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23rd November 2015
01:02pm GMT

I can still remember being in the car listening to the radio back in 2000 when the £5.5million capture of Adi Akinbiyi was announced on the sports news. Martin O'Neill had left for Glasgow, Emile Heskey has been sold to Liverpool and, having let Stan Collymore leave, new manager Peter Taylor had £11m of Anfield dosh burning a hole in his Le Coq Sportif tracksuit. Taxi deregulation came in around this time but there was probably still more value in £5.5m of Dublin taxi plates than Akin-bad-buy. Despite his almost comical performances in front of goal Leicester were briefly top in the autumn, enjoyed a very brief Uefa Cup campaign and managed not to disgrace themselves until the following season. When they won five games and dropped like a stone.https://twitter.com/BBCRLSport/status/662298060828057600/video/1 Claudio Ranieri was few peoples's idea of the ideal Leicester City manager when he was appointed during the summer. Most people's idea of of the ideal City manager had been sacked to create the vacancy. Nigel Pearson was confrontational, bad-tempered, purposefully obtuse and occasionally downright aggressive, but he was Leicester's thug and anyone who didn't see the attraction was clearly an ostrich. Sure, Leicester were bottom of the table for most of last season, at one point looking doomed with 19 points from 29 games, but they genuinely were playing well without getting results. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnlm_DPVpng Despite the unseemly spats with reporters, and unseemly scrap with James McArthur, it was presumed that Pearson would be kept on after guiding the club to safety with a run of form that featured seven wins and just one defeat in their last nine games. However it seems there was more going on behind the scenes and the Srivaddhanaprabha family saw fit to remove a man who was successful in both his stints at the club and replace him with a man who was last seen getting the bullet from Greece. All I can say is fair play to the duty free shop-owning Srivaddhanaprabhas and fair play to Ranieri. https://twitter.com/OliverKayTimes/status/668121122039275521 The Italian has done bugger all tinkering. He realised he won the football manager lottery by landing a position that became available for reasons other than his predecessor doing a terrible job. He has persevered with a counter-attacking style despite his side's less than stellar defensive record and has shown faith in the attacking talents of Vardy, Riyad Mahrez, Marc Albrighton and Jeff Schlupp. https://twitter.com/BreatheSport/status/668383497971609600?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw It wasn't always so.
The 2007/08 season ended with relegation to League One after a typically Mandaric-esque campaign saw the trigger happy owner go through three permanent managers as they slipped into the third tier of English football for the first time in their history. Martin Allen and Mandaric did not get along, with the former leaving after four games. Then came the curious case of Gary Megson and the six-week spell in charge that ended with an offer from Bolton that he could not refuse. So it was left to Ian Holloway to lead the club into uncharted and unwelcome waters. After that there was the first coming of Pearson, Paulo Sousa, Sven-Goran Eriksson, the second coming of Pearson and now Ranieri.And so to Sunday night and the sheer pleasure of watching Leicester's Kasper Schmeichel on Match of the Day 2 talking about his table-topping team-mates. Sure the next six games suggest the joy might be short lived but having spent years listening to Leicester on the radio and begging editors to let me cover League One schaudenfreude derbies against Leeds, it is very nice to be box office. It is very nice to be top of the league.
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