Leicester were haunted by their fairy tale past

Before kick-off at the King Power Stadium, the lights are dimmed just a touch and some stirring, vaguely soldierly music plays loud. On the big screens at both ends of the ground, videos play a potted history of Leicester City’s glorious moments. You’ll forgive the video’s creators for the extreme recency bias.

Towards the end of last season, those videos felt distinctly unhelpful. They were both recent and forever ago. Supporters watched all the reminders of what had been and then watched in real time it all being lost. Those unthinkable achievements seemed to be achingly symbolic, an audio-visual epitaph of an entire age of a football sinking into its own incompetence.

Seven months ago to the day on Friday, Leicester played Liverpool at the King Power. The same videos, the same call-to-arms via the PA system, the same abject calamity from a team who couldn’t defend and barely tried to attack.

Leicester could not afford to lose, had four shots and conceded three goals. Then, they had one win from 14 league games and equalled a club-record tenth home defeat of the season. Brendan Rodgers had been a problem but not the problem. Leicester were going down with him and without him.

Now the sky is clear and inky black, the temperature dropping quickly to catch out those who have no hat or scarf or beer cloak. Steam fills the air from breath, from cups of tea and from fast food dinners eaten on the move, giving the stands an air of wispy mystery.

Leicester City are a division below where they would like but only four places lower than they finished last season. By the end of the night, it will be three. On this December Wednesday, they win their 19th match of the season. Last season, in all competitions, they managed 13.

Those pre-match videos can now be viewed with the warming fondness that only happy memories can provide. So the era ended, so Rome fell; another one begins and a club can be rebuilt. Better to have loved and lost and have to play tricky, physical Millwall at home on a cold Wednesday evening than never to have loved at all. Leicester are top of the Championship. Leicester are on the way back up.

The mood is not entirely serene, and never will be. Match-going football supporters are inherently pessimistic beasts and the sport provides a constant supply of fuel.

Leicester concede early – break, cross, header – and Millwall then dig in so deep that a few years ago they might have found Richard III.

The crowd begins to get restless at the short, slow passing moves that are supposed to quicken in the final third but rarely do. A clear penalty isn’t given. Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, with his surname like the worst school trip you went on, can’t get on the ball.

But Leicester are too good for this league right now. They equalise shortly after half-time, but it’s the second goal that really makes people giggle.

Harry Winks sprays a pass to Wilfred Ndidi, whose gorgeous chipped cross finds Patson Daka stood on the goal line with a grin on his face and really nothing to do at all. Ricardo Pereira scores the third, the personification of this Leicester story: arrival, overperformance, injury, decline and now second-tier rebirth. Pereira is Leicester’s captain these days.

There are two features to Leicester that stand out more than most, one blurring into the other like cordial poured into water. They have been exceptional when taking a lead – 17 wins and one draw from 18 occasions.

And they are a bugger to play against when they have one, that slow passing becoming a form of torture. They taunt Millwall into pressing and then play a simple sideways pass, like professional piggy-in-the-middle. At one point, Wout Faes stands for five full seconds with his right foot on the ball, as if posing for the Christmas catalogue.

Part of this dominance is entirely natural. The financial gap between the Premier League and Championship is cavernous and growing all the time, while those relegated clubs continue to get the benefit of parachute payments.

Leicester have only three new players in the starting XI, but that means eight of them were considered good enough for the Premier League. The matchday squad against Millwall contains 12 senior internationals and three current Under-21 internationals. Mind the gap.

But this is also the house that Enzo Maresca is building, the Pep Guardiola disciple who is so obsessed with his work that he initially lived at the training ground and made his squad do the same for the first week of preseason. For those readers who have visions of sleeping bags on office floors and midnight feasts purloined from vending machines, you haven’t been to the palatial Seagrave training centre.

The slow-to-quick passing – with work still needed on the second element – is Maresca’s doing. The hallmark signs are here: playmaker goalkeeper, clever wingers, relentless possession. Between the 30th minute and the scoring of their third goal, Leicester have 86 per cent of the ball.

The only surprise is that they concede a late goal to make it nervy. Below the Main Stand, supporters who nipped out to beat the traffic huddle around television sets on the concourse as if waiting for news from war.

The final whistle brings that uniquely football noise, the harrumphed happy sigh: “Thank god for that”. It is the second time all season that Leicester have conceded more than once. The other? A trip to Anfield in the EFL Cup. A fleeting memory of painful times.

There will be troughs that follow peaks. Maresca won 13 of his first 14 league games as manager – that is not normal. He inherited a team that was used to losing and had lost its best creative player, energising them quickly for a promotion campaign.

The Foxes have also lost to Leeds and Middlesbrough, while eight Championship teams average more shots per game. But there is room for reverting slightly to the mean. Leicester have an 11-point gap to the playoff places.

Do not underestimate the courage shown by the club in appointing Maresca, who lasted just 18 matches in his only other senior managerial role. Director of football Jon Rudkin came in for stinging – and merited – criticism last season for allowing the weeds to run wild.

Rodgers stayed for too long, too many players seemed demotivated and the recruitment was non-existent then panicked. It would have been easier, perhaps even more sensible, to go for a tried and tested name. Rudkin opted for the grab at the future and it is working.

“Last season was the result of several fatal errors at once – poor recruitment, poorly handled contractual situations, the wrong personalities to get us out of a serious mess, and a very bad call to keep Brendan Rodgers for as long as we did,” says Joe Brewin, co-founder of The Fosse Way, a Leicester City website. “Much of that fell on our director of football, Jon Rudkin, but you had to give him some credit for the Maresca appointment.

“We have a forward-thinking, positive and decisive figurehead who knows what he wants and where he’s going. We’ve not been perfect under him by any means, and results have definitely been better than performances so far this season, but it’s the fresh era we all needed.”

There is a lesson for other clubs here too. For those coming down from the Premier League, fear typically haunts.

Either clubs have been circling the drain, stuck in a cycle of sticking plasters and treading water, or they have suffered a dispiriting fall from grace that removes the floor beneath them. The Championship can indeed be a gruelling slog for those clubs who aren’t able to stop the bleeding.

But it’s also a league of deep financial inequalities and, as such, has potential restorative effects for those who recover quickly. This season, only Ipswich Town’s vast overachievement stops the Championship’s top three from being a relegated triopoly. Speak to supporters of all three clubs and they will tell you (although Leicester and Leeds more emphatically than Southampton) about enjoying watching football again.

“You suddenly flip from expecting to lose every week to the complete opposite,” says Brewin.

“It’s the reason I wasn’t particularly upset when we did drop – the last couple of years had been pretty joyless with a squad that was proving less likeable by the game. I’d rather go down with renewed hope than try to salvage something that wasn’t worth fighting for. The Championship can still have its moments even at the best of times, but it’s an enjoyable poke… if you can get out of it sharpish.”

That is indeed the key. The great paradox of the Championship, for those who fall into it: the experience is positively refreshing just so long as you get out of it as soon as you possibly can.

Leicester City needed an overhaul and they needed a reset – literal and emotional. In the Championship, trust is quickly being rebuilt and mistakes are slowly being forgiven. “When you’re laughing, the sun comes shining through,” as the pre-match anthem reminds. 2024 may well be a sunny year.