December 11th 2004 : Championship Leicester City 0 Reading 2
We went into this game in a relatively optimistic mood after 2 back to back wins at home to Plymouth Argyle and away at Leeds United. Our season under both Mickey Adams and Craig Levein had always been one of a couple more wins and we could be among the teams fighting for the play offs. The first half was fairly equal, with us hitting the outside of the post once, but in the second half, a solid Reading team got 2 goals against us and our hopes were gone for another week. A man sitting near me in the kop summed it up when he said he hadn’t seen a decent team against us all season and that we were an average team in a poor division. Somebody said on TV that these days, most teams getting promoted would virtually need a new team when the got promoted, and that only 2 of his team last year were good enough for the premiership this year.
I think Craig Levein will sort things out in time and I hope that the fans are patient enough to give him time to do the rebuilding job that needs to be done. He has inherited a squad of maybe 20 players and none of them you could say were guaranteed to be playing every weeks. I think we lack quality, and I hope in due course he will add a few quality players and then build the team around them.
One bright spot was the full debut of Richard Steadman at full back. The crown gave him plenty of encouragement and his first half display repaid that support. I hope players like him will be given a run of games in the first team. We have a number of players from our time in the Premiership under Peter Taylor who are reported to be on money which is far higher than we can really afford in our current situation. At the end of the year, a few of them will be out of contract and then it will be interesting to see what decisions are made about their futures at the club.
We stayed the Friday and Saturday night at the Holiday Inn Express Hotel next to the Walkers Stadium. It was nice to walk around the outside of the stadium when nobody else is about. We saw the small garden of remembrance which looked very nicely kept, and seen in the dark with just a little light and a bit of mist blowing around, it looked dignified and right. Just 2 weeks before, a small service had been held there to remember the recently departed City great, Keith Weller.
The stadium really is quite magnificent, and I hope that one day we will be able to buy it back from the American Pension Fund “Teachers” that owns it, whether that is in partnership with Leicester Tigers or on our own. I also walked about the Filbert Street area of Leicester late at night and memories always flood back when I am there. But when you look at pictures of the old ground, it really does look a mixture of old and new stands, whereas the new stadium really is the business. A giant step forward for the club, but one that together with relegation and the collapse of ITV digital TV Deal, came within minutes of destroying us. I know that even if Leicester City was buried, that AFC Leicester would be born out of the ashes and in time, we would get them back to the rightful place in football.
We have a proud history of never being below the top 2 flights of the English game. I remember that somebody said that all teams have a natural place in the league, a certain level, unless something dramatic happens to them. They might have a couple of great seasons as a money man arrives, or a few bad ones if they try to recover from a relegation. At the start of Saturdays game, we were in 9th place in the championship, or 9th place in division two if we think of it in historic terms. That must be in the range that Leicester City would be if you looked back over its history and averaged out its position. Lower half of Division 1 to top half of division 2. You can look at some teams now in the premiership and know that they are fighting above their weight, in a position that is probably deserved currently on merit, but in 5 years time, you wouldn’t back them still to be there. Portsmouth is one that comes to mind, while other like Blackburn and Bolton Wanderers will be relegated sometime in the next 5 to 10 years. Other teams, ourselves included are destined to bounce up and down or YOYO as the press like to call it.
I would include Ipswich town, Norwich City, Crystal Palace and Manchester City in this category.
The hope of the Walkers is that we can get up, stay up, and then build using average gates of 30,000 people. Filbert Street could never do that for us. The question is, we have an average team in a poor league, we lost, and we are just 4 points of a play off spot, do we want it ! , what would Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool etc do to us as the moment ! . But we have to hope for promotion, them just hope and pray after that if we get it ! .