Like just about everyone else who follows football I have spent the past few days basking in the warm afterglow of the sport’s greatest ever underdog triumph.

When Leicester City clinched the title last Monday night without even kicking a ball, it sparked celebrations not just in the city itself, but around the globe. It felt like the entire football world was uniting to acknowledge the most unlikely, yet undoubtedly welcome, champions the game has ever seen.

Leicester’s rise to the top has been, to use a phrase that has been thrashed to within an inch of its life over the past week, the perfect football fairytale. A version of David and ‘Goliaths’ the likes of which team sport has never seen before.

Yet as the plaudits and accolades were being poured over Claudio Ranieri and his players, one thought kept nagging at the back of my mind – is there perhaps one man who deserves a bit more of the credit than he is getting?

And that man is former Foxes manager Nigel Pearson.

I don’t for one second want to devalue Ranieri’s achievement. His tactics, methods and incredible man-management skills are the true genius behind Leicester’s title. And success certainly couldn’t have landed at the feet of a nicer guy.

But I think we are all forgetting that Leicester’s revival, which ultimately led to this season’s staggering charge to the top, was started long before Ranieri set foot in the King Power Stadium.

There has been a lot of talk about how dramatic Leicester’s rise was from bottom of the league 13 months ago to top of the table now. Yet there has been little mention of the man who actually started that revival.

Pearson may not have the cuddly, grandfatherly charm of Ranieri. In fact he is a bit of a nutter, truth be told, with a short fuse, a harsh temper and a tendency to physically attack opposing players.

But it was Pearson who brought Riyad Mahrez, Robert Huth and Jamie Vardy to the club. It was he who gave the team its never-say-die attitude. It was Pearson who made this set of players truly believe in their own ability and claw their way to safety.

If you really want to identify the moment when Leicester became potential title contenders, it was not the first win of this season but their 2-1 victory over West Ham United in April last year.

I don’t for one second want to devalue Ranieri’s achievement. But it was Pearson brought Mahrez, Huth and Vardy to the club. It was he who gave the team its never-say-die attitude

From that point on they only lost one more game – to champions Chelsea – in a run that saw them win seven of their last nine games. That, in itself, is title-winning form.

As I said, and I don’t mind saying again, this is in no way trying to take anything away from Ranieri. After all, he took the good work that had been started by his predecessor and built on it superbly.

He brought in N’Golo Kanté, turned Vardy into a truly feared striker, made Mahrez one of the most effective midfielders in the game and brought a sense of calm to the club that has helped the players thrive.

But I think we should all spare a thought for Pearson who was sacked through no fault of his own.

If his son had been able to behave on that pre-season tour of Thailand, then there is the possibility, however slight, that the world would be hailing him as the writer of modern football fairy tales.

Instead the out-of-work 52-year-old has been forced to watch from a distance as the team he built became champions. Not much of a happy ending for him…

Old fashioned football

A lot of people have complained that the ill-tempered Tottenham Hotspur vs Chelsea match was an embarrassment to English football. Nonsense. It was merely a throwback to the days when football was a sport played by real men.

I can’t and won’t condone incidents like Mousa Dembele sticking his fingers in Diego Costa’s eyes – although he was only doing what a thousand other players have wanted to do to the hugely irritating Spaniard over the years.

And there were a few tackles, mostly by Spurs players, which went over the top.

Yet despite these moments of excess, this was truly one of the most entertaining matches of the season. And do you know why? Because, and this may come as a shock to the younger generation, football was always meant to be a contact sport. That’s the way it was born and bred and, until the feminisation drive of recent years, the way it has always been.

Quite frankly I am getting a little bit bored with modern football. Who wants to watch players who are afraid to tackle? Who wants to watch 22 grown men prancing around a pitch trying not to touch each other?

Maybe some of the Spurs players did get carried away by the occasion. Maybe they let the fact it was a local derby with so much at stake cloud their judgement. Maybe they did allow the red mist to wash over them when they realised their title goose was cooked.

But give me that over the sanitised, non-contact sport football has become these days.

I watch football to enjoy it. And boy, did I enjoy last Monday’s game.

Shame on you

Well, Manchester United fans, at least you now know who is to blame for your club’s recent failures – you are.

“We have to meet the expectations of the biggest club in the world. Expectations are too high,” Louis van Gaal whined last week.

Shame on you United fans for expecting a team assembled for half a billion euros to be capable of getting out of the group stages of the Champions League.

Shame on you United fans for expecting your collection of star internationals to be able to score more goals in a Premier League season than newly promoted Bournemouth.

Shame on you United fans for expecting a team with such a proud history and incredible record to be challenging at the top of the league rather than desperately scrambling for fourth place.

It’s all your fault, fans. You and your silly, inflated, unrealistic expectations. Lower them and the life will be good again.

Pep’s real test starts

You can try to dress it up any way you like but the reality is that Pep Guardiola’s time in Germany has not been a true success.

Bayern Munich’s elimination from the Champions League last week means he hasn’t got past the semi-finals of Europe’s most prestigious competition in any of his three seasons at the helm.

Yes, Guardiola has won back-to-back titles and is likely to add a third in the coming weeks.

And there has been the odd cup thrown into the mix as well during his spell at the Allianz Arena. But considering the season before he arrived, Bayern powered their way to a brilliant treble of league, cup and Champions League, it is hard to see how Guardiola’s reign can be viewed as anything other than underwhelming.

In a couple of months he will be plying his trade in England, at which point we will find out once and for all if he truly knows how to manage or whether he is just exceptionally good at landing the right job at the right time with the right players.

Unlike his previous coaching jobs, this one is in a league that is genuinely competitive, a league which isn’t totally dominated by two or maybe three teams, a league where even 5,000-to-1 underdogs can have their day.

Sure, he will have money to spend. Lots of it, probably.

But, as Ranieri has just proved, that isn’t always the key to success in a league where passion and desire are as important and skill and finesse.

Guardiola has finished his managerial apprenticeships in Spain and Germany with, in my opinion, pretty mixed results. Trophies yes, plenty of them. But most of them either on the basis of having the best players in the world or set against a backdrop of little competition.

Now it’s time to see if his brand of management magic works in the real world.

sportscolumnist@timesofmalta.com
Twitter: @maltablade