Nigel Pearson - Sacked

Discussion in 'The Hornets' Nest - Watford Chat' started by Harrow Orn, Jul 17, 2020.

  1. Leighton Buzzer

    Leighton Buzzer Reservist

    I agree with all of this.
    Thank you for informing me that Nigel will still get his bonus, I was unaware of that, and I am very pleased to hear it.
     
  2. GoingDown

    GoingDown "The Stability"

    Well he won't. But he might have a case to say that he might have.
     
    Leighton Buzzer likes this.
  3. Chumlax

    Chumlax Squad Player

    Well, he probably actually won't, because we'll probably be relegated.
     
  4. Leighton Buzzer

    Leighton Buzzer Reservist

    Good point, after Villa beating the Arsenal, I think you are most probably right.
     
  5. LondonOrn

    LondonOrn Squad Player

    I said "2-0 defeat" which would have stopped Villa pipping us. And our home form under Pearson was very good even if the performances weren't always (but then that's not what managers are usually judged on) - P10 W6 D2 L2 F18 A10 Pts 20, all three of the goals we conceded in one of the defeats coming in injury time.
     
  6. a19tgg

    a19tgg First Team

    There was strong evidence the players had stopped playing for Pearson, especially in that first half against West Ham.

    If players have stopped playing or responding to a manager it doesn’t matter who you replace the manager with, it could be the tea lady, but you’ll likely get a better response from the players than any tactical nouse or experience could ever produce.
     
  7. hornetboy1

    hornetboy1 First Team Captain

    Yes, but it's all speculation. We just don't know because there is never any explanation. It could be because they didn't like his glasses, who knows what the reason was.
     
  8. Chumlax

    Chumlax Squad Player

    Fairplay, I concede to misreading that, although personally I doubt that too we will, of course, never know.
     
  9. a19tgg

    a19tgg First Team

    I agree, it is speculation and we don’t know. But you have to admit that first half against West Ham was deeply concerning, a must not lose game against a team level on points with us, and we roll over 3-0. Something was going on. To then expect us to play a full strength City and somehow get a result for me is too much of a stretch.
     
    Chumlax likes this.
  10. Davy Crockett

    Davy Crockett Reservist

    Could it be that after the Norwich win 6 points clear oppo have 3 tough matches left
    the players knocked off and were on the beach but then some freak results and even
    freakier VAR stuff and we are dragged back into it and the squad unable to lift/switch back
    on ?.
     
  11. LondonOrn

    LondonOrn Squad Player

    That could be it, not to excuse the players for their performances, but to capitulate in a must win/not lose game is not as uncommon or surprising as some people seem to think, I've seen it many times with teams in that position in any division. Remember how people were already crapping themselves when Villa beat Palace, never mind when Bournemouth got that goal blitz against Leicester and only lost by one goal in a game we were expecting them to get hammered in? Maybe the nerves had got the better of the players by the time they faced West Ham after seeing signs of life in the teams below us after they'd looked like they'd do well to even get another point.

    But then they were performing crap even when those teams were constantly losing, so I don't know. Maybe they are just largely crap and/or don't have the mentality for this fight, having (AFAIK) not been in this situation before, Foster apart?
     
    Davy Crockett likes this.
  12. a19tgg

    a19tgg First Team

    I think either way seeing that Man City team sheet would’ve mentally crushed them though. Whether it was Pearson or Mullins if it had been their B team they put out against Bournemouth I think they would’ve been slightly more up for it. Personally I think given all that had gone before, the best chance we had against City was a new manager bounce, not a tactical master class from Pearson.
     
  13. UEA_Hornet

    UEA_Hornet First Team Captain

    Bevan though fails to point out that our three direct relegation rivals - Villa, Bournemouth and Norwich - have had the same manager for some time and are still well in the mire. I can understand why the head of the manager's union would find it alarming though if lots of other clubs started realising that role isn't as crucial as historically seen to be.
     
  14. Davy Crockett

    Davy Crockett Reservist

    Well we are still in it but everyone including most WFC fans think we are already down .
    Bournemouth have been given a lifeline . Villa have it all to lose now so the pressure now
    on them . Oddly enough the pressure on our team has been lifted slightly as no one is expecting
    much from us so there is nothing to lose .

    I don't wish to make excuses for our squad who have performed horribly of late but
    how many of us also thought after Norwich " that's it , only strange results can thwart us now! "
    only to see 1 strange result after another getting ticked off?
     
  15. LondonOrn

    LondonOrn Squad Player

    I was mulling over the different permutations after a ****** evening last night, and realistically the only combination of results that will see us stay up is if we draw and Villa lose.

    Crap though this Arsenal side is (the worst for a quarter of a century) they're not going to lose two games in a row to relegation-threatened teams, and while Villa might lose, they're not going to roll over at West Ham (a 1-0 defeat for us and 3-0 for them would see us stay up if Bournemouth don't win).

    So that gives us, out of the top of my head, a 20-30% chance of staying up? (Of course you've got to factor in recent performances of all six teams involved, it's not like throwing a dice or coin)
     
  16. Supertommymooney

    Supertommymooney Squad Player

    Exactly.

    With 6 games to go and a good replacement lined up? Maybe

    After the end of the season? Fine.

    But 2 games to go? Makes no sense.
     
  17. Diamond

    Diamond First Team

    That is consistent with what the bookies are saying too.
     
  18. Tricky Dicky

    Tricky Dicky First Year Pro

    I think he forcibly told the powers that be at the club that their management system, player recruitment and the squad in general was dreadful and that they and the players are responsible for the shambles the club has been all season.
     
    Smudger likes this.
  19. Smudger

    Smudger Messi's Mad Coach Staff Member

    And he would not be wrong.
     
  20. a19tgg

    a19tgg First Team

    Being interviewed on Talk Sport later, I wonder if he’ll spill the beans...
     
  21. wfc4ever

    wfc4ever Administrator Staff Member

    Don’t think he is the type really - more of a bat away the question person after about 5 minutes of thinking about an answer!

    And well the truth might not be good for him !

    Is him isn’t it and not the reporter they have on there with the same name.
     
    Last edited: Nov 6, 2020
  22. leighton buzzard horn

    leighton buzzard horn Squad Player

    I'm not sure he would want the beans spilling...
     
    wfc4ever likes this.
  23. a19tgg

    a19tgg First Team

    I’m sure you’re right unfortunately, but it is definitely him they’re interviewing.
     
    wfc4ever likes this.
  24. wfc4ever

    wfc4ever Administrator Staff Member

    Ah yes it’s the Jim White show so the host might try to get it out of him but probably won’t get much.
     
  25. I Blame Pozzo

    I Blame Pozzo First Team

    I doubt he will,unless he doesn't want to work again.
     
    wfc4ever likes this.
  26. a19tgg

    a19tgg First Team

    So nothing happened... but he was given no reason for being sacked
     
    folkestone orn and wfc4ever like this.
  27. wfc4ever

    wfc4ever Administrator Staff Member

  28. a19tgg

    a19tgg First Team

    Yeah, I mean I’m sure he can’t say, but equally it’s obvious something happened as why else would he have been sacked without an explanation.
     
    wfc4ever likes this.
  29. Burnsy

    Burnsy First Team

    Piece from The Athletic:


    “I’ll answer the question,” Nigel Pearson says, making it clear that he has no intention of fudging the issue when it comes to what he really thinks of Watford’s decision to sack him last season. “I’m not going to be anything other than brutally honest about it. I was upset. I was angry. I felt it was… I didn’t understand why it happened.”

    Pearson is talking from his holiday home in Devon, where he has been recovering from a prolonged period of ill-health that started with him suffering from what he describes as a secondary phase of COVID-19 and, at a time when he was managing Watford in the Premier League, included heart problems too.

    It is quite a lot to take in at first, especially as Pearson has chosen to keep those medical issues private up until now, with only a small number of people at Watford aware that he was having “a bit of a troubled time” when the Premier League restarted in July. Pearson clearly did a good job of disguising what he was going through back then. “It’s like anything, you’ve got to find ways of coping with situations. And I don’t think that it affected how I worked,” he says.


    The good news is that Pearson looks and sounds like he is in a much better place now. He has a smile on his face when the Zoom call starts and later goes on to talk about spending his days kayaking, paddle-boarding and even horse riding — a new hobby that he evidently didn’t realise was going to be brought up in conversation. “Who told you about that?” Pearson shoots back, laughing.

    Watford, by contrast, were always going to be on the agenda. It is approaching four months since he was sacked and it is fair to say that the decision makes no more sense to Pearson now than it did back then.

    Appointed last December, when Watford were cut adrift at the bottom of the table, Pearson engineered a turnaround that took them out of the bottom three and, memorably, included a 3-0 victory over Liverpool. He had a 35 per cent win rate during his time in charge and a points-per-game ratio (1.25) that is better than any other Watford manager or head coach in their Premier League history.
     
    Last edited: Nov 6, 2020
  30. Burnsy

    Burnsy First Team

    Although Watford had played poorly in a 3-1 defeat against West Ham United 48 hours before his dismissal, they won the previous two matches and were three points clear of safety with two fixtures remaining. Can Pearson explain why he was dismissed? “No,” he replies, shaking his head and smiling. “I can’t. All I would say is that when I joined Watford, I joined with a very clear understanding that what might happen might not be clear… so that’s a real oxymoron!”

    It says everything that Gino Pozzo, Watford’s owner, has hired as many managers in the last five years as Elton John, the club’s most famous supporter, has had UK No 1 hits. Pearson was the sixth of seven in that time and, although it is impossible to say whether he would have kept them up, the bottom line is that Watford achieved nothing by sacking him.

    That whole episode sounds like a bit of a mess, not least because Pearson knew what was coming before anybody had officially told him. Aged 57, the former Leicester City and Derby County manager has been around football long enough to know how it works. The clues were there when he couldn’t get into the training ground.


    “I wasn’t shocked on the day because there were a series of events which I mulled over in my head and sort of put together, and by the time I had got a missed call and rang the person (Filippo Giraldi, the technical director) who rang me and said, ‘You’re not ringing to sack me, are you?’, it was clear,” Pearson says.

    “I’d already rung Craig (Shakespeare, Watford’s then-assistant manager) to say, ‘By the way, I’ve got a missed call and I’ve been stopped from going into the training ground by the security guards’. I said to Shakey, ‘Look, I think we’re in trouble here, but I’ll ring you back in 10 minutes’. I did, and we’d been sacked.”
     
    Last edited: Nov 6, 2020
  31. Burnsy

    Burnsy First Team

    Pearson is not the sort of man to go looking for any sympathy and, by the same token, he harbours no ill-feeling towards Watford or Giraldi, whom he says he got on well with and still speaks to now. At the same time, there is no getting away from the fact that the way his departure was handled was desperately poor.

    “I’ll be honest with the things I didn’t like,” Pearson says. “I found it to be disrespectful that apparently, some players knew before I did, and I thought that given the amount of commitment and, considering my situation at the time of being unwell, considering my mum died just after the new year and I didn’t break stride at work… I thought the press release was a bit disrespectful.”


    Pearson pauses for a moment as he thinks about that 50-word club statement, which didn’t express an ounce of gratitude to him. “Not a bit (disrespectful); very disrespectful,” he adds, correcting himself. “I don’t expect people to write me a wonderful epitaph but I thought it was very disrespectful.

    “Having said that, I moved on very quickly. It’s not scarred me. I don’t feel bitter now at all. I met lots of good people there, I keep in contact with a number of the staff, I spoke to a couple last night as it happens, and it’s football. What I also don’t intend to hide from, and can’t hide from, is that I sort of expected this type of volatility anyway, just because of the track record of what’s gone before.

    “But from how you feel on the day, the two or three days afterwards and beyond, to how I feel (now), I don’t have any bad feeling, any animosity. It’s what it is. It’s an illustration of how some clubs are. There’s no point being overly sensitive about it. Having said that, I wouldn’t treat people in the way that I was treated. But that’s just how it is.”

    Pearson has always been an intriguing man to interview. His answers to questions tend to be long and thoughtful, and there are times when it is genuinely difficult to know whether he is talking seriously about his own complex personality or offering up a nice line in self-deprecating humour.

    His response when asked whether the experience at Watford has made him view football management in a more negative light is a case in point. “Interestingly enough, I have a love-hate relationship with it… I should probably quantify ‘it’ with ‘and myself’, in the sense it is a little bit like that,” Pearson says, chuckling.
     
    wfcmoog likes this.
  32. Burnsy

    Burnsy First Team

    Leaving aside any critical introspection for a moment — and Pearson has never shied away from holding his hands up to his faults — it is clear that 2020 has been a particularly tough year for him. He unexpectedly lost his mother, who was 84, at the start of January, when there was little time to grieve because of the relentless nature of football management.

    Later in the year came the news that James, his son, had been forced to retire from professional football at the age of 27 through injury and on the back of a chaotic final season at Macclesfield Town, who were mired in financial problems. On top of that, Pearson lost his job and has been dealing, literally, with the effects of coronavirus, which seem to have hit him for six.

    “I’m presuming that I contracted COVID at Watford in March, like everyone else at Watford contracted it in March. But of course, back then the blood tests were not necessarily accurate, and I didn’t have a blood test back then, and I’d got no real symptoms which would suggest I was particularly unwell.

    “I had a couple of days where I wasn’t very well. I self-isolated after lockdown actually happened. So once the season had been suspended, I stayed down there for another 10 days, just to make sure I was OK, before I went home, because my Dad was going to stay with us back up north.

    “It was only when I had a blood test in early June, when the new blood test came out, that it transpired that I’d already had COVID-19. So my health issues have been really surrounding a sort of second phase of that, and I experienced all that during May, June, July, August, September even.
     
  33. Burnsy

    Burnsy First Team

    “Now I’m on different medications. But initially, it transpired I was having heart problems, which was a bit of a shock to me if I’m honest, during that restart period of the Premier League season. So I worked all through that and my heart is OK now, so that’s not something I’m having to deal with. But I was dealing with a situation that was not particularly easy, for sure.”

    Listening to Pearson talking through that story, which he seeks to put into context by saying that it is “something that a lot of the population will be dealing with”, it is fairly obvious that the standard question that gets rolled out to any out-of-work football manager — “You must be itching to get back?” — doesn’t apply here.

    Pearson smiles. “Yeah, but I was working through it and I don’t suppose if you asked anybody… I mean, there were a few people who knew about it, as they needed to, but I don’t think anybody really knew when I was working, and I was a lot less well when I was at Watford. I bet if you looked at any of the interviews I did after games during the restart, you wouldn’t know I was having a bit of a troubled time.


    Craig (Shakespeare) was aware of it, and there were days that I missed press conferences for instance, and that was only because on those days I was unable to work. That’s how it is.

    “What can I do now? Live a normal life. I’m fine. So I’m not really thinking of it in terms of… I understand how you’re asking the question about being able to work — I’m a lot more healthy than the last time I was working is all I would say.”

    Football, however, isn’t in better shape and it is interesting to hear Pearson’s thoughts on the broader state of the game, given he has managed across all four divisions and also had the inside track in the summer on life at either end of the professional pyramid.

    Pearson nods when it is put to him that it is not a great look when the Premier League is spending more than £1 billion on transfers and other professional clubs are living from hand to mouth. “No, I agree with you 100 per cent. I think what it illustrates is the types of pressures on clubs to basically survive in the format that they’re already in,” he says.

    “It’s very difficult to just judge people based on one moment in time. You make decisions over a period. So, for instance, if you’re a football club whose wage bill is whatever it is and you get relegated, and you’ve got to maintain that in the league below, it’s going to affect your ability to make moral decisions just for survival in your own world — and that happens throughout all the leagues, by the way.

    “I suppose over the years if you were involved in it and you were able to earn money, which on an individual level allows you to earn a really good living, how many people in that sort of bubble are going to ask questions about what the implications are if it goes in the other direction?

    “Now is not the time to recalibrate. I think what we’ve probably got to do is try to stave off capitulation of football clubs and leagues in particular. I think the time to recalibrate is when it’s all over. But stories like Bury going bust, Macclesfield going bust, don’t sit easily with me.

    “In the summer, I experienced — and I know because of my son James and his involvement with Macclesfield, and my involvement in regard of being the Watford head coach and being involved in Premier League meetings — the disconnect and the lack of empathy with what the bigger picture is was very, very apparent to me.
     
  34. Burnsy

    Burnsy First Team

    “There may be more casualties; I’m surprised that there haven’t been more. I suppose all I’m alluding to is if we’re that bothered about the industry, or any sporting activity, it would feel better to live in a world where there was a bit more understanding of what it means for people who are slightly less well off.”

    Life in the quiet village of Bittaford, on the fringe of Dartmoor National Park, sounds as though it is perfect for Pearson, who has always liked to escape from the rat race. “Except it’s been ******* down and blowing a hoolie for the last week. But the sun’s shining now,” he says, smiling.

    “Fortunately for me, once I’ve finished here, I’ll be going out for a stroll, which is nice. It’s very therapeutic. I’m lucky in life, I think, with the cards that have been dealt. I’m happy with my lot in the sense that I’m able to enjoy the things that are available for me.”

    The public perception of Pearson, who has courted controversy as a manager at times, is almost certainly at odds with the man that people get to know away from the dugout. A deep thinker, Pearson enjoys listening to classical music, studying history, taking on The Guardian crossword every day and, perhaps more than anything, losing himself in nature.

    “Paddle-boarding, kayaking, walking on the Moors, those types of things, just enjoying the surroundings as much as anything,” Pearson says, explaining how he has been spending his time in Devon, away from the family home in Sheffield.

    “I suppose one of the things I reflect on quite a bit… I don’t want to sound like a schizophrenic, but it’s nice to step outside yourself sometimes and observe. To allocate any time for your own pastimes (while working in football) is quite difficult because it’s very much a situation where the job is all-consuming. Conversely, when I’m in a situation like I am now, it’s a pleasure to be able to immerse yourself in just being able to exist, which sounds a bit flowery. But it’s true.”

    All of which brings us onto the subject of horse riding, which Pearson is more than happy to talk about despite his initial surprise that his secret is out. “Just along the way here, there are some stables,” he says, pointing out of the window. “Some friends of ours go horse riding a lot and I said: ‘Any chance?’ I went for a couple of hours the other week and it was great. Hopefully, I will get back out there again — hopefully on the Moors, but I think you have to be a bit more proficient than I am. Again, try something different — fantastic.”

    What about trying what he knows best again — football management? When will we see him back in the dugout? “Who knows when the next opportunity comes along?” he replies. “If you had said that to me this time last year I would probably have given you a vague wishy-washy answer like I’m trying to do now. But the reality is it (Watford) came at a time when I didn’t expect it. I don’t know, is the honest answer. You asked me earlier whether I feel well enough. I feel OK at the minute. I really do.”

    Pearson received a couple of calls from clubs after leaving Watford but the timing wasn’t right then in more ways than one. Also, he is not minded to go chasing opportunities “when, actually, people aren’t particularly committed themselves”.

    That is the thing with Pearson — it’s all or nothing. “I don’t do things half-measure. It’s really important for me to commit to something. I’ll only really know when either an opportunity comes along or if I feel that grab inside myself. It quite literally could be anything — apart from mucking the stables out. I’m not doing that.”
     
  35. Burnsy

    Burnsy First Team

    Seems to me that something happened and he expected the sack because of it - but won't go into detail.

    Find it quite shocking that Gino had Giraldi do the dirty work though rather than do it himself - I suspect there was an issue between Gino and Pearson after West Ham as reported. Interesting that Pearson says he got on well with Giraldi and still does...

    Also think its shocking behaviour from the club to lock him out of the training ground and sack him by telephone call.

    The club definitely didn't cover themselves in glory with this one.
     

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