Claudio Ranieri: Alan Shearer compares treacherous Leicester City stars to his old pet dog over sacking
SunSport columnist reveals how the Italian's dismissal brought back painful memories
IT’S said if you want loyalty, then get a dog.
I don’t necessarily agree, I had an old English sheep dog and it bit me.
It was a bit crazy. But nothing is as crazy as football when it comes to loyalty.
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There just isn’t any, as we learned last week with the dismissal of Claudio Ranieri from Leicester only nine months after lifting the title.
I have been asked to put myself in the position of Leicester’s owners.
That’s to say, if I was running my club Newcastle, would I not have done the same with the team on a downward spiral? No, I would not.
If my manager had delivered Newcastle the Premier League trophy I would not have sacked him, even if we had gone down the following season.
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For me, he would have earned that. The majority of Leicester fans might have another view.
Indeed, there seems to have been greater outrage from outside the King Power Stadium than in and around the club and city.
It is their team and the fans are the ones who have had to witness defeats on a regular basis — and the prospect of the Championship looming larger each weekend.
So why is there such outrage in a sport where managers regularly get the sack having done a great job?
For example, how Chelsea treated Jose Mourinho and Carlo Ancelotti.
Likewise, Manchester City with both Roberto Mancini and Manuel Pellegrini.
In this case, however, I think the real anger comes from disappointment that the fairytale is well and truly over.
Last season, if your team was not going to win the Premier League you wanted Leicester to.
If you were lower down the leagues you were rooting for the underdog, they were like one of your own.
We all bought into the story. We listened to people who told us it could not be done — and with each win we began to believe, along with the Leicester fans, that they were wrong.
We were delighted by the Jamie Vardy story and the other sub-plots around the team.
The way the bookies were defied.
The geniality of their manager, his funny sayings and amazing passion on the sidelines. In an age when the same teams with the big money were challenging at the top, this was something very different.
It was a game-changer that would inspire other clubs who thought it was not possible.
But what has happened now is that normal order has been resumed. Leicester have become Leicester again.
What we all wanted was for them to not only prove the underdog could win a title — but could continue to rewrite the script by staying up there.
Not by winning it again, by continuing to finish high up the league to convince all other owners it could be done.
Instead, it is all about staying in the Premier League for clubs the size of Leicester again — because look at what happens the following season.
There are already too many clubs seemingly happy to be in a comfort zone.
Managers rotate their squads to make sure they win THEIR important games, against others whose ambition is also just to stay up. Leicester instead went for it and dared to dream. But the result was that nobody could quite handle things at the club anymore.
The repercussions had left everyone’s heads spinning.
The players were still living off the achievement.
The manager could not pick them up.
And the players had forgotten it was sheer hard work which earned that title.
I did not see the same hard work again — I saw players who did not care as much.
Who came out with their social media tributes to the manager just a bit late for me.
Perhaps the backlash prompted it — and suddenly they realised how complicit they were in Ranieri’s downfall.
He protected them from critics, took it on his own shoulders and had faith. Sadly, none came back.
For that, Ranieri paid the price — but so have the club.
From being everyone’s second favourite team, they are now the ones everyone seems to want to go down.