For the Love of Leicester City

On a wintry night in November 2014, the kind of cold that makes your bones ache, I was driving down the motorway with the windows wide open.

My husband was stretched out in the passenger seat, my older brother in the back, scarfing down a bag of scampi-flavored crisps. We’d been in the car for four hours already, crawling in traffic somewhere near Bedford, the radio blasting BBC Five Live.

We were on our way back from Leicester, having watched them lose one-nil at home to West Bromwich Albion. I was three months pregnant, exhausted, and working hard to keep my eyes open. For practical reasons, it made sense that I’d be driving; my husband is American, not familiar with stick shifts and roundabouts, and my brother doesn’t drive.

My husband sighed and shifted in his seat.

“Long day,” he said.

It’s always been a long day for us, going to watch Leicester. My brother and I grew up in north London, ten minutes’ walk from our mum’s team, Arsenal, and twenty minutes from our stepdad’s team, Tottenham, but chose to follow our granddad’s team instead. It was my brother’s choice initially, to follow Leicester, and I hero-worshipped him, so I went along too. I guess it’s an odd choice, to follow a team that plays hours away from home, a team that has never been very good.

It took a while to explain this to my husband when we met seven years ago. He’d never lived in England and never been into sports, so I had to teach him everything I knew about football, from the official rules to the unofficial ones. I was probably more cynical than most, since I had given up my career as a football journalist, feeling that it was an industry filled with too much money and too many crappy people in powerful positions.

He’d ask questions like, “Do you think Leicester City will win the Premier League one day?” with classic American optimism and naivety.

And I’d scoff, “No, of course not.”

“But why do you support them then?”

“Because they’re my team.”

He thought it was strange, the dedication I’d shown over the years to a club that didn’t seem to do much. I’d even chosen to go to university in Leicester so that I could have a season ticket for three years. But he came along for the ride, assuming there must be something in it, somewhere…

We live in New York City, but every time we went back to the UK, we’d go up to Leicester to see them play. I took him to all the glamour ties, like Barnsley and Huddersfield Town and West Brom. The sight of him in his replica shirt, yawning through yet another dire aerial hoof-about, always made my heart swell with appreciation. If that wasn’t love, I don’t know what is.

I explained offside, and dodgy refs, and hoofing. I taught him songs (“Wait, West Ham fans sing about bubbles?!”) And through it all, I found myself falling in love with the game again. Because it’s all so ridiculous, once you start articulating it.

My brother and I have had a brilliant time watching Leicester together over the years, even though it hasn’t been all that brilliant on the pitch at times. We’ve sat freezing through goalless draws, laughing and singing the whole time.

We’ve bonded through depressing moments, like the 3–0 defeat to our rivals, Derby County, the season we plummeted out of the Premier League with a record wage bill. There was the year we nearly went bankrupt. There was the season we were relegated to the third tier of English football. There were countless last minute goals conceded and soul-crushing losses. There was the time I threw my “lucky” Leicester gloves into a garden hedge and left them there.

But there was also Steve Claridge’s last minute shin-goal in the 1996 play-off final against Crystal Palace. There were League Cup final wins against Middlesbrough and Tranmere Rovers. There was the time we played Atletico Madrid in the UEFA Cup (although, with typical misfortune had our midfielder Garry Parker bizarrely sent off for taking a free kick too quickly). We hosted Red Star Belgrade in Europe a few seasons later, although the joy of that encounter lasted for less than a minute, when we conceded in the haze of red smoke from an away fan’s flare.

There has been plenty of misfortune and, mostly, just abject mediocrity. But we’ve been in it together, my brother and I. And we dragged my husband into it too.

When Leicester made the Championship play-offs in 2013, my husband and I were at home in New York. We got up at dawn and went to a midtown bar to watch the team take on Watford, live on TV. When Leicester were awarded an injury-time penalty that could win us the game, I closed my eyes and said, “Oh no.”

“What are you talking about?” my husband said, still cheering. “This is awesome!”

I shook my head. “No. You don’t understand. This is awful.”

Sure enough, poor Anthony Knockaert missed from the spot and Watford took possession, broke quickly, and scored to knock us out.

Back to square one. Back to another season in the Championship.

My husband was beginning to understand what it was to be a Leicester fan. He quickly bundled me out of the bar and searched for a cab to take us home, while I stood on 34th Street in the early morning light, between the perplexed tourists and the curious shoppers, and wept.

So, on that chilly night in November, you can understand why his reserves of optimism were spent. He was starting to realize that maybe this was all there was: seven hours in the car and ninety minutes of humdrum hoofing.

When we finally got back to London, we climbed into bed, completely spent. He turned to face me and put his hand on my belly, on the little boy growing inside: time for a frank parenting discussion.

“Are we going to raise our son to be Leicester fan?” he asked, and then took a long pause before adding, “Wouldn’t it be easier for him to support a team closer to home?”

I knew what was coming next.

“A team that wins…?”

No parent wants to subject their child to a lifetime of heartache, of mediocrity, of long car journeys and cold afternoons and hot Bovril and defeat. So I had to give it some thought. Questions flooded my mind: Could I persuade my child to support another team? Could I let him make his own mind up, like my brother and I did? What if he chose Manchester United… or Chelsea? What if he opted for an easy life full of easy wins? Wouldn’t the ultimate gesture of parental self-sacrifice be to encourage him to do that?

The simple answer was yes, but no.

I held my husband’s hand and said, “I’m sorry, but we’re Leicester fans, for better or worse.”

He gave me a look that said, Will there be better? I gave him a look that said, Probably not.

He nodded and said, “Okay.”

I gave birth to our son in May last year, the week before Leicester achieved Premier League safety. I spent the last few weeks of pregnancy trying not to get too excited, trying not to leap up and down too much as the team put together win after win to achieve the greatest escape from relegation in Premier League history.

In August, we bought our baby a tiny replica kit, and my husband ordered himself a home shirt with Vardy printed on the back. We were looking forward to another season in the Premier League, expecting a season of defeats, maybe some scraped wins, of watching our team struggle to stave off relegation again. Because, at the very least, we’d be in it together, as a family.

Now here we are in February 2016. Leicester City is top of the league, five points clear. It is absolutely unfathomable, in the best possible way. Un.fathom.able.

A miracle.

On Saturday, we beat Manchester City 3–1 at the Etihad. When Riyad Mahrez scored with a beautiful shimmy and a perfect strike, I fell to my knees and cried. Happy tears, for a change. Because Leicester have never played this beautifully, and I never thought I’d see it. In the past, when we won it was with grit rather than grace, with a Steve Walsh toe-poke or an Ian Marshall header. We played pretty well under Martin O’Neill, but not like this, not with these passes and chips and dinks and dribbles. This, as my 93-year-old grandfather says with tears in his eyes, is “dreamland.”

Seeing my team play such beautiful football, without an oligarch or a sheikh in the director’s box, without a $50 million signing, with a team of players who weren’t expected to amount to much individually or collectively, is breathtaking. In the pre-season predictions, most football journalists picked Leicester to go down. And so did I.

Now, they’re picking us as favourites for the title. In the words of every football fan in the world, what the actual fuck?

My husband is optimistic, of course. And completely committed now, as ardent a fan as I’ve ever seen, checking stats, listening to podcasts, now he’s the one telling me about potential new signings or contract negotiations. I’ve even caught him listening to Talk Sport phone-ins.

My brother and I are as scared to believe as ever. Superstition prevents me from even considering the possibility of us winning the thing that everyone now thinks might be possible. Because — as any fan of a mediocre team knows — if I dare speak or write about it, it won’t happen. Even being favourites now is a worrying sign.

My husband, brother and I managed to go to one Leicester game this season, all the way from New York City to the KP Stadium and, of course, it was a goalless draw with Bournemouth. You can’t tell me we don’t have jinxing potential. So, while my husband is excited for the last 13 games, my brother and I see the end of the season, the final match at Stamford Bridge, as filled with potential for heartache. We remember all the disappointments, the close calls, the dodgy decisions. We remember the penalty that was awarded after Erland Johson’s dive in the dying seconds of extra time [FA Cup 5th round v Chelsea, 1997]. We remember throwing our gloves into hedges.

If there is anything to gain from this story so far, for Leicester City to rise from bottom to top of the best leagues in the world, a league that is so predictable that it has been impossible to win without spending big, it is this: never give up hope.

If it looks as though we might be in with a chance of doing something incredible towards the end of the season, we will fly back to England to watch with my brother, because I couldn’t watch it without him.

And if Leicester makes it into the Champions League, which is a sentence I can’t believe I’m typing, it will mean the three of us probably making a long trip somewhere to watch the game. But, like always, it’ll be worth every mile.