As Hamza Choudhury walked back into the home dressing room at King Power Stadium, his joyful Leicester City team-mates were waiting to greet him with a round of applause.
The players and staff had already mobbed him after the final whistle signalled a vital 2-1 win over West Bromwich Albion that meant Leicester took another huge step towards automatic promotion to the Premier League.
He was paraded by a delighted Enzo Maresca, who kissed him in front of the ecstatic Leicester fans who had stayed behind to celebrate a nervy but huge victory. What a contrast to the scenes a week ago at Plymouth.
After that 1-0 loss — their third consecutively on the road, which seemingly put their promotion hopes in jeopardy — the reaction from the 1,700 fans who made the long trip down to Devon on a Friday night was very different.
For an hour afterwards, the away dressing room was locked as Maresca and his staff held a long postmortem with the players.
On Monday, the players held their own meeting for 45 minutes at their Seagrave base. They talked about what they felt had been going wrong and what they needed to do to ensure they got over the line in the tightest of promotion races.
“Sometimes I think you’ve got to sit down and have honest words and speak about what we want and where you want to go, and we’ve done that,” said defender Conor Coady. “It was brilliant. I had an opinion to express, but what gets said stays in the dressing room and then we take it into the next game.
“We spoke about finding ways to win and we’ve done that.”
What Coady and the players were talking about is desire and a mental resilience to see the job through, which was epitomised by Choudhury’s display against West Brom.
He made three goal-line blocks to save his team as, at the start of both halves, West Brom threatened to put another huge dent in Leicester’s hopes of promotion.
After just 14 minutes, it was Choudhury, as shown below, who backed up goalkeeper Mads Hermansen to deny Mikey Johnson, who could have had a hat-trick in the first half.
Then he topped that feat at the start of the second half. Twice he denied Albion: first with another block to deny Yann M’Vila…
… and then a clearing header after Hermansen dived bravely at the feet of Grady Diangana.
There were other examples of Choudhury’s tenacity. It may not have been the perfect display in possession (the reason why Ricardo Pereira is often preferred to him in the inside full-back role), but defensively he was crucial. He covered ground, pressed the opposition aggressively and disrupted play to retrieve the ball. It was a fully committed display.
There were others, too. Jamie Vardy was equally committed in typical fashion and, in the sixth minute of added time and with Leicester hanging on, Harry Winks took a painful blow to the head trying to stop a bouncing ball from being clipped back into the danger zone.
Leicester have been praised for their style of play this season, the way they can dominate the ball and then patiently and clinically carve teams open, but this was another side of the game they needed to show.
“Football is such a strange game,” said Choudhury. “You can dominate games and lose 1-0 and it feels like the end of the world — for the fans, for us and everyone involved.
“We have a really close dressing room. There isn’t a bad egg in there and we care.
“I think we showed the fans how much we care for this club and how much we want to take us back up to the Premier League.
“We had the meeting. Sometimes they help, sometimes they don’t, but I think this one did.
“We spoke about the tough stuff, the gritty side of the game. Everyone’s throwing their bodies on the line. We showed we couldn’t care any more than we do.”.
After nearly 20 years at the club, it means a lot to Choudhury. He hasn’t always done the right things off the pitch as he has grown up, but the club has always stuck by him and he wants to repay the faith.
GO DEEPER
Hamza Choudhury exclusive: My footballing firsts…
“It means everything to me and my family,” he said. “My mum used to do all the long journeys on Tuesday and Thursday nights (for training). It’s so rewarding.
“It felt like the biggest game of my life to pay back to the club everything they have done for me and help put them in a position to go back up to the Premier League.”
It has been a challenging campaign for Leicester, on and off the pitch, but they are not over the line yet. They need two more wins in their final three games to ensure promotion.
They may have to dig in and show more grit to get over the finishing line again.
(Top photo: Plumb Images/Leicester City FC via Getty Images)
