Sunderland 0 Leicester City 2: Jamie Vardy takes delight in matching Gary Lineker's record as Foxes close on title

Vardy scored his first goal in open play since February to match Lineker's 20-goal haul for Leicester in 1984/5

Leicester City’s Jamie Vardy has said he feels “brilliant” about matching Gary Lineker’s 31-year-old goalscoring record for the club, having crashed through the 20-goal barrier as he did in the 1984/5 season

Lineker made no secret of his delight that Vardy has become the first Leicester player to pass 20 goals since he managed the feat in the 1984/5 season, going on to score 24. But Vardy was customarily low key. “There’s nothing that I know of,” he said. “I don’t really look at Twitter. Just click notifications, click it again, drill straight up to the top. It is massive for me personally.”

Vardy said that he and teammate Danny Drinkwater had spotted a weakness in the Sunderland defence which they had exploited to score their opener, after a difficult first half against Sam Allardyce’s side.

Leicester celebrate after Jamie Vardy's goal against Sunderland (Getty)

“Me and Drinky had a little chat in the first half and saw that one of the centre halves was always going to attack and one was dropping off,” he said. “So if you got the chance and you were on the last man and the ball was there to be played over the top… Luckily in the second half it has worked a treat.”

Though Vardy had not scored in open play since the first game of February, he finished clinically. Asked what goes through his mind when clean through on goal, he said: “You don’t really get a chance to think. I have seen it back, I have got onto it but I’ve had to straight away take a touch inside and then my next touch is a shot. You don’t get that much time to think about it. It is just instinctive. The keeper has come across and I’ve managed to bend it into the far corner.”

Danny Drinkwater identified a weakness in Sunderland's defence (Getty)

Leicester had been “rushing things a bit too much” in the first half, he said. “We had a chance to relax and talk about it at half-time. It was like we were passing a bomb about which was just about to go off, and nobody wanted it. Half time did us a lot of good, we just sat back and relaxed and looked at things that were going wrong.”