Leicester Must Lean on Claudio Ranieri to Counter Champions League Inexperience

When Claudio Ranieri accepted the Leicester City job last summer he was probably expecting that the night of April 20, 2004 wouldn’t feature heavily in the critics’ appraisals of his new team’s fortunes. He would certainly have been hoping so.

That was the night his Chelsea side capitulated to AS Monaco in that now infamous Champions League semi-final. It represented a personal catastrophe for the Italian, one that he will not need reminding of as he prepares to resume his affair with Europe’s premier competition.

At 1-1 in the Stade Louis II that night, with Hernan Crespo having notched a priceless away goal and his side well placed to land a thoroughly useful result to take back to Stamford Bridge, Ranieri made the first of what the BBC described as “a series of inexplicable substitutions,” which plunged his players into a state of confusion and chaos.

Monaco had just been reduced to 10 men, Claude Makelele’s shameful theatrics drawing a red card for the ostensibly innocent midfielder Andreas Zikos, when Ranieri sniffed the chance to eat into his opponents while they were vulnerable.

On came Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink for the defender Mario Melchiot, and in a moment Chelsea’s balance was thrown. Gaps—great, gaping holes—appeared. In a matter of minutes, Monaco had raced away from them, twice, and scored, twice. Ranieri’s future, previously in the balance as new owner Roman Abramovich weighed his options, was decided before his players had stepped foot back in the dressing room.

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Whether victory that night would have saved his job is doubtful. A win in the final against the man who was being lined up to replace him may have given the owner food for thought, but even in 2004 Jose Mourinho was already deemed to have the kind of European pedigree that the freshly anointed Tinkerman lacked.

Last season, finally, Ranieri exorcised the ghost of Mourinho, which had stalked him for more than a decade regardless of how much he always tried to deflect it. On Wednesday night, 12-and-a-half years after the debacle in Monaco, he will have the chance to lay his Champions League spectre alongside it.

Standing in his way are Club Brugge of Belgium, a thoroughly beatable outfit. It his own side’s inexperience which may prove to be an ultimately more testing opposition, something Ranieri made reference to at his pre-match press conference:

Brugge is a good team, a good team, one of the best in Belgium used to playing in Europe. They are full of experience and that means something.

We are the last, Leicester and Rostov are the last in this competition. Of course we want to show our best, of course our desire is to win, but we have to stay calm and show a lot of respect for everybody.

The group, some people say ‘oh, Leicester can win the group.’ We need calm as Brugge have a lot of experience, Porto a lot of experience, …

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