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Riyad Mahrez Is Face of Leicester’s Rise to Top
LONDON — It was typical of Riyad Mahrez that after receiving the Player of the Year award in England, he dedicated it to his Leicester teammates, because, he said, “We are a real team of brothers.”
Typical, too, that when he was told that he is the first African to win the accolade, Mahrez replied, “I didn’t know that. Drogba never won it?” He paused for thought, then added, “Not the best, but the first — so I’m very happy, yeah.”
Mahrez, 25, is like that. He is the individual most likely to come up with something off the cuff in a regimented Leicester City team whose fighting spirit has carried it to within one win of the Premier League title.
Leicester has willed itself to outrun the biggest clubs in this league this season. Mahrez, who was born in France but represents Algeria, his parents’ homeland, in international play, has scored 17 and created 11 of Leicester’s 63 goals this season, the third-highest total in the Premier League, just behind Manchester City (66) and Tottenham (65).
On Sunday, Mahrez struck the first goal in Leicester’s 4-0 rout of Swansea City. After the game, the team used five helicopters to fly to London’s swanky Grosvenor House hotel for the Professional Footballers Associationawards dinner.
And less than 24 hours after that, Tottenham Hotspur — the only remaining club that still has a chance to win the league besides Leicester — was held to a 1-1 tie on its home turf by West Bromwich Albion. Three times, Spurs hit the frame of West Brom’s goal. The result left Leicester seven points ahead with three games to play.
Leicester, also known as the Foxes, have leaped from last place in the standings to first place in the span of 12 months. They are a collection of triers — of brothers if you accept Mahrez’s word — from nine different nations, playing in England’s Midlands for a club owned by a Thai family and coached by an Italian.
You could not make it up. Claudio Ranieri, the 64-year-old coach who has never won a domestic title and who was fired a dozen years ago by Chelsea, is a wily old fox using every trick in the book.
He has words for every situation. Ranieri told his players up until Christmas that their task was to avoid relegation. He then told them that it was step by small step to see how far they might go. Finally, just last weekend, he told the players, “I believe in you, go and win the championship.”
He told the media something else. With Jamie Vardy, Leicester’s leading striker, suspended, the coach had to come up with a fresh strategy. “Riyad,” he told reporters, “is fantastic! Riyad is our light. When he switches on, Leicester changes color. That is the truth.”
Maybe it is. Mahrez is slight but swift, wonderfully balanced and full of trickery. He works hard, because no player of Leicester gives less than his all every game.
Coach Ranieri was prescient in Sunday’s pregame prophesy, because Mahrez flicked the switch when he scored first against Swansea.
He came in off the wing, seemed almost to sense a misdirected pass from a defender and then outfoxed the goalkeeper by guiding his shot inside the near post after feigning to shoot the other way.
The darts, feints and teases make Mahrez the unpredictable element in the toil that Leicester imposes on its opponents. It is a club of relentless desire — for the most part, the players are castoffs from other clubs — and that spirit is engrained in Mahrez.
He struggled as a boy growing up in Sarcelles, a largely immigrant community about 10 miles from the center of Paris and only seven miles from where Stade de France, the national stadium, now stands. Sarcelles’ population swelled in the 1960s with Jewish and North African immigrants. Zinedine Zidane’s family settled in Marseille, while Mahrez’s settled further north, but both brought a love of soccer from the same Algerian source.
It was there in the 1930s, testified to in the writing by the French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus. The struggle to get it out of Riyad Mahrez was made harder by the death of his father from a heart condition when the son was 15. Few outside of the local amateur club in Sarcelles could foresee the small, skinny and obsessed boy becoming a player in Europe’s richest league.
Leicester’s chief scout, Steve Walsh, happened upon Mahrez in 2012 when he was in France to watch another player in a second-division game. Walsh saw a raw, mercurial and quick winger with an eye-catching, but erratic, touch for the ball.
But the scout sensed that Leicester (itself a second-division team at the time) could make something of that rawness and acquired him for less than half a million dollars. Mahrez became a cub on the Foxes, clearly gifted but ready and willing to undergo the initiation into Leicester’s team of rejects.
Some of the senior Foxes were said to have kicked him in practice sessions as a way to toughen him up to the English style of play. It worked — players from 100 clubs in England and Wales voted him Sunday as their player of the year.
Now married to a Leicester woman, with a daughter born there, many see Mahrez as destined to move on to one of the bigger clubs, but don’t be too sure of that.
He was asked after Leicester won 3-1 at Manchester City in February to compare the two clubs. “For them, winning the title is obligation,” he said. “For us, it’s a dream.”
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