Whatever this season has in store, it's unlikely to be quite as eventful as the race for promotion in 1991/92, when 'the city went absolutely mental'.
That's how Leicester striker Kevin 'Rooster' Russell described it, and if you lived through it too, you'll know he wasn't exaggerating.
No wonder we went crazy. For so long we'd had nothing to shout about. We'd had years of Second Divison mediocrity, we hadn't won a single FA Cup tie for seven years, and we hadn't been to Wembley since way back in the 1960s.
To tell this story properly would require a whole book, but here's a highlights package, with key moments from that unforgettable run-in. And I want to tell the story in a different way, focusing not just on us, but also the three teams we faced at the climax of that season. Each of them had a fascinating back story, and each of them had a striker who had been, or would soon become, a Filbert Street hero.
1) There's only one place to start - Saturday February 15th 1992, the day when all the main players in the drama took the stage.
It was on that day that a new force entered English football. Newcastle United were lying 22nd in Division Two, facing a trip to leaders Blackburn. The club's away support usually hovered between three and four figures, but on this day, five times the normal number - a 'Toon Army', as they would soon be called - made their way to Ewood Park.
Why the sudden excitement? The week before, the Messiah had returned. Kevin Keegan had taken on the manager's job at St. James' Park. His mission - to stop the former giants falling into the third tier.
Keegan was the greatest British footballer of the 1970s - and his main rival for that title was Kenny Dalglish. Kenny had taken over as Blackburn boss four months earlier. With Jack Walker's money he'd already transformed the club, and they looked set to return to the top flight for the first time since the 1960s.
In the days before the game, it was off the field goings on that had people talking. The tabloids had been reporting on the private life of Blackburn's David Speedie, or more specifically, his wife who, while he was on away trips, had been having adventures of her own.
When the game began, the 5,000 Newastle fans chanted 'We've all had your wife'. Their mood became even brighter when David Kelly gave them a shock lead. Kelly had been brought from Leicester City three months earlier - the last big signing of previous boss Ossie Ardiles.
Then a controversial decision changed the game.
Referee Peter Jones from Loughborough was a massive Leicester City fan, and a friend of Steve Walsh. Just before the break, as Newcastle keeper Tommy Wright gathered the ball, Rovers' Jason Wilcox followed through and caught him with his studs. An obvious free kick to the Geordies. But after lengthy treatment for the keeper's injury, Peter Jones inexplicably awarded a drop ball inside the area.
Seconds later Blackburn were level - and Speedie was the scorer. Keegan had to be pulled back from Jones as the teams left the field at half time.
After the break, Speedie added two more and 3-1 was the final score. As one Newcastle fan said, 'We started off going on about his wife but at the end it was us who'd had the shafting'.
Here's that controversial drop ball moment:
The phrase 'Toon Army' caught on later that year, but the roar of 'Blue Army!' was already filling the air at grounds across the country. On February 15th, Vale Park joined the list - and that day was a big turning point in Leicester City's promotion drive.
Brian Little had been in charge for seven months, but Kevin Russell had yet to start a first team match. His goals at the end of the previous season had been a crucial factor in City staying up, but he didn't fit into Little's tactical plan. Now, as City traveled to Port Vale, Russell was told he'd finally get his chance. He'd just returned from a loan spell at Stoke City in Division Three. Their boss Lou Macari was desperate to sign him, and if the club had been able to afford the 75,000 that we were asking, Russell wouldn't have played any part in our promotion drive.
Just like Speedie that day, Russell was being roundly abused by the opposing fans - thanks to the Stoke connection. And just like Speedie, Russell had the last laugh. He scored twice to give City a vital three points, as chants of 'Rooster!' and 'Blue Army!' rang around Vale Park.
Here's the key moments:
One more striker made his comeback that day. Cambridge Untied were the surprise team of the season. Back in the summer, their boss John Beck had been targeted by Leicester City (before we turned to Little), but he'd decided to stay at the Abbey Stadium to try and achieve what no-one had done before - take a club straight from Division Four to Division One in three seasons.
In November it looked like the miracle was possible. Their long ball game had taken them to the top of the table. But then star striker Steve Claridge picked up an injury that kept him out for 10 weeks. Now on February 15th he was back, and he was Man of the Match as they beat Charlton 2-0. The match report said, 'At last, the Cambridge fans enjoyed some of the variety in attack they had craved for months'.
This was how the table looked at the end of the day:
Newcastle were still down in 22nd place.
2) April 14th / 15th
Ee-eye-ee-eye-ee-eye-o! Up the Football League we go! That was another regular on the soundtrack of the 1991/92 season, and it captured perfectly the joyous feeling of upward movement after years of flatlining.
Brian Little was getting used to it. In the two seasons prior to joining Leicester he'd taken Darlington to successive promotions - from the Conference to Division Three.
Dalglish and Keegan were serial winners too. As player and manager, both of them had known nothing but continual success. After losing to Speedie's hattrick at Ewood Park, Newcastle had picked up four wins and rapidly moved up the table. The Keegan Midas touch was working. Meanwhile Dalglish was still on course to take Rovers up to the top flight that, from the following season, would be the newly constituted 'Premier League'.
Then something quite astonishing happened. Those two legends of the game, at the same time, experienced something entirely new - a soccer slump. Newcastle, seemingly cruising to safety, lost five games in a row. Blackburn, seemingly cruising to promotion, lost six games in a row. The national media lapped it up - full of talk of Dalglish 'cracking up again' after the pressure had made him quit the Liverpool job, and speculation about what Keegan would do when the inevitable happened and they dropped into Division Three.
On Tuesday April 14th, Blackburn were at home to Wolves, and the manner of their defeat - the fifth in that losing sequence - was crushing. Rovers' regular keeper Bobby Mimms had been troubled for weeks with a thigh strain that meant he'd been delegating kicking duties to his defenders. Dalglish decided to rest him for this game, hoping he'd come back fully fit for the run-in. His replacement was John Dickins, making his debut.
In the last minute, with the scores level, Wolves' Paul Birch tried a speculative shot from 25 yards that Dickins seemed to have covered. This is what happened:
That defeat left Rovers in fourth place. Could they stop the slump? Their next game was at home to Leicester City at the weekend.
Before that, we had a crucial home game against Tranmere Rovers on the Wednesday night. And that was the moment when promotion fever at Filbert Street reached a new level. Here too there was last minute drama. After a scrappy ninety minutes, Steve Walsh chipped a glorious ball through to Kevin Russell, and he raced on to shoot City into second place in the table - the first time in six months we'd been in one of the two automatic promotion spots. This clip still sends shivers down the spine.
3) April 18th - 21st
Next came that game at Ewood Park, which we won 1-0 with another Kevin Russell goal. Bobby Mimms was back for Rovers - did that thigh injury play a role in the key moment of the game, when he messed up his clearance?
So Blackburn had lost six in a row, and were in danger of not even making the play-offs.
The following Monday, April 20th, saw the tension build still further.
That fifth straight defeat for Newcastle came at Derby, when the wheels really came off. In just the third minute, Newcastle defender Kevin Brock was sent off for stopping a goal bound header with his fist. Assistant manager Terry McDermott was soon sent to the stands for protesting, and further red cards for Kevin Scott and Liam O'Kane left Newcastle with only eight players. Derby ran out 4-1 winners, and Newcastle fans smashed up the away end. Paul Kitson, yet another Leicester link, was one of the scorers (we'd sold him to Derby a few weeks earlier, causing a massive rumpus - but that's another story).
That same evening, Blackburn were facing an incredible seventh straigtht defeat, losing 2-1 at Tranmere with time running out. As they pressed for an equaliser, a goal bound shot led to a fantastic one-handed save - by John Aldridge (the leading scorer in Division Two). The handball gave Blackburn the chance to draw level. Then they would surely press for a much-needed winner against ten men, with Aldridge taking an early bath.
Except that Aldridge somehow stayed on the field. Unlike the red card shown to Newcastle's Kevin Brock for the same offence, he received only a yellow. The ref later said he 'wasn't sure the shot was goal bound'. Hmmm. Have a look at where the ref is standing. It's very clear on the replay:
Mike Newell's penalty at least stopped the losing streak (yet another ex-Leicester striker).
That defeat at Derby left Newcastle on the brink - as one paper put it, 'staring Division Three, financial ruin, and the departure of Kevin Keegan in the face'. With two games to play, the final one at Filbert Street, they were back in the drop zone and things looked grim. Keegan had decided he'd quickly get away from it all whatever the outcome - he'd booked a holiday in Los Angeles straight after that final game at Leicester.
But then events in America made him change his plans.
In late April came the verdict in the Rodney King case. He was a black man who'd been filmed being brutally beaten by police officers in LA. Despite the clear video evidence, the jury found them not guilty, leading to days of rioting, which left 63 people dead. Scores of shops had been looted - not in the rich white areas, which police had sealed off, but in the Korean community, which had been left unprotected.
Keegan canceled his holiday.
That sort of thing could never happen in Leicester, right? Well, just as that Rodney King jury was considering its verdict, there was an incident in sleepy Stoneygate that raised racial tension in the city to a worrying level.
Valentina, a shop in Allandale Road, had been selling shoes bearing inscriptions from the Koran, including the word 'Allah'. On April 20th, a car was rammed though the shop's window, and the place was then set alight and destroyed. In the hours following the attack, phone calls were made to several mosques in the city threatening revenge attacks. The top story in the Mercury the following day was 'Shop Arson: Stay Calm', with police and representatives of the city's muslim community appealing to the public.
That evening, the city was anything but calm. But fortunately, the cause of the excitement was events at Filbert Street, as promotion fever reached a peak.
This doesn't need any words, just watch the action:
The left us on the brink of automatic promotion:
This was the front page of the Mercury the following day:
Years and years of misery were surely about to end. Everyone was talking about promotion. The shop arson case rapidly fell off the news agenda, the racial tension disappeared overnight, and there were no more developments in that story.
In the following days the local media were full of Leicester stories - people getting Rooster haircuts, fans camping out overnight to secure tickets for the Newcastle game, and above all, 'How do we get to the Charlton game on Saturday?' Charlton were then based at Upton Park, playing in front of very small crowds, and we would have our biggest ever away following for a League game in the capital.
You can see at the start of this video that unforgettable moment about half an hour before kick-off when Leicester fans, packed in tight on the South Terrace, surged across the pitch to fill up the empty chicken run side (please skip the rest of the video):
We completely filled two sides of the ground, and two thirds of the 15,000 crowd were City fans.
Sadly, the carnival occasion inspired Charlton more than us. They hated playing in front of tiny crowds at Upton Park, and their results were better away from home. We lost 2-0, and it was suddenly out of our hands. Middlesbrough won their game in hand, and now we had to win that Newcastle game - and hope.
In the end we had to settle for a play-off place, as Newcastle won 2-1 to secure their safety. Keegan may have canceled his holiday to avoid the trouble in LA, but the most memorable thing about Filbert Street that Saturday was its resemblance to a riot zone, with a police helicopter circling overhead throughout the game, cops in full riot gear marching out of the tunnel, scores of arrests, and dozens injured. Extra barriers had been erected in the East stand to separate the two sets of fans, but that didn't stop coins flying both ways, and more than 300 seats being ripped out.
This was the Mercury on Monday:
And here's an unusual angle on the scene - taken from the East Stand and posted on a Newcastle forum:
Who would we meet in the play-offs? It looked like it might be Blackburn, who'd got two crucial wins in the run-in - but then Cambridge came back from two down at Sunderland to draw 2-2 - both goals from Steve Claridge - and that took them above Rovers into 5th. The semi-final line up woud be Derby (3rd) v Blackburn (6th) and Leicester (4th) v Cambridge (5th). The two that went up automatically were Ipswich and Middlesbrough.
Three days later UEFA announced that the 1996 European Championships would be held in England. Incredibly, by the time that tournament kicked off at Wembley, we would have played FOUR play-off finals at the stadium.
And several of the main actors in this story would have played key roles in those play-off stories.
Let's take a breath and leave the 1992 play-offs for Part Two.
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