Our glory, our grief

So many people have written and spoken so eloquently on the death of five people in a helicopter crash outside the football stadium I regard as my second home, I’m struggling to add anything, conscious that at some point, the memorials stop and the memories are what remain.  

And yet five people, including Leicester City’s transformative owner Khun Vichai, did die in the most terrible and sudden of circumstances. What we have witnessed since has been as strong a testimony to kindness as our title triumph was to defying the odds. It’s been bewildering and beautiful, sad yet reaffirming, perspective reasserting itself on football’s fickle and feckless jibba jabba. A football club is at the centre of a trauma, a city is grieving and the world is sending its’ heartfelt condolences, humanity’s core decency breaking the surface when it’s needed the most.

Football is usually a distraction, a story with no tangible consequence which can strut its stuff as everyday life grinds its’ wheels through working weeks and wage slips. 2016 was different. It put the possibility of previously unimaginable glory at the heart of every day and every waking hour and when this glory was realised it provoked an explosion of absolute and uncomplicated joy for City fans and an entire city. A fanbase and city that also reveled, basked in fact, in the realisation that the whole entire sodding world was also doing a jig in our honour.

A normal club and a normal city became exceptional in the world’s eyes. And yet what became clear during this 5000-1 fairytale, and maybe even to ourselves, was that Leicester wasn’t a normal city and Leicester City wasn’t a normal football club. The city is actually a magnificently diverse one, a mardy miracle of multi-culturalism that had for a couple of generations simultaneously shrugged its’ shoulders and put an arm around nationalities and faiths from all over the world. And quietly, without much fanfare, Les-tah had become the most laid back multi-cultural city in Europe. And the club, which since 1884 had churned out a familiar tale of underdog near misses, produced great players but rarely great teams now had something a rare at its’ heart: a great owner, Khun Vichai.

An owner whose investment and generosity helped an often surly fanbase shake the shrug and enjoy itself, enjoy it’s football and enjoy what we were: a community that loved football, loved the club. Clappers and cupcakes, naff maybe and certainly resented in the eyes of hardened fans brought up on terraces and pies, was producing the best atmosphere in the Premier League, cheering on the best team in the Premier League. Claims that Leicester had never been close to to making in our entire history.

On May 7th when the culmination of football’s most remarkable story reached its peak and we played Everton before collecting that beautiful trophy, Leicester City stepped into moment with the class of George Clooney leaving prison in a tux in Oceans Eleven. We pulled off our once in a lifetime heist with the swagger of a club who’d been winning titles as a matter of course. The choreography of that day, the bag of gifts to every fan in the stadium and Bocelli, oh Bocelli. It all exemplified the remarkable class of a club that knew what it was meant to be. A celebration of a community and a city and a source of joy. A clarity of purpose provided by Vichai in how he invested in the club, its' city and its' people.

Sadly the car horns, chants and the crackle of broken beer glass of 2016 for now at least has been replaced by a dignified silence, free tea and the rustle of floral tributes. The books of condolences being filled with a gratitude that it will be impossible to quantify. Queues and tea, an English send off for a Thai billionaire. Sometimes the world works out in ways you could never have foreseen.

A remarkable quilt of colour now occupies a corner of my remarkable city. This memorial is a testament to our memories, our grief a fitting tribute to our glory. Neither event will ever be forgotten and nor will the man, so joyously and so tragically, at the heart of both.

Thank you.