It’s the summer of 2016, Leicester City are the champions of England and Gary Lineker, their most famous, crisp-flogging superfan is presumably spending the bulk of his free time in the gym, as he prepares to honour a promise by presenting the upcoming season’s first Match of the Day in only his pants.
Nobody has lavished Claudio Ranieri’s fabulous Foxes with more praise in recent months than Lineker, who watched his boyhood club laugh in the face of 5000/1 odds stacked against them and go on to achieve what is arguably the biggest upset in English football history.
But like the bookmakers, the former Barcelona and Tottenham Hotspur striker wasn’t massively confident going into that famous season. After saving the club from relegation, reported off-the-pitch issues resulted in Nigel Pearson being sacked as manager, and in came Claudio “Tinkerman” Ranieri.
Ranieri arrived at the King Power Stadium after a pretty disastrous spell as manager of the Greece national team, and it had been 10 years since he’d last managed in England’s top flight. Like a large section of the British press, Lineker’s reaction to the appointment was hardly one of emphatic approval.
But the Match of the Day man has almost certainly never been so happy to have been wrong, and today, exactly one year after Ranieri was confirmed as manager of the would-be title winners, he’s had this to say on Twitter.
Claudio Ranieiri signed for Leicester a year ago today. Claudio Ranieri? Yes, really!
— Gary Lineker (@GaryLineker) July 13, 2016
