Age-resistant, Tic Tac-powered Jamie Vardy deserves shot at golden boot - MW

There have been many lists going around this week of the best foods to boost your immune system. They seem to be mainly things like oily fish, yogurt, spinach, burnt rice, ginger and raw garlic, although by following these ingredients in the letter, I can confirm that they are not actually made for a great sandwich.

From a Premier League perspective, there are some notable absences from the list of miraculous foods. Cheese and ham. Red Bull pistols. Bowls soluble in vodka. Chew tobacco. Port in the drunk water of an old bottle of Lucozade.

Basically, it is worth considering anything, according to his own pre-match feeding story, which contributed to the creation of Jamie Vardy, who today qualifies as one of the activists. the most persistent elite membership in Europe; although a person with a career is also left in a particular state of stress due to sports disturbances.

It's still a little weird to keep talking about the Premier League season as a powerful and meaningful entity. In fact, the problem doesn't matter if the tournament is canceled or postponed, or if Liverpool actually gets the title of the tournament.

Mainly because humanity is threatened by a deadly epidemic and the world economy is on the verge of collapse. But also because the trophy is only an emblematic award for being the best team of the season. Liverpool is obviously the best thing that the obsession with the pot is to get lost in a pointless literal sense, which of course no one in football will do.

But there are still unresolved issues. Think about Vardy, whose season is one of the big unfinished side boxes. It was a little strange. Vardy had 19 goals, mostly divided into 17 in 16 games from August to December. This streak did not score goals in nine games, which coincided as soon as the stories emerged that Vardy had really reformed the omelet and Red Bull following the advice of top sports nutrition experts.

Four days before the final season was put in the cold room, he found a couple in a 4-0 victory over Aston Villa, making him safely exit in the race to win the Premier League gold shoe .

There is a fairly omitted appendix for this realization. If Vardy finished at the top of this list, he would be the oldest top scorer in the English line since Ronnie Rooke of Arsenal in 1948.

Rooke has scored 33 goals and shot 37 times the season. Since then, very few 30 times topped the list. The vast majority were in the early to mid-1920s. Vardy will be 33 and a half at the expected end of the season.

There is something in the way of this feat as much as in its implementation. Vardy just isn't hooked. He changed, he resolved. His first throw is not at the start these days. He's still there in his feet, supplied by Tic Tacs and Skittles, a man who always plays like he wants to swallow all day.

It's the same quality as it did in its Premier League debut against Manchester United five and a half years ago. United had Wayne Rooney, Radamel Falcao and Robin van Persie in the attack that day. They went up 3-1. At the Premier League combined stadium, read Rooney-RVP-Falcao 310, Vardy draws.

In the end, Vardy made four and scored one and Leicester won 5-3. He fled from the defenders of the United States, very easily, they seemed to have been reduced to red figurines, the Lego men were left in the middle of the green space. He saw firsthand the Premier League on Vardy's classic finish, all silly, at high speed. At the time, we thought that Leicester Leicester's victory told us something disastrous about United. In fact, it tells us something glorious about Vardy.

Vardy started Leicester League 45 games later. They won the title. He now has the 99 best goals. For a while, people said that he took advantage of missing the rigors of the academy's professional life, because it was a kind of super-fast casting, discovered around the local soil. like a fly stuck behind a blind curtain.

But Vardy also grew up as a player. He is still playing as if he had just burst into billboards chased by farmers and police dressed in heavy serrated uniforms, here to steal lettuce and gobble the goalkeepers before going down. Road on his running scooter. But he is a more complete version of himself these days, looking for deeper gears, performing various races, creating as well as scoring goals.

And so to the break. What is it going to do to Vardy, or indeed to all those overripe high-end talents pushing the limits of their own physique? Vardy has just kept running through all this. But he will turn 34 in January. He’s a year older than Lionel Messi, three years older than Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and seven years older than Harry Kane.

Perhaps the enforced rest will allow all of these players to reset and recover from long-term pain. There is a handy precedent. Rooke had seven years away from football during the war years, six of those spent as an RAF PT instructor.

Still, though, the Vardy Supremacy feels distinct, a standalone feat of will and physicality. There hasn’t really been a career such as this in modern times, a late-bloom affair that just keeps on coming, which deserves, when we get going again, a shot at that boundary-pushing golden boot. And which is, in these times of interruption and store-cupboard lockdown, still quietly cheering.

MW