King Ranieri!

Day -772. WorldCup2018.

So they did it. Leicester City, Champions of England. It feels like 30, 40 years ago when teams like Aston Villa, Nottingham Forest, Everton were winning the league before the dominance of Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester United, and more recently Chelsea and Manchester City. The big teams, with the big money. The small club, the team that fought back from the brink of relegation last year. It is a pretty incredible achievement. The nature of football, not North American leagues though, is that you watch it unfold week after week from August to May. It's a league where the team at the top of the pile come May is the winner. There's no play-offs where the team in 8th place can come from nowhere and win. We all followed Leicester, week after week, stay at the top. In the end, only die-hard Tottenham fans thought it might not happen. So we had time to digest the surprise factor. It was a slow-building surprise. But it is pretty amazing that it happened. Maybe every country, no matter how small, that qualifies for the 2018 World Cup will believe that they can "do a Leicester"

But will theyhave a manager like Claudio Ranieri? I almost wish some country hire him just before the World Cup for the entertainment he will provide. Greece will definitely not be in the running to hire him after his disastrous spell with them in 2014 where they lost to the Faroe Islands, twice. Ever since he was Chelsea's manager, in what seems like a different lifetime now, I've been a fan of Claudio and his honesty and his humour. And within the Leicester team he has obviously used some incredible managerial skills to create an incredible winning formula. And it takes a very smart man to get a clause written in his contract that he would get a £5m bonus if Leicester did win the league. Was that confidence or a sense of humour?

So give me Vardy and Mahrez, Kante and Fuchs, Drinkwater and Huth and their happy go-lucky style of play. But most of all give me a happy man, a happy manger like Claudio Ranieri any day. If you haven't seen it already here is one of the best press conferences ever, so typical of the man. This is when he first admitted a couple of weeks ago that they could actually win the league.

Dilly ding dilly dong