Leicester’s ultimate top ten players ever: Strikers, No. 2

Providing a list of the best strikers is a little easier than doing so for midfielders or defenders in the sense that they can be judged according to how many goals they have scored. That’s not the whole picture of course, but a forward who doesn’t convert chances is unlikely to survive for long. Leicester City have had some great strikers over the years. Today, number 2.

27-year-old Arthur Chandler was signed by City manager Peter Hodge from Queens Park Rangers in 1923 for a club-record fee of £3,000. It was probably the best signing in the club’s history. He didn’t score that many goals at QPR (16 in 78 league appearances) but it was a different story at Filbert Street as ‘Channy’ went on in a 12-year stint to score a phenomenal 273 goals in 419 games (mostly in the top flight), making him Leicester’s leading goal scorer of all time and eighth in the list of most appearances. In seven of those seasons, the centre forward hit over 20 goals and in four of them he netted more than 30.

Arthur was part of the great Leicester team – including Ernie Hine, Johnny Duncan and Arthur Lochhead - that finished third in the First Division in 1928 and within one point of winning the title a year later. He scored all types of goals, with his head and both feet, close-range and from distance and holds the club record for the number of hat tricks converted – 17 – and the most goals scored by an individual player in a game – six in the 10-0 defeat of Portsmouth on 20th October 1928. Unbelievably, like Arthur Rowley, Chandler was never selected to play for England. The bias against an unfashionable club like Leicester is palpable.

Some Leicester fans might put Rowley above Chandler in our list. Although it is true that Chandler scored more for the Foxes than Rowley (273 against 265), Rowley’s goal-per-game ratio was superior (a staggering 0.8 – 265 in 321 appearances) to Chandler’s (0.6 – 273 in 419 appearances).

On the other hand, and – taking into account they were playing in very different eras – probably the decisive factor is that most of Rowley’s 251 league goals for Leicester (208 or 82%) were bagged in the second tier whereas most of Chandler’s 259 (203 or 78%) occurred in Division One games. In addition, Rowley’s total included 40-odd penalties whereas Chandler only took two for City and missed both. This shouldn’t take anything away from Arthur Rowley’s achievements though. Netting 51 times in under 100 Division One fixtures is no mean feat.

As a 40-year-old, Chandler was still playing for Leicester in the 1934/5 season, although not quite so regularly, and he moved on to Notts County whom he played with for a season. He returned to Filbert Street to take on a variety of responsibilities before retiring in 1969. He died, aged 88, in June 1984.