Great Escape Artist
Why Pearson can add Watford to his list of miracles
MANY people will have their own image of Nigel Pearson’s management style and it is likely to resemble what they see — the sergeant major’s haircut, the cold stare, frosty answers and the handshake that cracks walnuts as well as knuckles.
Troy Deeney’s recent comments about Watford’s new manager, the man who has lifted them from the bottom of the Premier League and instilled real hope of survival, play up to that stereotype. ‘If you don’t buy into what the gaffer wants, you won’t be here,’ he said. ‘For the first time in eight years I’ve been treated like a proper man.’
No nonsense. Authoritarian. My way or the highway, lad.
There is truth to this, of course. Pearson is a straight talker. As one source who knows him well says, he has ‘no time for bullsh*t’. Yet the dictatorial perception of him is more of a caricature than any realist portrait.
Much of it has been self-inflicted, whether it be throttling players on the touchline or comparing journalists to long-legged birds. The real Pearson is deeper than that.
Before taking the job at Watford, Pearson was midway through a history degree at the Open University. That’s currently on hold. He spent some of the summer up in Scotland living alone in a bothy, with only a local fisherman to ferry him to the pub and back. Had he not been summoned to Vicarage Road, he planned to fly to India to drive 9,000 miles in a rickshaw.
And it is only when you speak to those close to him that you get the sense of what he’s like away from the flash bulbs and dictaphones.
‘He is very different,’ says one player who was part of the Leicester side that Pearson kept in the Premier League in 2015.
‘A lot of the reasons he is like that with the press is to protect the players. If you give everything for him, he won’t have anyone say a bad thing about you.’
‘What you perceive is not what you get,’ adds Alan Birchenall, the former Leicester player turned ambassador who has been a mainstay of the club for 40 years.
‘To the outside world, he’s the exmilitary guard. The stature, the haircut, the confrontational stuff. To the people who know him and those he trusts, he is a completely different person.’
Trust is a big word for Pearson. As Deeney says, if you don’t buy into what he is trying to build, then you are gone. If you do, though, he will have your back.
It looks like Watford’s players have quickly done that. Victory over Bournemouth today could move them out the bottom three for the first time this season. So what makes players want to run through brick walls for him?
‘Because he would run through a brick wall for them,’ answers Birchenall. ‘You mess with Nigel and he’ll kick you in the dooberries. You give everything for him and he will back you all the way, through the good times and the bad.’
Speak to a number of those players who have worked with Pearson and plenty talk of a father figure.
‘He sees the team like his family,’ says one player.
‘As a person he really cared about his players,’ current Leicester goalkeeper Kasper Schmeichel told YouTube series Gloved. ‘He still does, he still cares. He treats them like his own children.’ Schmeichel once t ook t he brunt after he stormed into Pearson’s office when he returned from injury in December 2014 but was left out the side in favour of Mark Schwarzer.
‘I had a frank conversation with him but he just stared me down,’ Schmeichel said. ‘I knew that I had to shut up then.’
Kelvin Davis was at Southampton when Pearson kept them up during a three-month spell there in 2008. ‘What stood out when he came here is that he was on his own and took control of the whole club, the whole squad,’ he said back in 2015. ‘He was very personable which is a great trait.’
Birchenall tells the story of when he was summoned to Pearson’s office one morning by his assistant Craig Shakespeare, now his No2 again at Watford, who brings out the best in Pearson.
‘He said, “Nigel wants to see you” — in an abrupt tone. “What have I done now”, I thought. I walked through the door and the next moment there was a plastic arrow right between my eyes. He’d fired it from a toy crossbow. I’ve still got the indentation on my forehead!’
One pl ayer r eci t es another. Leicester had just beaten Ipswich 6-0 in the Championship. Some of the team decided to celebrate with a trip to watch Tony Bellew and Carl Froch box in Nottingham.
‘The TV cameras panned to the crowd and caught us all drinking,’ he says. ‘On Monday morning, the gaffer called a meeting. He stood at the front and said, “Well done on the game... and I think it was brilliant you went to the boxing.” We thought we were going to get hammered. He was only annoyed that everyone had not gone.’ It comes as no surprise then that on his first day at Watford he summoned all the staff, including the laundry and kitchen workers, to the canteen to tell them that together they would instil soul at the club.
When asked what one story sums Pearson up, Birchenall goes back to a distressing night in 2017. Birchenall, now 74, collapsed on stage at an awards ceremony and suffered a cardiac arrest. He ‘died’ for seven minutes before a defibrillator saved his life. When he woke up the next morning at Glenfield Hospital, the first thing he saw was Pearson stood with his arms folded.
‘ About time you woke up, I’ve been stood here for hours.’
Pearson had not been Leicester manager for nearly two years. ‘He travelled down from Sheffield that night to be with me,’ says Birchenall. ‘That’s the Nigel I know.’
Pearson could inspire yet another great escape. Jimmy Glass, the former goalkeeper who scored the goal that kept Pearson’s Carlisle in the Football League in 1999, is now player liaison officer at Bournemouth. He has already texted Pearson ahead of today’s game.
‘He got freedom of the city… and I got the sack!’ jokes Pearson.
If he keeps Watford up this season, it is more likely he will get the former, even if he is at a club with a propensity to sack managers.