Dean Smith: not a Bond villain but maybe what Leicester City need right now
Look at where Leicester City fans have grown accustomed to seeing our team in the Premier League table, challenging the elite and pushing for Europe, and you will find Aston Villa and Brighton.
Both clubs were forced into a managerial change early in the season - Villa by Steven Gerrard’s underperformance, Brighton by the poaching of Graham Potter.
As their fans enjoyed serenading us with this time last week, Villa’s chief executive Christian Purslow went to Spain, in a Lamborghini or otherwise, and brought them back Unai Emery. Brighton, meanwhile, plumped for Roberto De Zerbi, who had bounced around his native Italy for a while before impressing at Shakhtar Donetsk.
Emery and De Zerbi - they’re slick, you can picture them in a rollneck, they’re Bond villains. Mikel Arteta, Pep Guardiola, Erik Ten Hag - they all pass the rollneck Bond villain test.
Leicester City, making the change they needed to make at the same time as Villa and Brighton, have finally done something.
Top went down the M69 in a white van and brought us back a manager - Dean Smith.
You can’t imagine him ever wearing a rollneck and he’s more henchman than Bond villain, which says everything about where the club is right now in comparison to Villa and Brighton. Those are long-term projects. This is a quick fix.
And this isn’t where we wanted to be, in more ways than one. But - and here comes the hollow phrase that’s popped into my head every time someone’s asked what I think about the appointment of Dean Smith so far - we are where we are.
Pleased to appoint you
When Leicester City and Brendan Rodgers mutually accepted that we couldn’t keep losing in ridiculous ways every week and hope to maintain the pretense that it was all part of some grand, long-term project in the Brighton and Villa mould, we very quickly had the familiar list of names in the frame.
As a fan, you look through the list and you mentally sift out the names you feel have been added to bulk up the numbers. In a split-second, you recall the jobs done by each of these men at their previous clubs and a quick summary of their coaching CVs. At that point, Dean Smith was making up the numbers in my head among one or two candidates that made sense. Rafa Benitez may have failed at Everton but who hasn’t? He seemed a logical choice in our situation.
Jesse Marsch was the early favourite but then he actually watched us play and decided he’d prefer to stay home and watch Loose Women. So on Monday afternoon when I had a quick check of my phone before watching a film and it looked like Benitez was the frontrunner, all seemed well. Then when the film ended I picked up my phone again and we were about to appoint Dean Smith. I’m not sure how long the film was, but this news was a bit disorientating.
There was further disorientation at the tone struck by others. Sky Sports reporter Rob Dorsett called the move ‘clever’, while one fan poll I saw had around 95% of an admittedly small sample size welcoming the imminent appointment.
Unlike Dorsett, at TFW we don’t have to be nice to the club. We try to tread that thin line where we don’t get banned for tweeting either, but we can say what we think a bit more. And what we think, like a lot of people reading this, is that the club is an absolute mess from Top to bottom. Even they tacitly acknowledge this from time to time.
For instance, I had a look back at the way the club announced the appointments of Claudio Ranieri and Brendan Rodgers. They were ‘delighted’ by both. Claude Puel? Again, ‘delighted’. Dean Smith got a ‘pleased’.
We are where we are.
Big Nige in a rollneck?
There are obviously similarities between Dean Smith and Nigel Pearson - and not just the Shakespeare connection. Maybe you can picture Pearson in a rollneck but he’s definitely more of a henchman too, the kind of manager people describe as being “Brexit”, even though Nige is actually anything but. There’s also the talk on Twitter from fans of another club - in this case Villa - of ‘the band getting back together again’. Now we see just how much we must be annoying Bristol City supporters.
There’s slight discomfort with appointing a manager so strongly associated with another club. It’s a pride thing. You may not need one of your own - this isn’t a call for Steve Walsh or Gary Lineker to get the job - but you kind of want someone who could feel like your own. Or at least isn’t already someone else’s.
But we don’t actually need to worry about any of that. We just need to stay up.
Some may have thought we’d gone past this point - that we have a £100million training ground, a reputation for clever recruitment and good football. Others, who have been taking notice for the past couple of years, will know this hasn’t been the case for a long time now. This isn’t 2019 any more.
What we’ve actually needed for a number of years is to toughen up. On the pitch, Leicester City haven’t been what I want from a football club. We’ve been too weak, mentally and physically.
So that’s why the arrival of John Terry among the backroom staff is sparking a bit of life into Leicester supporters. You can see the sense in it.
A fresh start
While things look grim, it still shouldn’t take that much to keep us up. We do feel like a lost cause but we’re not, if only because there are at least three other terrible teams in this league. Maybe as much as seven or eight. We have a good squad in need of fresh motivation and confidence, that needs to stop making mistakes and get one or two key players back from injury.
The fresh start, while long overdue, is at least finally happening. We can talk about how it should have happened last September, or during the recent international break, or even before the Bournemouth game - but all that’s gone now.
Our new manager bounce will hopefully arrive when we play… *checks notes*… Manchester City away.
After that pointless endeavour, we’ve got seven games to save ourselves and an actual football manager to help us do it. This is an improvement on the past two games.
We’re not able to look into the future and see what happens to our football club. We certainly wouldn’t have predicted a couple of years ago that we’d be where we are now. But desperate times call for desperate measures - we’ve got Dean Smith, we’ve got John Terry and we’ve got a pair of balls and a man who knows how to carry them.
