinct, and the ‘tinkerman’ tag surfaced again as soon as his name was linked with a return to the Premier League.
The point is not that Ranieri is necessarily of great intelligence. To quote the great 21st century French thinker Patrice Evra, “it is not enough to walk with books on slavery, glasses and a hat to become Malcolm X.” But it is because Ranieri was different, because he carried the equivalent of books, glasses and a hat, that the media wrote him off as uninspiring and out-of-touch. Few were prepared to give him the chance to prove himself, conveniently ignoring the vast experience he amassed at some of Europe’s biggest teams.
Of course, we shouldn't expect things to change: that would be an admission that English football isn't really morally superior to that of anywhere else. The media will be sure to seize on the difficulties Leicester will inevitably encounter this season, and in the meantime will tide things over with patronizing descriptions of Leicester's "nice," if "delightfully dotty" manager. But for now, we can all enjoy Ranieri's triumph over parochial expectations, and be thankful that the tabloid utopia of 20 Tim Sherwood clones won't be realized just yet.
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