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TSN Soccer Analyst

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Sit and watch sports for long enough and you’ll still be surprised until your final day.

Despite what some say, you have not seen it all and it is not even close.

Of course, sports in a general term tend to form similar patterns and storylines just like how they tend to leave us all with familiar emotional scars. They will make us laugh, they will make us cry and hopefully much of the time in between, they will make us smile.

One of those familiar stories we have seen play out often is the role of the plucky underdog. Sometimes this is your team or your country, sometimes this is the team facing your team or country and sometimes you blissfully sit in between and watch it play out.

We have all seen it, no matter your sport of choice. As fans we go through different stages. Our parts in the story can only start with knowledge and these days our phones can often buzz from friends or alerts notifying us of something special developing. We rush to the nearest screen to watch and wonder. We sit with suspicious minds expecting the powerful favourites to pull through eventually and we are so often right. Sometimes, however, we reach a fork in the path of our minds. ‘Will they actually do it?’. Minute by minute suspicion is replaced by wonder and then a new phase hits us.

“Oh my word they are actually going to win this.”

Five years ago this week, Wes Morgan celebrated with the home fans dreaming of Premier League football.

Morgan had been influential once again in a dramatic game that saw his Nottingham Forest side score late to win 3-2. On the wrong end of that loss at the City Ground would be his future employers.

Leicester City had been beaten and their hopes of playing in the Premier League were dashed. Morgan, who joined his hometown club as an overweight teenager that few gave a chance to play regularly, was now the club’s longest serving player.

He knew all about Nottingham Forest’s rich history and their struggles to get back to the Premier League but now he truly thought he could be apart of something special.

Morgan and Forest would win their final four games of the season and the Premier League got closer, only for it to be taken away from them in one game. Morgan’s dream turned into a nightmare against Swansea in the playoffs and less than a year later he was sold to Leicester for a million pounds. Red five would become blue five.

A change of path was required, but the destination remained the same. Morgan was named captain in the same year he joined Leicester and within eighteen months he had reached the Premier League.

On Sunday afternoon the Jamaican, now 32, was back in his comfort zone in the middle of the Leicester defence, leading his team to another clean sheet. The white number five stood out brightly off the back of his blue shirt as he punched the air in delight and then shook hands with referee Mark Clattenburg, the experienced official who had blown up five years earlier in Nottingham ending Leicester’s dreams and reigniting his own.

Now the collective dream that no one saw coming was coming true. Morgan hugged his teammates. His partner in crime at the back, Robert Huth, not wanted at Stoke. Danny Drinkwater and Danny Simpson, former Manchester United youth products forced to play in the lower leagues to get experience. Marc Albrighton, released by Aston Villa, and, of course, Riyad Mahrez, who eight years ago played as an amateur on the outskirts of Paris desperate for a team to give him a trial.

After the game Morgan accompanied Mahrez and others to the PFA Awards on a private helicopter. Five points was all they would need to win from their final three games to win the Premier League title. Their latest victory eliminated past giants of the league, Arsenal and Manchester City, and all that stood between them was Tottenham, a brilliant young side playing their best football of the season.

Spurs had swagger and momentum heading into Monday night’s clash with West Bromwich Albion and only seemed to have to show up to secure three points and keep the gap at five. Inevitability is an adjective that sport, the grandest stage of unscripted drama, has very little time for, however.

Fittingly, number five for Tottenham played a huge part in their opening goal as Jan Vertonghen pressured Craig Dawson into an own goal for the first goal of the game.

It appeared they’d go on to do what they did a week earlier and win comfortably but suddenly West Brom battled back and came close to a remarkable equalizer.

At home, the Leicester players, who in recent weeks have not hit their strides but still found ways to win games 1-0, watched and wondered if their title rivals could do the same. They couldn’t, perhaps, finally showing fatigue in their 50th competitive match of the season, 10 more than Leicester has played. Dawson scored his second goal of the game and this time it was for his own team and, effectively, Leicester as well.

For just the third time in 2016, Spurs had dropped points at home and in the same goal that Huth won the game for Leicester in January, in the same goal that Alexis Sanchez’s low shot reached after a mistake by Hugo Lloris in March, Dawson had scored the biggest goal so far of this compelling season.

Tottenham’s players and supporters were the true last of the non-believers in Leicester’s phenomenal season, but as they consoled each other at the end you could see it in their own faces.

Seven points back with three games left it hit them too. “Oh my word Leicester are actually going to win this.”

On Sunday at ‘The Theatre of Dreams’ Wes Morgan will lead his team out at Old Trafford knowing a win will make him a Premier League winning captain. It’s just one remarkable story alongside so many at Leicester that weren’t even fit for dreams. Message your friends, make no plans for Sunday morning, bring your smile and find a television screen. Sports eh? Magnificent.

Watch Leicester City as they try to clinch the title at Old Trafford, Sunday on TSN2 at 9am et/6am pt.