Nigel Pearson: ‘I don’t like all I am but you’ve got to live with it’
Leicester City’s manager has had a season punctuated by incidents but he speaks candidly about them as he plots City’s escape from the Premier League relegation zone with six matches left, starting with Burnley on Saturday
• Belief Leicester can stay up is growing, says Marc Albrighton
• Nigel Pearson hopes Leicester find extra half per cent after curious week
• Pearson: I rang McArthur to clear the air over touchline tangle
Nigel Pearson believes he is portrayed with a dour and miserable persona but insists he has been open in his press conferences as Leicester City manager. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the
Nigel Pearson has been candidly rowing back over a season that has thrown up more than its fair share of incident, when an analogy involving Peter Snow’s Swingometer and the relegation battle leads the conversation into general election territory and whether the Leicester City manager tunes into the leaders’ debates.
“Nooooo,” Pearson says, sounding dismayed. “They’re all pandering. People whose views are swung when you get into these ridiculous debates – I think they’re all nonsense. You’ve got to have a fundamental belief, you’ve got to believe in what you believe in. If you go into something like this thinking: ‘Hmmm, I’ll see what they come up with this year ...’”
Other than predicting another coalition government, Pearson’s own political views are not for public consumption. “I’m staunchly something but it’s none of your business,” he says with the hint of a smile, before suggesting it would be presumptuous to read too much into the fact that he has already disclosed he buys the Guardian. It turns out that Pearson likes to do the crossword.
He also confesses to enjoying reading the obituaries, which in some people’s eyes will probably fit the popular characterisation of Pearson as a rather morose man. By his own admission, the former Sheffield Wednesday and Middlesbrough captain can be “very moody”. He has no time for “crap questions” in press conferences and is prone to making a “flippant remark from time to time” to cause a bit of a stir. “There’s a bit of mischief in there,” Pearson says. “Whether people think there is or not, I’m not really bothered, to be honest with you.”
As for the public perception of him, Pearson has a reasonable gauge of the mood. “I’ve been quite open in our press conferences and yet the only bits they ever use are the ones that would back up the persona. I get the words ‘dour’ and ‘miserable’ quite often. If that’s what people think, fine. I don’t think I am like that.”
It is certainly not how Pearson comes across in his office at Leicester’s training ground and there is no reason to suspect that the 51-year-old has undergone a personality change because three successive wins have lifted Leicester off the bottom of the table for the first time since November. “That’s me at work in the public domain,” he says of the footage that colours opinion of him. “It’s not me at work here.”
Gregarious and generous with his time, Pearson does a nice line in self-deprecating humour and, to his credit, fronts up when it comes to his various scrapes this season. “Just ask me the questions,” he says. “I don’t mind because they’re things I’ve done and said. You can’t have it both ways. You either like or don’t like people warts and all. You’ve got to look yourself in the mirror. I don’t like all the aspects of what I do and am, or things I’ve done, but you’ve got to live with it.”
The charge sheet, in order, reads: an ugly spat with a Leicester fan; that grapple with Crystal Palace’s James McArthur – which was followed by Pearson’s “sacking” 24 hours later; a war of words with Gary Lineker and, after the goalless draw with Hull City last month, some colourful language for a journalist.
The incident with the Leicester supporter, which came towards the end of the 3-1 home defeat against Liverpool in December, seems the obvious place to start. The Football Association fined Pearson £10,000 and gave him a one-match touchline ban for telling a fan who was abusing him to “***** off and die”.
What does Pearson think about it now? “I regret offending people in the general area. With the individual I don’t have any regrets at all,” he says. “I don’t like the fact that I’m probably better known for that and telling another journalist he’s something else than anything else this season. But that shows you the type of industry it is at times.
“I wouldn’t try and justify the events [with the fan]. I don’t believe in that. What I did get is quite a bit of support from people within the game and I think what that probably illustrates is a level of frustration regarding what you just spoke about [how a fan can verbally abuse a player or manager without any sanction]. I had people saying: ‘We’ve all been thinking it.’ I think that shows you that there is this underground feeling of … I think there’s empathy, which is an interesting emotion to feel for people under difficult pressures. And I know people will say: ‘What pressure is a football manager under?’ But that’s the industry I work in and I try and be as conscientious as I can be. But I’m a human being and I’ll get things wrong.”
Nigel Pearson speaks candidly about a season that has been packed with incident but that may end with Leicester staying up. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian
Two months later came that rather bizarre altercation with McArthur, when Pearson ended up kneeling over the Palace player with his hands round his throat. “Maybe a bit naive on my part but it was all pretty innocuous stuff,” he says. “Because I kept a deadpan face there’s this aggression that gets built into it, but the bottom line is that’s not how it was. The lad was brilliant with it, to be fair, because he defused it straight away. He sent me a text the next day, I started to do a text back and then thought I’d just give him a ring.”
Another storm, however, was brewing at the King Power Stadium. Later that Sunday reports emerged that Pearson had been sacked and at one stage it certainly appeared that the manager and people at the club believed that was the case. “Things happen in football … it was a difficult weekend, let’s put it like that,” Pearson says. “Potentially that sort of story could have been very damaging. There were social media tweets from people which didn’t go down particularly well. But what we tried to do is just draw a line under that weekend and move on. I don’t think it would be right to say what went on. It was an internal thing. How the story broke and got into the public domain, I still haven’t got a clue. It was all a bit strange.”
Lineker was among those to have his say on social media and Pearson took exception to the way that the Match of the Day host, along with Danny Murphy and Jermaine Jenas, the two pundits on the show on the Saturday night, dissected the McArthur confrontation and, in the Leicester manager’s eyes, “made a mountain out of a molehill”. At his press conference on the Monday Pearson pointedly said: “I pay my tax bills” – which was interpreted as a dig at Lineker in relation to a disputed allegation about the finances of the former Leicester striker, who is also the club’s honorary vice-president.
Pearson is not afraid to speak his mind and rattle a few cages if need be but, with good reason, he has no intention of reigniting a fire that has long gone out. Leicester are buoyant at the moment, the feelgood factor within the club is tangible and the last thing the manager wants to do is risk destabilising everything. “I’m trying to concentrate on what we’re trying to do on the pitch,” Pearson says, politely. “I don’t think there is anything to be gained by myself, or the football club, to reopen that [Lineker row]. For me it’s a closed chapter and that’s how I see it.”
Perhaps we will read more about it if Pearson brings out a book one day – something which he hinted could be in the pipeline on the day of the row with Lineker. The book, Pearson said at the time, would have nothing to do with football. “I think what I’ve observed about myself this season is that I’ve occasionally come out with some real pearlers, which I’d rather not have come out with,” Pearson says laughing as the quote he gave at the time is read back to him. “I won’t write a book. I haven’t got a magnum opus in me. Who’d ***** buy it for a start?”
It is safe bet that the journalist whom Pearson called a “*****” at the end of his press conference after the Hull game would not be on ghost-writing duties. Annoyed with the reporter’s line of questioning, in particular a reference to whether Leicester’s season was “waxing or waning”, Pearson’s withering comments were picked up as he left his seat. “It was unfortunate,” he says. “I suppose there’s the mischief side in me, probably subliminally knowing that the microphone is still on.
“He [the reporter] was quite clever, because there was something that happened in the Thursday presser, the ‘waxing and the waning’. I said [when asked about the tide turning]: ‘I think you’ll find that’s to do with the gravitational pull of the moon’, thinking ‘yeah, alright’, and it got regurgitated after the game. And I suppose there’s the Liverpool game at home, Palace, so there’s this cumulative effect of: ‘Is he losing his marbles? Is the pressure getting to him?’ And those type of angles can gather a bit of momentum. What it does is, it makes you reflect on what you do and how you do it, and it would be a shame if I became even more guarded than I am.”
Pearson admits at times “there is an element of roleplay” to his behaviour but the one thing he will not do is please people for the sake of it. To illustrate his point he talks about how much he enjoyed watching games from the stand and the pressure he came under to be in the technical area. “I’m not going to all of a sudden start wearing a snazzy suit and putting a scarf around my neck, which seemed to be vogue for about 20 minutes at one point,” Pearson says. “I’ll do what I think is best for the players. Some of the players, I think, would probably rather I sit in the stand!”
Whatever anyone thinks of Pearson, his managerial record stacks up. He won promotion from League One as champions with Leicester in his first spell, claimed the Championship title last season in his second stint in charge and Premier League survival is now within touching distance. With four of their final six games at home and both away fixtures against relegation rivals, Burnley on Saturday and Sunderland in the penultimate game of the season, Leicester are odds on to stay up.
Not that Pearson is getting carried away. “I can sense when there is a shift, all of a sudden it’s ‘Leicester will be all right now’. Bullshit,” he says. “We’ve got to be really focused now, try and influence what you can here and not join in with the daily and weekly debates. It’s almost like Peter Snow’s Swingometer on election night. And how interesting is that? Well, it’s not, is it? The bottom line is that results come in when the votes are counted and yet people put so much emphasis on a swing which may not actually have a huge bearing on it. Ultimately we’ve got to try and do our own job.”
The same goes for Pearson. “I have to accept what I am, rather than necessarily change for the sake of it,” he says. “That’s not to say that I don’t believe in finding ways to improve. If I thought this is as far as I can go, I may as well just get in my car, go home and start dead-heading the daffodils.”
Guardian
