Leicester City may be 15th in the Premier League and onto their second manager this season but they are sitting comfortably in the draw for the Champions League quarter finals.
The English champions rebounded from a 2-1 first leg defeat to beat Sevilla 2-0 and go through 3-2 on aggregate.
The victory comes only two weeks after the club sacked Claudio Ranieri, the man that led them to that remarkable 2016/17 league triumph.
While Leicester fans were celebrating their club’s revival, and the players cavorted on the pitch – not wanting the night to end – Graeme Souness was not a happy man. Not at all.
The former Liverpool and Rangers manager was in TV3’s Dublin studios and he was openly appalled at the Leicester players for their role in Ranieri getting the sack. He declared:
“Look, when you’re a manager and you’ve won the league, are you going to turn up the next season and change things? If it ain’t broken, why fix it?
“They would have been doing the same training, talking to them the same way, preparing, travelling, everything the same way. Some of those players believed, all of a sudden, at the start of the season ‘Oh, we’re big players, we’re league champions’ and took their foot off the accelerator and got comfy in their big armchairs and got their Bentley in the car-park and maybe changed their house.”
Souness then claimed that Ranieri challenging the under-performing players caused dissension in the ranks and ‘the followers in the dressing room’ took the lead from ‘two or three influential players’. He added:
“Those players that are out there and rejoicing and thinking ‘We’re back; we’re big players’, they’ll fall off their perches again, guaranteed, because they’ve done it once and they’ll do it again. They’ll let you down again.”
Graeme Souness hitting the nail on the head about what happened with Claudio Ranieri at Leicester. pic.twitter.com/XqkUTOgQBe
— Cathal Pendred (@Pendred) March 14, 2017
Even used the Alex Ferguson classic about getting knocked off perches.
His comments drew a whole heap of praise.
Graham Souness is a G the way he just killed off that Leicester side 😂😂😂
— 🇵🇸 Sherman Hemsley 🇯🇲 🇧🇧 (@Weso3K) March 14, 2017
Great Leicester went through but I have to agree with souness https://t.co/w1HLP84wkk
— David watson (@manudave1987) March 14, 2017
https://twitter.com/Levi_Murphy/status/841781064704094214
Credit Souness for sticking to his principles, has not forgiven the Leicester players…
— James Twohig (@james2hig) March 14, 2017
