Watford vs Leicester City: Claudio Ranieri just cannot wait for next step on the road to glory

Manager impatient to face Newcastle after win at Watford

Riyad Mahrez, right, celebrates after scoring Leicester’s winner at Watford (AP)

Claudio Ranieri, like The Boomtown Rats, does not like Mondays. For Leicester City, flying and five points clear at the top of the Premier League after a well-deserved 1-0 victory at Watford on Saturday, the next game cannot come soon enough – and next Monday is too long to wait.

If anything can test the manager’s undervalued skillset, however, it will be endlessly telling the world, as he did on Saturday night, what tough opposition Newcastle United will present.

“I don’t like to play Monday,” he said. “Saturday, Sunday yes, Monday is too long. But Newcastle – fantastic players, strong, quality, it is a difficult match.”

The amiable Italian’s philosophy since his widely derided appointment last summer has been that the real target was avoiding relegation and that everything else would be a bonus. Some bonus.

He can now use the fact that less than a year ago, following a 4-3 defeat away to Tottenham Hotspur that seemed to sum up their misfortune, Nigel Pearson’s Leicester were bottom of the table and seven points from a position of safety.

After setting out to avoid relegation, Claudio Ranieri is now dreaming of facing Barcelona (Getty)

Seven wins in the remaining nine games preserved their top-flight status; to do the same in the nine remaining games of this season would almost certainly make Leicester champions of England for the first time. Such has been the scale of their achievement already that it would be a terrible anticlimax not to finish in the top four for the first time since 1963.

“Somebody asked me if we are nervous,” Ranieri said. “Last season must [have been] nervous, now [we] must be happy. They had the bitter taste last season. Now they taste the sweet. It is not so hard. For us this season is to discover and improve, to build the winning mentality. Step by step. Not to be nervous. We are focused and everything could happen.”

Any signs of nerves were absent at Watford, where Ranieri’s shrewd response to the home team’s one brief flurry was to make two half-time substitutions in a tactical change that tightened up the midfield, even though neither of the players he took off, Marc Albrighton and Shinji Okazaki, was playing at all badly. The improvement that Jeffrey Shlupp and Andy King helped to bring about in a second half dominated by the visitors backed up the manager’s belief in the strength and depth of his squad.

“From the start of the season I said I had very good players. They help each other as a group. I have to do some choosing but they know I believe in everybody. Albrighton and Okazaki were playing very, very well but I had to change something.”

It worked superbly, although another touch of brilliance in Riyad Mahrez’s dazzling season was required to secure maximum points against a Watford side who, with two goals in six league games, have lost their bite.

One little luxury Ranieri did allow himself, with a huge smile, came when he was asked to imagine Barcelona and Real Madrid turning out in the Champions League at the King Power Stadium next season. “Yeees, why not? But I imagine Newcastle now.”