“Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this sun of York”
‘Tis how Richard the Third, begins his tale, describing the ascension to the throne of his brother King Edward IV after the scions of the House of York seized it from the clutches of Henry VI and the House of Lancaster. It’s one of William Shakespeare most evocative works, a tragedy full of improbable twists and turns that revolve around the War of the Roses and the battle for the throne of the most powerful Kingdom on Earth at the time; all between families and clans that see the throne as their birthright.
From time immemorial, that has been the script for epics and ballads the world over. Be it the Iliad or the Mahabharata, or the twenty-first century’s Game of Thrones; heroic tales of war and triumph have always revolved around the privileged few.
Even in the most fantastical of stories, royalty isn’t passed around like a football in the Camp Nou, it is exclusive; kings will fight dethroned monarchs, queens will plot against princesses and crown princes will fight the sons of exiled royalty.
This is because all the greatest storytellers in history have known that the one thing that makes a story truly great is its ability to be rooted in reality. And the reality is that it is almost always the privileged that wield, and consequentially fight for, power.
Hell, even Cinderella was the daughter of a rich, widowed baron, (or a lord, in some versions); in the first known European Cinderella story, Cenerentola, the father is a widowed prince. Her eventual marriage to the Prince merely establishes that she got back what was rightfully hers.
There is no such thing as a Cinderella Story, not in the way we like to imagine it.
In Sports, as in life
It is to escape this drab reality that most of us turn to sports, to live vicariously through our favourite heroes, and to be taken to highs of victory and jubilation that otherwise most of us cannot even conjure up in our imaginations. Even in sports, though, nobility and privilege belong to only a fanciful few.
While this has usually held true over the ages, it has become even more pronounced in the modern era. Commercial success engineered by global marketing campaigns using words like “synergy”, “catalyst” and “leverage” have seen sports entities get into all kinds of inane tie-ups with businesses across the world.
Sports has become a big-bucks business and none more so than the world’s most popular one, football. This commercial success has brought about an unprecedented difference in wealth, and subsequently success, between the haves and the have-nots. Take for example Europe’s top football leagues.
Over the last decade, the English league has been won by Manchester United, Chelsea and Manchester City with a combination of these three along with Arsenal and Liverpool comprising the top three, year after bloody year.
In Italy, the winners have been Internazionale, AC Milan and Juventus with no one else even coming close to competing. In Spain, it’s been a duopoly between the two biggest clubs in the world, Real Madrid and Barcelona, with Atlético Madrid’s victory in 2013-14 the sole standout.
It’s gotten so bad, that a lot of us have been celebrating Atléti’s victory and the relative success of the team in the past two years as the victory of the underdog. But, Atléti, who are Spain’s third wealthiest club, had have spent € 136.11 million this season and have won more first-division titles than any other club outside the Big Two are no underdog.
Not in the truest sense of the word anyway. But similar is the case with the Bundesliga victories of VfB Stuttgart (five-time Bundesliga Champions) and VfL Wolfsburg (bankrolled by the all-powerful Volkswagen group) in a league dominated by Bayern Munich with sporadic resistance from Borussia Dortmund.
Much like the Pandavas, they were always royalty – they just weren’t as powerful as their foes.
Think of it like this - Liverpool winning the EPL: Great story? Hell yes; An underdog’s victory over the elite? Hell no.
Which is not to say that true underdogs don’t win at all in sport these days – Flavia Pennetta won the US Open last year, Brawn GP won the F1 constructor’s championship in 2009 (to call anyone non-privileged in the stratified world of F1 is slightly amusing though), Greece won the European Championships in 2004 (slightly outside the time-frame of this decade, but still relevant) and for goodness’ sake, Japan beat South Africa in an actual Rugby World Cup match.
The thing is though, without diminishing the greatness of any of these - or any such – triumphs, if you were to study them you would see that most occurred either as one-off cases or in tournaments that generally don’t last for more than a month. It is easier (relatively speaking of course) to build up a head of steam, or have a really good spell (where all your talents work at their peak powers) over the course of such short durations.
This is also why it is next to impossible for the non-privileged to win a top football league spread out over ten unforgiving months; why Leicester City were given odds of 5000 to 1 by bookmakers (usually the most expert of sporting forecasters) to actually go on and win the English Premier League (odds that remained at 1000 to 1 even as late as January); and also why Leicester City Football Club being crowned the Champions of England is nothing short of the greatest sporting achievement of the past decade.
The Triumph of the True Underdog
In 2012 a project initiated by Philippa Langley and enacted by archaeologists from the University of Leicester managed to re-discover the remains of one of England’s more notorious medieval monarchs, thought lost for the last 500 years after the battle of Bosworth Field in Leicestershire. In March 2015, the City Council had the skeletal remains ceremoniously reburied in the Leicester Cathedral.
If the crabby ol’ King were around today (whether the real one or the Bard’s famous literary figure), he would most probably just throw his crown down in disgust at the vile show of rebellion by the football team that represents the city he lost his life in.
For there is nothing privileged about Leicester - in 132 years of playing domestic football, they have come close to actually winning the First Division only twice, way back in 1929 and again during an especially cold 1962-63 season. Their fans claim no birthright to any trophy (other than perhaps the Championship) - they have perennially been one amongst the collection of clubs that are always considered as “too good for the second division, not good enough for the first.”
For them, merely surviving the drop would have been a remarkable achievement this season, especially considering the unprecedented run that took them from rock bottom to safety during last season. The abrupt sacking of the manager responsible for this (Nigel Pearson) and the surprise replacement with Claudio Ranieri was treated with derision by the watching world and with a healthy dose of pessimism by fans who are too used to seeing their club lose their way in the top division.
What happened over the ten grueling, glorious, months then was as unexpected as it was unbelievable. No team in living memory had ever fought such odds, overcome so much, and come out on top.
Yet, they did it.
It was a triumph as much of the individuals as of the team. As much as the team itself was an underdog, so were the individual personalities within. These were no collection of washed up galacticos playing to claim what they thought was rightfully theirs. These were men who had dredged around in the lower reaches of the game for most of their careers, knowing fully well that they were never going to make it into a team that would even have the remotest chance of winning the league.Yet, they believed in themselves, and pushed the barriers of what is actually possible in today’s sporting world.
People had told N’Golo Kante and Riyad Mahrez that they were too frail and slight to play in the top echelons. The former was the most intimidating presence in the world’s most relentlessly physical league, the latter, it’s Player of the Year. Jamie Vardy went from working in a carbon-fibre splint factory to support his non-league football career to scoring in 11 consecutive Premier League matches, breaking a record held by the great Ruud Van Nistelrooy.
Wes Morgan, the team’s captain, used to be serenaded with “You’ll never beat Wes Morgan” by fans (for 10 years that meant second division's Nottingham forest) more out of affection for his spirit than as any real paean to his feats on the field. This season, he is in the PFA team of the year.
They had no right to do this. And yet they did it, inspired by a coach who was thought of as washed up and senile.
Yes, Mr. Linekar. Really.
Hope
Sure, the others - the traditional elite - have been poor but you don’t go from near-relegation one season to winning the most watched football league on the planet just because other teams in the league haven’t played to their potential! It wasn’t just momentum, or pure dumb luck, either – you don’t win 22 matches in 36 and garner 77 points just with that. Nor was it their reliance on the most primitive of tactics (4-4-2, kick it long to the striker at the first opportunity, shut down shop when up 1-0) – others have tried it before but have been far less successful.
Analysts and football writers will pore over the footage, conduct research on on-field tactics, off-field medical practices (they were the fittest team in the league, and suffered no major injuries; surely by design rather than accident) and motivational methods, and try and explain how in blue hell this happened. In the end, though, most are likely to scratch their heads, sit back and with a wistful smile put it down to something a certain Sir Alex Ferguson once said - “Football, Bloody Hell!”
Let us not leave the last word to the architect of modern English football’s greatest monarchy. Instead let us heed the words of the ever-genial Claudio Ranieri – “Dilly Ding, Dilly Dong, Wake up, Wake up”
Listen up World – Wake Up and savour the Hope that Leicester City Football Club have brought to our doorsteps, a genuinely memorable reminder that success is not the birthright of just a privileged few, that wealth can be beaten by passion, hard work, and discipline, and that if you were to simply believe in yourselves, you can achieve anything.
“Dilly Ding, Dilly Dong”
