Even under searing scrutiny, Morgan is a disarmingly serene presence in this extraordinary Leicester side. Granted, he arrives for this interview in a de rigueur footballer’s get-up of diamond earrings and bespoke leather jacket, but there is nothing in his background to suggest that he would one day shoulder a burden of local, national and international expectation so nonchalantly. As a teenager, Morgan was released by Notts County on the suspicion that he was too heavy and lumbering to make the professional grade. At 32, he finds himself captain of the Premier League leaders and regards the whole experience with breezy composure. “We’re at a point now where we know how good we are,” he says, matter-of-factly, ahead of Sunday’s fixture against title rivals Arsenal. “We’re relishing the opportunity and just want to make the most of it.”
Morgan is the perfect mouthpiece for manager Claudio Ranieri, particularly the Italian’s habit of never tempting fate by discussing Leicester’s title prospects. He can be genial and guarded in the same breath. Perhaps it was his time at Nottingham Forest that conditioned for these pressures. There, he was surrounded every day by pictures of the Brian Clough side that subverted all logic through their back-to-back European Cup triumphs. But as he sits here in Leicester’s team room and sees the pictures of Ranieri’s class of 2015, he prefers to live in the moment. “We want to write our own legacy, put our own names in the history books,” he says. “We’re doing this for ourselves.”
As a collective, they are remarkably tight-knit, united in a curious way by their past struggles. Robert Huth, a colossus besides Morgan in the heart of Leicester’s defence, had become a forgotten reserve at Stoke. Kasper Schmeichel, the goalkeeper, has spent most of his career in the shadow of his father Peter. Jamie Vardy and Danny Drinkwater have both followed itinerant routes through the football pyramid. Morgan himself, facing up to his professional dotage before Ranieri entrusted him with the captaincy last summer, is not short of points to prove.
“As a group, we have been together for a while and gone through a lot,” he explains. “We got promoted together, then avoided relegation against all odds. We’re like a family. The players who have come in have bought into the philosophy of who we are as a team. We just naturally get on well.”
This infectious enthusiasm has been manifested off the field, whether in Leicester’s Christmas trip to Copenhagen – where the players all dressed as superheroes – or in a recent bike ride that they undertook on behalf of the club’s Thai chairman, Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha.
While the story of Vardy has attracted the attention of Hollywood scriptwriters, one could argue that the entire Leicester squad, toppling the elite of English football with an irrepressible zest, warrant the big-screen treatment.
Morgan does not dispute that Leicester have rewritten the manual on how a club is meant to reach the pinnacle of the game. “In the Premier League years, it has tended to be the established, outstanding teams who have made the top four,” he says. “But this season, the dynamic has changed, and I think that it will continue to change throughout the seasons to come. The so-called big teams will have to revisit how they go about buying players.
It doesn’t necessarily mean, if you spend £100 million on a player, that it’s going to bring you the title. Teams will look at us and decide that they have to reanalyse their policy of signing people.”
For all the mounting hubbub around Leicester, and rumours that the brilliant Riyad Mahrez has up to five agents poised to negotiate his next move, Morgan is confident that the core of the team can be preserved beyond this year’s feats.
“I see these players day in, day out in training, and it’s a bit of a false statement to say that they’re doing better than I ever imagined,” he says. “They’re showing their true talents, proving to everybody how good they really are. They understand what this team is capable of. Just to say that we are top of the league, five points clear, is a bit of a fairytale. But we feel we deserve to be here.”
- Telegraph