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No one needed a transistor radio to know the beautiful Leicester City story had been reduced to dust, from champions to the Championship within seven years.
The news of Everton’s goal was imparted brutally from a gleeful West Ham contingent taking great delight in another team’s misfortune. ‘Going down,’ they sang of Leicester. ‘Going to Prague,’ they sang of themselves. ‘Say hello to Millwall.’
The weird reality of the modern last-day relegation fight also included Leicester’s fans launching into spontaneous cheers on a few occasions in the second half, which implied Everton had conceded, when they had not.
Manager Dean Smith said: ‘West Ham fans were rubbing our noses in it. Half-hearted boos rang out and they vanished down the tunnel.
A few hours earlier, the same supporters had gathered in numbers at the statue of Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, ‘The Possible Man’ who built Leicester into a Premier League club, while a singer a few yards away hammered out a rendition of Walking on Sunshine, searching in vain for a little local enthusiasm.
The stadium announcer’s request that ‘if you are not a flag waver please pass yours on to someone who is,’ said a lot – not everyone was in the mood for flags. To wave the one-time Premier League champions on against Huddersfield and Rotherham?
Though the match programme cover stated, in block capitals, that: ‘Foxes never quit’, it certainly didn’t look like that in the first 20 minutes, when Leicester couldn’t put three passes together.
But somehow, from somewhere, that talk about them being a squad of players ‘too good to go down’ soon seemed a bit less hubristic.
Kelechi Iheanacho got the show started. And James Maddison, whose last Leicester season will always taint what he had hitherto achieved, drove into the spaces in front of West Ham’s defence which Rice occupied.
It was a glimpse of what might have been, for Leicester. Leicester put the game beyond much doubt five minutes later – Wout Faes getting ahead of Nayef Aguerd to head home from a free-kick – but Abdoulaye Doucoure sucked the life out of the stadium. Leicester were out of the relegation zone for 42 minutes.
There were reminders of an incapacity to defend which has played a major part in sending Leicester down. A lofted ball over Luke Thomas allowed substitute Jarrod Bowen to force a save from Daniel Iversen and then lay off for Danny Ings who blasted over.
It was Thomas’s misplaced pass which allowed a counter-attack from which Pablo Fornals ran at a back-pedalling Leicester defence to score for West Ham. But Leicester feel like a club in need of total reset, with seven players out of contract and eight with only a year left.
The solitary Leicester moment to savour was the arrival from the bench of Jamie Vardy, one of three of the title-winning squad still on the books.
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