Well done vardy7! You're number one now and you deserved it. #11inarow. https://instagram.com/p/-o2QwTlzcd/
Premier League Hangover: Vardy Breaks Record and Pushes Rooney to Periphery
There was a sense of the inevitable about both. Jamie Vardy got the fun bit out of the way early, as he needed just 24 minutes to become the first player in Premier League history to score in 11 consecutive games. Then in the second half, a further shower of deja vu threatened to flood the King Power Stadium when Wayne Rooney was replaced after another slovenly one-paced display.
England coach Roy Hodgson was in attendance but appeared to refrain from joining in the "just a s--t Jamie Vardy" ditty that greeted his captain’s substitution.
One suspects a man who is known to take his pleasure through the likes of John Updike and Philip Roth is erudite enough not to be spellbound by the prospect of instant gratification, yet Hodgson has his needs like any other.
On what he witnessed in the east Midlands, which was in truth a fair microcosm of the season as a whole, few would accuse him of cowering to populism were he to have mentally put a line through Rooney’s name and replaced it with Vardy’s.
"All mine! All f--king mine," appeared to be Vardy’s industrial response to shooing Ruud van Nistelrooy off a podium he wanted all for himself, when his record-breaking goal on Saturday gave Leicester City a deserved lead against a predictably ponderous, prosaic, plodding, pedestrian Manchester United in the opening sparring.
Having dethroned one United legend, he may well now train his sights on another. For a player who relies so heavily on his pace, Vardy has been playing catch-up his entire career. At 28, he has less than three-and-a-half seasons as a professional in his locker. To put his trajectory into context, he was being paid £30-a-week to turn out for Stocksbridge Park Steels in 2010.
Rooney used to be the proverbial bull in the china shop and for all the sanctimonious talk at the time of how he needed to curb an aggressive temperament, it was a good thing. It made him the player he was, it's making Vardy the player he is. United's captain currently looks like a self-conscious bull in a china shop, and that's a hard look to pull off. The simplest of things, be it a lay-off or simply trapping the ball properly, are made to look as difficult as picking up a Ming vase with hooves to check a hallmark. Gary Neville, a long-term advocate of his former team-mate, stopped short of saying Rooney needed replacing in his post-match podcast for Sky Sports, but it's not difficult to surmise who the fall guy would be should United land the type of player he feels they need. Rooney has now had just one shot on target and created two chances in his last four Premier League matches, per WhoScored.com. "If you put two more players into Manchester United's team, say a Gareth Bale or a Cristiano Ronaldo into that team, that team could win the league," opined Neville (h/t Samuel Luckhurst of Manchester Evening News). "But they need that matchwinner, that Neymar, that Luis Suarez, the one that is going to light up a game and score one or two goals to take it away, then all of a sudden they would look like a Barcelona, because they're dominating possession, making teams look foolish," he added. In mining Vardy's rags to riches tale to create a narrative that makes good copy, it's easy to underplay the role Claudio Ranieri has played in his metamorphosis. The common consensus is that the affable Italian's decision to rein in his natural inclination to tinker, hence the nickname, has been key to Leicester continuing on from where they left off last season in such good form.