King Power: Leicester City’s Remarkable Season

I

I, Richard Plantagenet, Duke of Gloucester, Lord Protector, loyal brother (ahem) to one king, loving uncle to another mysteriously vanish’d (though I never knew a thing of that, not a dickie bird), called Dickon by some, Crookback by more, King Richard of England for too short time, later of the City Council Car Park, New Street, Leicester LE1 5PS (special rates weekends and bank holidays), latterly reinterred in seemly place … I, Richard III, am now about to write the curious story of my afterlife.

Yet that misleads where no deception’s meant. ’Tis not merely, nor even mostly, of my own afterlife I shall write. For that may all too swiftly be thus condensed:

Afterlife of Richard III

Died 22 August 1485

Laid to rest in a car park

Remains discovered September 2012

Exhumed

DNA tested (an acid, so I’m told, that weaves and meanders through the blood, and is the very building block of life)

Confirmed as Richard Plantagenet

Reburied Leicester Cathedral, March 2015

No, reader, the afterlife concerning us here is that of my most wellbeloved association football club: Leicester Fosse as was, Leicester City as is, Foxes to friend and foe alike, whose King Power arena stands but a mile from the church wherein I now lie. Those Foxes who, little more than one brief year ago, lay ensnared in relegation’s trap, encircled by ravening hounds, their route to safety obscure unto the eye.

Yet from those depths we did rally and revive. Premier litter runts one spring reborn, we were rulers of the league the next. Aye, ’tis Leicester’s salvation from a shameful grave, and not so much my own, of which I write. And if I played a ghostly part in that, ’tis not for me to speak of preternatural things.

The question must nonetheless be asked, for who would leave this tale unexplor’d? How was last winter of our discontent made glorious by that son of Yorkshire, the Sheffield-born Jamie Vardy, and the steely bunch of misfits at his side?

This question is asked in realms across the globe. Discredited they were as fools and knaves. Marooned at foot of table, distended from the rest by many points, magnet for contempt across this land, as once I was, inexorably we were headed for the drop.

Yet now of those brave warriors – of Vardy who once did make prosthetic limb, and of Mahrez, the Moor from Maghreb come; of Kasper Schmeichel, the Viking between the posts, of Huth, forsooth, and of others too – the world entire speaks in reverent tones.

I have hinted meekly at the truth, for fear of charging centre stage when I be better hidden in the wings. But let me put the question now in clear and ringing terms, for dissembling is a fault in English kings.

Was the confluence of my reburial and Leicester’s revival naught but chance? Or by lying close to the Foxes’ ground, supine though I am and wrapped in shroud, was I a Moses to part the foamy tide, and lead my boys towards the promised land?

Coincidence? Or king power?

Decide this for thyselves. I say nothing either way.

For ’tis ne’er the way of kings to boast and brag,

Our princely state speaks well enough for us.

Lesser men yell self-aggrandising fuss,

In crown alone a king hath ample swag.

To you it falls, descendants of my subjects, to judge whether the Prince who fell at Bosworth Field, the last of England’s kings to die in war – you think you’d have caught one of those powdered Hanoverian ponces wielding a sword? Or that lascivious buffoon Charles II, who slavered over that buxom bint with the oranges? – is Leicester City’s salvation. All I will do is state these barren facts. Perchance they tell a tale upon their own.