Michael Walker: Shift in perception might not be enough to knock Leicester off track

Here's a story about bad lads and Leicester City. Unlikely as it sounds, it concerns Frank O'Farrell and Reggie and Ronnie Kray.

O'Farrell, born in Blackpool in Cork, and a devout Catholic all his life (and is still), was manager of Leicester City before he joined Manchester United. It was O'Farrell's work at Filbert Street, where he took Leicester to an FA Cup final and got them promoted having inherited, in December 1968, a team destined for relegation from the top flight, which convinced Matt Busby that O'Farrell was the man for Old Trafford.

While at Filbert Street, O’Farrell has recalled his tenure coincided with the construction of a maximum security wing at Leicester Prison.

In 1969, sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering George Cornell and Jack "The Hat" McVitie, the notorious Krays arrived in town.

O’Farrell, previously manager of Torquay United, had done some prison visiting then, at nearby Dartmoor.

“I suppose it was my Catholic background to practise charitable deeds,” O’Farrell explained in his autobiography.

At Leicester prison they had built a new gym and with the aim of keeping the long-term inmates interested in outside subjects. O’Farrell was contacted and asked if he would turn up one Sunday a month to instruct prisoners on fitness.

“Maybe some managers do it now and you don’t hear about it,” O’Farrell wrote. “I certainly never said anything publicly about it at the time.

“So I went into this room at Leicester Prison and there were about six or seven prisoners there, and I knew Reg was one of them.

“His brother Ron was also in Leicester at the time but he wouldn’t take part. You could tell Reg was the boss, but he was very polite.

Christmas cards

“The talks lasted about an hour. At the end Reg would always come up to me and thank me for coming. On one occasion he told me what a nice suit I was wearing.”

The pair hit it off so well that when Reggie Kray was moved to Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight – 180 miles away – O'Farrell went to visit him there as well. They ended up exchanging Christmas cards. "'God bless, Frank," Reggie would write.

“I bought the local paper regular [sic],” Reggie says, in a letter from prisoner 058111, “so read a lot about you and your team, in fact I felt a part of Leicester.”

All of which is a long way to get to the fact this is not the first time Leicester City have had the odd cloud to go with the silver lining a good man like Frank O’Farrell represents.

The alleged fairytale of Leicester 2016 has met some criticism this past week – from accusations of financial cuteness while in the Championship, to Jamie Vardy's resentful finger-pointing and Robert Huth's barely-legal "art" of defending. Some veneer has been chipped away, we are being presented with a different 'face' of Leicester and aren't Tottenham Hotspur lovely.

There has been a shift in the perception of Leicester City. “Crazy” has been one of Claudio Ranieri’s words of the season and if crazy-good has not exactly been replaced by crazy-bad, then there has been a smaller recalibration that dwells on the unsmiling traits of this Leicester team.

It might be no bad thing to return to the reality of performance. If we want to know just how it is that Leicester sit five points clear at the top of the Premier League with four games to play, it is probably best to return the focus to what Leicester do on the pitch and at their training ground.

For a start, it is probably worth recalling that in his formative years as a player, Ranieiri was an Italian defender. Some of his defensive instincts have been on view as Leicester accumulated those five clean sheets leading to last Sunday.

Remember, it was Leicester’s belated first clean sheet of the season in October that led to the squad’s trip to Peter’s Pizzeria in town. Ranieiri paid, but he made the players make their pizza, not just sit down to be served.

One wonders how Huth coped with the dough. Did he wrestle with it, pinch it, waste time, block it at corners?

To watch Huth in the flesh is to experience almost shock and awe that he could niggle and snap his way through 90 minutes and not be booked. But the fact is he has been booked once in 2016 and has not received a yellow card in the last 12 games.

Shift in perception

This is a clever Berliner who has been in England since 2002 and knows the score. He is what Leicester City are: effective. Even in the potentially destabilising final seconds of last Sunday’s 2-2 draw with West Ham, Leicester found a path to goal, so whether that shift in perception translates into a shift in momentum remains to be seen.

But, even without the suspended Vardy, and with fans' and officials' eyes likely to be on Huth and Wes Morgan at every set-piece, it is harder to believe Leicester will falter on Sunday than press on. Having seen Swansea City play like a team keen for the beach last Saturday, and with men like Riyad Mahrez and Leonardo Ulloa presumably ready to make sure the loss of Vardy does not tell, Leicester should be able to nudge three points closer to the eight required to win a first-ever league title.

What a line that is – a first-ever league title. As Frank O'Farrell would confirm, the club has produced a few down the years. From Reggie Kray to Robert Huth, they don't need to be fairytales to be interesting.