I knew Jimmy would go up for THAT corner - he looked at me like a Labrador puppy! But the good times didn’t last for both of us... Jimmy got the freedom of Carlisle and I got the sack!

TIME was up and the hourglass was down to the last grains of sand when Jimmy Glass ventured forward to save the day.

Despite throwing the kitchen sink at Plymouth, who had nothing but pride at stake, Carlisle United were seconds away from dropping out of the Football League.

Then on-loan goalkeeper Glass pounced to bury the rebound from Scott Dobie’s header, Carlisle were spared and Scarborough fell through the trapdoor.

For young manager Nigel Pearson, a rookie on his first appointment in the dugout at 35, salvation arrived in the nick of time.

And 21 years later, he is still orchestrating great escapes.

In only three cases – West Brom (2005), Sunderland (2014) and Leicester (2015) – have clubs cheated the Premier League guillotine after being bottom at Christmas.

Pearson has been instrumental in two of them, including winning seven of the last nine in 2015 when he led the Foxes to safety. Now

Pearson has made a promising start to leading Watford, bottom of the pile on December 25, from the quicksands to firm ground.

Tomorrow’s relegation battle at free-falling Bournemouth could be pivotal for both clubs on the Bear Grylls survival trail – and it will also be a reunion for the new Hornets messiah and last action hero Glass, who is now a player liaison officer with the Cherries.

Glass sent his old boss a good-natured text earlier this week, jogging Pearson’s memory of Carlisle’s miraculous escape.

“I don’t remember waving Jimmy forward as such,” said Pearson, who has taken 10 points in the last four games to transform Watford’s season from dead loss to intensive care. “But he was always going up for that corner because he was looking at me like a labrador puppy.

“There are so many stories about how he came to be the hero of the hour, many of them embellished.

“We had a great night out in Carlisle afterwards, although the good times didn’t last for both of us. Jimmy got the freedom of the city, I got the sack.”

Pearson, now 56, thought English football had washed its hands of him until Watford’s SOS came and he became their third manager in 90 days last month.

He still wonders if the grand old game would have afforded him such a rewarding ride – including two promotions with Leicester and building the team that Claudio Ranieri won the title with four years ago – if Glass had not made his sensational intervention. But it is an anomaly that Pearson has become pigeonholed as a survival specialist when his track record suggests he is more than a Red Adair firefighter.

“Yes, there have been times when I’ve thought about the possible implications of Carlisle going out of the League that afternoon and what it might have done for my career,” said Pearson (left with Watford skipper Troy Deeney).

“It’s not often that you get one of those ‘sliding doors’ moments in football from something as random as that.

“We can all look back at key moments, but football has a way of keeping you grounded.

“Does the ‘firefighter’ tag bother me? No, it means I can have half a year off without having to work, which I can spend at home! We all get labelled, but I would like to think that what I am as a man and how I conduct myself, does not necessarily match some people’s description of me.

“If I have been labelled as a troubleshooter, so be it. I know the type of work I’ve done at clubs in the past and I would actually consider myself, a lot of the time, to be someone who builds things rather than delivering short-term fixes.

“But this is not a job where I came in with time to build. We needed to win matches.”

They have done just that, but Pearson is having no talk of ‘job done’ yet. The league table still reads like a threatening letter and he warned: “There’s lots to be done.

“If you had said to me, when I arrived, that we would take it to the last game of the season for the chance to stay up, I would have taken it.

“I’m not taking anything for granted. Given what happened over the first half of the campaign, we have almost used up our full quota of ‘off ’ days.

“That’s going to keep us under pressure to perform for the rest of the season.”