No Nigel, you had lasted so long!
There is a strong trend in sardonic online football commentary to mercilessly mock sacked managers who claim credit for their successors greater success. Gerard Houllier (Rafa Benitez won the Champions League at Liverpool) and Tim Sherwood (Mauricio Pochettino arrested Spurs' slide into a laughing stock) are two coaches who are most familiar with these 'jokes'.
Everyone has been waiting with breath baited and tweets drafted for Nigel Pearson to claim credit for Leicester City's incredible season. Now, on February 19 2016, Pearson has finally come out and done it.
Here are the comments:
For Leicester to be where they are, even to have got into the Premier League in the first place, it needed a lot of groundwork and building blocks to be put in place. Whether that’s easily forgotten now, I don’t know, but good luck to Leicester and good luck to Claudio Ranieri.
What I would say is that he [Ranieri] was going into a situation where there wasn’t an awful lot wrong. He probably won’t have inherited a job anywhere else and found a structure in place like that.
I’m damn sure in my next job I won’t be walking into somewhere where the structure is as good as that because generally speaking in football you’re taking over a situation where there has been some element of dissatisfaction.
I’m not saying that to big myself up — I don’t actively look for any thanks for what has happened this year — but likewise I’m not going to underplay that.
Sadly, Pearson is showing a serious lack of awareness of the Internet's desire to fit Pearson into the Houllier/Sherwood niche. Pearson's head has evidently been in the sand, like an, erm, Ostrich.
https://youtu.be/hEyOtCCiwnY
Pearson has gazed into the abyss of this obscure and complicated metaphor and found the abyss gazing back at him.
The comments were made in an interview with Oliver Kay in The Times, in which Kay gloriously writes that Pearson "has preferred to keep his head down".
Nigel Pearson claiming credit for Leicester's success = a hipster saying he was into a band before they were popular.
— David N (@conanriquelme) February 19, 2016
It is a very good interview, in which Pearson says that he believes Leicester will win the title, and you can read its entirety here.
