.. . a case study of Leicester’s title win.
Following the Foxes brilliant run in the 2015/2016 Barclays Premier League season, soccer pundits are stormed by the incredible display of Cludio Raneri boys. All season long, people have been calling Leicester City’s unlikely triumph to the Premier League title a miracle. Could this be pointed to the divine intervention of the Thai Buddhist Monks?
Many are amazed at the sizzling form of Leicester City this season. Some pundits are shocked at how the Foxes have kept their form untangled despite their poor feat that stares them in the face last season.
Leicester have the joint third oldest squad in the current English Premier League season with a total market value of €100m.
However, even more interesting is the ‘spiritual activities’ going down behind closed doors in the locker room.
Apparently, Claudio Ranieri’s men have been using some help from Thai Monks certainly contracted by Thai owner, Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha. Whatever the Monks men have been doing through last season at the King Power Stadium is surely looking quite potent.
Football enthusiasts have traced the success of Leicester City this season to the arrival of the Thai Monks.
Leicester is owned and chaired by Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, a Thai businessman and CEO of King Power, a big player on the duty-free market.
And it appears Srivaddhanaprabha has allowed for an infusion of Thai culture into Leicester and it has paid off for the club. Thai Monks have appeared at matches, as well as in the Foxes’ dressing room.
A Thai Buddhist monk, Phra Prommangkalachan, has claimed that his ‘blessings and talismans’, bestowed upon the team’s field and its players by him and his fellow monks, have made the difference for the Thai-owned club, per Agence France-Presse.
Over the last three seasons, Phra Prommangkalachan has regularly traveled to Leicester with a few colleagues to brush up the club’s karma. “I hang some amulets on their necks and I gave them these fabric talismans,” he told AFP.
Prommangkalachan said he wasn’t sure the players understood him, but that they grasped that he would make them luckier. The club is owned by Thai retail mogul Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, who is a staunch Buddhist, a believer in karma and good fortune – like much of his country.
The monk had earlier assured Leicester owner that his contributions and powers would deliver the players “stamina and strong mind to play and keep fighting hard and the team will be the number one in the Premier League this year for sure.”
These looks very obvious and one can see the strength Jamie Vardy, Riyad Mahrez and Robert Huth exhibit on the pitch during play, these could be that they are really drawing from their karma guru and is hard to say otherwise. Neither can we quite quantify how much impact it has had on the standings or indeed Leicester’s beating their title rivals Tottenham, Arsenal and Manchester City to clinch the Premier League, to say nothing of woeful defending champions Chelsea.
Leicester goal poacher, Jamie Vardy revealed that one of the secrets behind the Foxes incredible run this season could be traced to the Thai monks handling out the dressing room lashings.
“The owners bring the Monks over from Thailand and we get the blessings from them,” revealed Vardy.
“As we were getting changed before the game, the Monks came around; they dip the sticks in the holy water and then lash us on our legs and feet. It’s not too hard, it’s just that you are literally having a shower, there’s that much water going everywhere. It’s all over your gear you have hung up.
“That’s the Thai culture and we are happy for them to do it.”
Many sports pundits are still struggling to explain how this relatively small, unfancied club was able to compete with and outshine some soccer’s biggest, richest giants and cup fovourites like: Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United, Arsenal and Tottenham to win the money spinning Barclays Premier League cup. In August 2015, most of the soccer journalists at the Guardian newspaper predicted that Leicester City would finish in the bottom three places in the league, a result that would have made the team drop the next season to the division below. Instead, Leicester are champions of England and poised to take on the biggest clubs in Europe next season. But again, you can’t argue with the results.
Anthony Nlebem
