FRANK McLintock was the captain of Arsenal when they did the English league and cup double in 1971 and still refers to the club as “we”. So it comes as a jolt to hear the man who made 403 appearances in the famous red-and-white shirt saying it would be a “sensationally good” thing if Leicester City were to achieve the unthinkable by winning this year’s Barclays Premier League.

As befits a boy from the Gorbals, McLintock was a hard-as-nails centre- half and, in keeping with that persona, he rarely minces his words. He blames Barcelona for allowing his allegiances this season to have been swayed from the club he was idolised at. It helps, too, that Leicester is the club where his career started.

McLintock has become irked by the modern trend for club sides to imitate the Catalan giants and claims that Claudio Ranieri’s uncomplicated approach at Leicester has been a breath of fresh air.

This is a pivotal afternoon in the title race down south. Leicester, who sit five points clear of Tottenham Hotspur in second, travel to third-placed Arsenal while Spurs visit fourth-placed Manchester City. By 6pm, the destiny of the Premier League trophy should be a little bit clearer. Despite his Arsenal connections, McLintock, still sprightly at 76 and speaking whilst on a winter break in Spain, believes his first club are favourites to last the distance.

“I think they can win the title, yes,” he says. “It will be very difficult but they’ve kept the same team more or less all season. If they get two or three key players injured then I don’t know if they will cope with that but, yes, you could put money on Leicester. It would be sensational and sensationally good as well.

“I look at Leicester and it’s fantastic what Ranieri has done. He’s giving them two days off per week. He’s taken the pressure off by saying as long as we get 40 points we’ll be happy. He’s playing it very carefully, he’s a very experienced manager. I’m fed up with teams copying Barcelona; everybody plays 65 per cent or 67 per cent possession. How many shots at goal? Two. But Barcelona have got three geniuses up front and other teams don’t. It drives me up the wall.”

It’s all a far cry from when McLintock first made his name in English football as a callow youth at the Midlands club, signing on his 17th birthday in 1956. A run to the 1961 FA Cup final where they lost to the great Spurs double-winning team was his apogee at Filbert Street before the then Arsenal manager Billy Wright paid a club record £80,000 to take him to Highbury three years later.

He sees plenty of similarities between the Leicester team he featured in and that which is taking the Premier League by storm this season. The Jamie Vardy role was played by a fellow Scot, the prolific former Celtic striker Jimmy Walsh, while loping left-winger Mike String- fellow was an early-day Riyad Mahrez.

“I was surrounded by Scotsmen at Leicester. That created a real bond among the guys who were there. This team remind me of the one I played in. We played very direct football but it was with good passing, balls out to our big winger Stringfellow, who would get great crosses in and we had a very good centre-forward [Walsh]. It was very effective and it shows that there are other ways to play football rather than the Barcelona way. I think it’s great for football. I’m chuffed to bits that they have shown the bigger boys that you don’t have to spend vast sums.”

Arsenal, and Arsene Wenger in particular, have tended to err on the side of caution when it has come to lavishing exorbitant sums on transfers and McLintock fears they might just pay the ultimate price for that policy, querying whether they are good enough to deny Leicester this afternoon and, indeed, over the remainder of the run-in.

“Arsenal have struggled a lot at home,” he adds. “If Per Mertesacker is playing, Leicester City will be looking for Vardy coming short off him and then spinning and getting the ball knocked up the inside of him. You would imagine that Arsenal will be the team with problems rather than Leicester.”

He is similarly unsure what Wenger’s movements will be should the Frenchman fall short once more in the title race.

“I don’t know. He might pack it in,” muses McLintock. “I’m sure he will be very disappointed, especially with Pep Guardiola going to Manchester City and Jose Mourinho likely to be going to Manchester United. It’s going to be more difficult next year. I think Arsenal are capable of winning the league but it’s not the best Arsenal team I’ve seen. Arsene Wenger seems to think over the last two or three years his squad of players is better than most of the supporters think.

“We have anything between five and nine players injured every season and a lot of the time they are out for between six and nine months and even up to two years. I mean, it’s incredible. I do not know what is happening at Arsenal.”

And what of the other title contenders? While City have fallen off the pace in recent weeks, it is Spurs who McLintock believes are likely to present the biggest challenge to Leicester and Arsenal.

“It’s the best Spurs team I have seen for years. They have always been a wee bit flaky, Spurs, but not this year. The two centre-halves have been solid as rocks, Eric Dier in front of them has been excellent and the boy Dele Alli is first class. He has got the lot. He’s terrific and so is Harry Kane, even when he wasn’t playing well he was working so hard for the team. He’s a top player. They’re worth about £60 million or £70m already. I really mean that.”

And should Leicester prevail?

“The other teams are going to see it as a massive missed opportunity. They’re spending £200m and Leicester are going to get away with a spend of something like £22m. It will be a terrific kick in the teeth for those teams.”