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| ADIOS: Claudio Ranieri was fired as manager of Leicester City. |
Descriptions that go with them include being cold, scary, ferocious, crazy, eccentric, studious and arrogant. Whatever the case may be, they are normally forceful personalities who do not invite affection.
Claudio Ranieri defies this stereotype. Over the past 18 months, the recently sacked manager of Leicester City wormed himself into the hearts of football lovers the world over.
Melted the hearts
He cut a grandfatherly figure that sometimes bordered on the clownish. One writer even compared him to an Italian granddad in a cute pizza or pasta advert.
The world’s love for Ranieri was to grow in leaps and bounds as he guided Leicester City to one of the most incredible fairytales in modern football history.
His infectious joy that came with every goal scored and the leaps after every victory, or the improbable draws, made for indelible memories for millions of viewers across the globe.
His media conferences were often peppered with priceless quotes, which melted the hearts of the notoriously vicious British media.
In contrast to the philosophical musings of the Alex Fergusons and the hubristic comments of the José Mourinhos came his intelligent, meaningful humorous nature.
“My team is like an orchestra. To play the symphony correctly, I need some of the boom boom boom, but I also need some tweet, and sometimes the tweet and boom go well together ... Sometimes all you can hear is the boom, sometimes only the tweet.
That is not good music,” was one memorable quote. As the impossible became the possible and Leicester seemed destined to embarrass those who predicted that they would run out of steam, he likened his team to the 1990s movie hero Forrest Gump.
“Why can’t we continue to run, run, run? We are like Forrest Gump. Leicester is Forrest Gump,” he said.