Disbelief hangs in air as Leicester sleepwalk to avoidable relegation

A s the clock ticked past 80 minutes at the King Power Stadium, with Leicester beating West Ham but hostage entirely to events at Goodison Park, it felt fitting that this should be one of those relegations sung to its rest by ghosts of other games, of goals unscored, energy waves, rumours, the Mexican wave of death.

Several times through those final 10 minutes the ground was gripped by sudden contortions of false joy, leaping, roaring sections of crowd lifted by news of fake survival, reality-lag, non-redemption. If Bournemouth score a non-goal and nobody tells the King Power it doesn’t exist: is that non-goal still a goal? And who does Youri Tielemans sign for next season?

Disbelief was a theme of the day. Even Leicester’s impressively pointless 2-1 final-day victory seemed to fit the pattern. Generally teams go down because of identifiable causes. Lack of playing talent, cyclical downturn, black swan events. Sometimes, as they say in comforting American movies starring Morgan Freeman, it is just your time.

Here is a sporting collapse that seems to be born above all out of carelessness. Leicester have been relegated because they forgot not to be relegated. From Premier League winners and Champions League hopefuls to a sleepy march into relegation. This feels like the definition of a sporting volte-face. Or Wout Faes as we call it around here.

In isolation it should come as no surprise that Leicester have been relegated just seven years after winning the league. The much greater surprise is that they won the league in the first place. It is just the way it has come about. Has there been a more distracted, avoidable slide into Premier League relegation in recent memory? No team with James Maddison, Harvey Barnes and