It was a good job Dean Smith had tickets only for the practice rounds at the Masters because by the end of last week, instead of admiring the view at Augusta he was analysing Leicester City’s lethargic performance in defeat by Bournemouth in preparation for replacing Brendan Rodgers. “You’re not allowed your phone on the course, so I didn’t know until I got back to the hotel,” says Smith of the need to swiftly head to London for talks with Leicester.
Leicester are in an unusual spot, a place and two points off the bottom of the Premier League. Last season they finished eighth and reached the Europa Conference League semi-finals. The previous year they won the FA Cup and secured a second successive fifth-placed finish, and six years ago this week Craig Shakespeare, who has returned as Smith’s assistant, led the team at Atlético Madrid in a Champions League quarter-final; only Wilfred Ndidi and Jamie Vardy, who have struggled this season, remain from the starting XI that night. Marc Albrighton is on loan at West Brom.
In the past few weeks, perhaps for the first time some supporters have questioned Leicester’s ownership whose commitment to the club – and city – can never be doubted. Last year the chairman, Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha, known as Top, donated a further £1m to a Leicester hospitals charity and this February he wiped clear £194m of club debt. Whether he kept faith in Rodgers for too long or was too slow to appoint a successor are questions that will rise to the surface in the event of the worst-case scenario, an unthinkable prospect on the basis of their sprawling £100m Seagrave training ground alone. “You can see the ambitions are the elite level,” Smith says. “If you get John Terry saying ‘Oh, wow’ then you’re doing something right. We’ve seen what this club can do over the years.”
Leicester’s season boils down to eight matches in seven weeks, the first at the champions, Manchester City, on Saturday. Smith will ask his defence to nullify Jack Grealish, whom he developed at Villa. “I had a message from him when I was driving through South Carolina last week and he sent me a message when I got the job to congratulate me,” Smith says. Given City’s form – they have won their past five matches by an aggregate score of 24-2 – the significance of Leicester’s next three matches, against Wolves, Leeds and Everton, feels pronounced. Smith knows time is not on his side and there is a fine line between stressing urgency and urging calm.
“You can get into a situation where you always think there’s another game: ‘We’ll get out of it the next game, the next game,’” he says. “We’re not at that stage now. It’s not an emergency but certainly a time where we all need to realise that games are running out very quickly. I know Brendan very well and he’s done an unbelievable job here, two top-five finishes, FA Cup, an excellent coach and excellent man. For him to not be here, something must have gone wrong.”
Leicester’s display against Bournemouth caused alarm within the Leicester hierarchy and for Smith. “If I was 80-20 for taking the job then, I probably went down to 50-50,” Smith says. Rodgers felt some of his players had checked out mentally, knowing their futures lay elsewhere. Eight players, including Youri Tielemans, who could return on Saturday, are out of contract at the end of the season. James Maddison will almost certainly be sold, regardless of what division Leicester are in. The top goalscorer Harvey Barnes, who has a hamstring injury, also has admirers.
Smith would not have taken the job had Shakespeare and Terry, both of whom he worked alongside at Villa, not joined him. “I’ve done well to get him off the golf course,” Smith says of Terry, “but then we turn up and there’s a golf course here [at the training ground]. All three of us had to agree that we could come here and make a difference and keep the team up. I met with ‘Top’ and Jon [Rudkin, director of football] and liked what I heard from them, relayed that to the lads and we felt it was something that we could do.”
Leicester’s final game is at home to West Ham, Villa’s opponents when they survived on the last day of 2019-20. “I have got a few friends who are West Ham fans and they have reminded me,” smiles Smith, who is fast approaching 600 games as a manager. Would it mark his greatest feat if Leicester retain top-flight status? “I think I’ll tell you that at the end of the season, if and when we’ve kept them up,” comes the reply.
