Leicester City manager Claudio Ranieri has made a career of saving big clubs in crisis

Italian continues to find willing employers despite criticism and run-ins with Jose Mourinho, writes Ian Hawkey

Leicester City manager Claudio Ranieri gestures during the Premier League match against Sunderland at The King Power Stadium on August 8, 2015, in Leicester, England. Matthew Lewis / Getty Images

Claudio Ranieri turns 64 in October, or, if you were to take literally a spiteful remark once made about him by Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho, he will celebrate his 78th birthday then.

Ranieri is, by any measure, a veteran coach with a very long list of past employers.

Yet there is nothing jaded about the Italian, which is partly why he keeps getting interviewed for jobs and impressing the chairmen on the other side of the table.

Leicester City scored four goals on Saturday, as Ranieri, appointed last month, took charge of a Premier League match for the first time in 11 years.

Safe to say the response in some quarters was of surprise. Leicester had scraped clear of relegation last May and the decision to replace Nigel Pearson, an abrasive figure, with Ranieri was not greeted with universal applause.

There is a perception of him in England, where he managed Chelsea between 2000 and 2004, that he is not a man to ­inspire.

The idea seems misplaced. Ranieri may not have the rugged, gritty demeanour of a Pearson, but this is a coach who knows the game extensively, approaches his tasks with rigour and evidently studies carefully the ways to manage and motivate athletes 40 years younger than he is.

Leicester’s players ran out onto the pitch to the music of rock band Kasabian ahead of the 4-2 win over Sunderland. Ranieri, with a self-deprecating smile, acknowledged that Kasabian, who he knew were a Leicester group, might not be his own natural choice of soundtrack, but if it stirred them up, all the better.

The anecdote reminded of a line he used at Juventus once.

They were at Real Madrid’s Bernabeu for a Uefa Champions League match and, because they had been out of Europe for a while, and indeed in Serie B only 18 months earlier, were considered the underdogs.

“You know this place from your PlayStations,” Ranieri told the younger players ahead of kick off to sooth their nerves. “Now, you are really here, playing in the real Bernabeu. Just carrying on doing what we have been doing.”

Juve went out and beat the Spanish champions.

At Juventus, Ranieri was given the task of consolidating the team after the punitive relegation of 2006. He took them to third in Serie A and, though he lost his job just before the end of his second season, they followed that up with second place.

His career features just too many runners-up spots for comfort; he has never been a champion, apart from guiding Monaco to the Ligue 2 title in 2012. He had come to Monaco, like at Juve, to resurrect a fallen club.

With Roma, in his native city, he won a runners-up medal in both the Coppa Italia and Serie A in 2010, after a rousing season spiced up by his rivalry with Mourinho, who was then at treble-winning Inter Milan.

Mourinho’s antagonism towards Ranieri dates back to when the Portuguese succeeded the Roman at Chelsea and immediately directed barbs at the ordinariness of his predecessor compared with his own “special” qualities.

When they were both in Italy, Mourinho derided Ranieri’s age: “How old is he anyway? 70?”

With the trademark twinkle in his eye, Ranieri told journalists on his 58th birthday that he had just turned 71.

Mourinho won the Premier League in his first season at Chelsea. Ranieri, a year earlier, had finished second with them. He had also overseen a bad collapse in a Champions League semi-final against Monaco, making questionable substitutions, criticised by his players.

His habit of restless team changes had already earned him the nickname "The Tinkerman", and on that night in Monte Carlo, it became a term of anything but endearment.

When things go wrong for Ranieri, they have often done so dramatically. A spell at Inter spiralled downwards quickly; likewise the tail end of his second stint at Valencia, where his first spell had been a success.

His last job, with the Greece national team, was brief and stained by a home defeat against the Faroe Islands.

Leicester will not be looking for a runners-up spot in the Premier League from Ranieri, but something more like the job he did at Parma in 2007, staving off the drop in unlikely ­circumstances.

Keep them up and English football generally may come to appreciate him more, enjoy his animated features, a stark contrast to the granite, sometimes gauche Pearson, and see his real enthusiasm for the Premier League.

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