It was only three years ago that Leicester City did the utterly improbable and won the Premier League title.
Those improbably underdogs, who overcame 5,000-1 odds to conquer the world’s toughest league, won over the hearts of even the most hardened sports fan with their story.
But, after a few seasons of struggles and finding themselves in the muck of the midtable slog, the Foxes are back and as feisty as ever.
It all turned around after hiring Brendan Rodgers from Celtic in February, with the ex-Liverpool gaffer leading the club on a fantastic run to finish the season with six wins over the final 11 games.
The club has been even better this season. Leicester is sitting in third place. having dropped just 10 points of a possible 30.
All said, the team has collected the third-most points since hiring Rodgers, behind only Liverpool and Manchester City — you know, the current leader and the defending champion.
The strength of the Foxes was on full display on Friday, putting on a historic beatdown of Southampton, scoring the biggest EPL win ever at 9-0. Yes, that’s not a typo, it was really 9-0.
After the Saints suffered a double-whammy just 10 minutes into the game — Ryan Bertrand was sent off for a bad foul which was caught while VAR was reviewing a goal by Ben Chilwell — the team completely capitulated.
Ayoze Perez would score a hat trick for the Foxes while Jamie Vardy also scored thrice — including a penalty in injury time — to bring his season total to nine and take the league lead.
This is by no means a one-dimensional team, either. The Foxes are doing excellent at both ends of the field. Their 25 goals this season, of course aided by Friday’s nine-goal rout, ranks second in the league while the defence has allowed just eight goals, also tied for second-best.
This is a defence that lost top centre back Harry Maguire over the off-season as well. He has been replaced by Caglar Soyuncu, who is among the league leaders in passing. As we mentioned last week, the Foxes also have the two top tacklers in the league, Ricardo Periera and Wilfred Ndidi. That’s a pretty recipe for success.
And, if you’re wondering if Leicester can keep up this form, or if it will soon be running into some tough fixtures, it actually gets much easier until Christmas. The Foxes’ Nov. 9 date at home with Arsenal is the only match against the league’s Big 6 before facing Man City and Liverpool back-to-back in late December.
These ferocious Foxes look like they’ll hanging around the top of the table for months to come.
As for Southampton, well, it doesn’t get much easier. After Tuesday’s Carabao Cup match at Manchester City, it’s another date with Man City away. Ouch.
PLAYER OF THE WEEK
American and Chelsea fans have been waiting a long time for a moment like this.
After months of anticipation, stoked by his big-money and delayed by a loan back to Dortmund, we finally witnessed Christian Pulisic’s coming-out party.
In his first start in months, the American not only scored a hat trick, but he did it three different ways, scoring with his right foot, left foot and his head.
This output was highly unexpected. Pulisic had been relegated to the bench for some time now and didn’t even make the matchday squad for a recent Champions League game.
For manager Frank Lampard, Pulisic is just creating another one of those good problems to have. With all of these good, young players firing at Chelsea, how do you get them all gametime?
AROUND THE LEAGUE
Remember this year’s Champions League final between Liverpool and Tottenham, in which one side scored quite early and then the other couldn’t do much to get back in it? Well this time it was the opposite and the Reds showed why they’re leaps and bounds ahead of Spurs … Even in a game in which Manchester United won, you can’t help but look at the negatives. Both Marcus Rashford and Anthony Martial — back from weeks on the shelf — couldn’t connect on penalties. Against a better team than Norwich, that could’ve been costly … So, I guess the Pukki Party is over now? … Everton is everything that cross-city rival Liverpool isn’t. And that’s not a good thing. Looking to start a rare winning streak, the Toffees completely bottled it against Brighton. Up 2-1 in the final 10 minutes, Everton first conceded a penalty and then saw Lucas Digne score an own goal in injury time. You won’t find many more gutting ways to lose a game than that … Bournemouth somehow kept a clean sheet for the second week in a row. Sure, it was facing Watford, but we’re still impressed.
THE LAST WORD
We know that England have a lot of headaches going on right now with the whole Brexit debacle and the Prime Minister seemingly wanting to be “dead in a ditch,†but can we all just agree on one thing: We need to get rid of daylight savings time. Or, at the very least, we need it to be on the same date across the world.
This past weekend, England set their clocks back at caused some frustration to those looking for their Sunday morning footie its usual time. Instead, we saw three games — including the marquee matchup of Reds-Spurs, kickoff at 12:30 p.m. ET.
That’s all well and fine for some, but when the NFL has a whopping nine games kicking off at 1 p.m. ET, there’s far too much overlap to take it all in.
Look, daylight savings shouldn’t even be a thing in 2019 and we applaud any place that does away with the archaic time shift that, according to studies, can do actual psychological harm to some.
It’s time to do away with daylight savings — and please do it before spring rolls around and we in Canada set our clocks forward a whopping three weeks before England does.