JUST WHEN I THOUGHT I WAS OUT … THEY PULL ME BACK IN
Considering he once fought off a pack of wild dogs while hiking in the Carpathian mountains, armed only with a walking pole, it was no great surprise that Nigel Pearson opted to take on the comparatively less scary Crystal Palace midfielder James McArthur with his bare hands. In a weird Saturday afternoon set-to following an accidental touchline collision between the pair, the apparent gaiety of the occasion appeared to switch from “amusing ribaldry” to “downright sinister and menacing” in the time it takes a scary, bullet-headed man who can tame a pack of slavering hounds with a stick to violently throttle somebody who’s just accidentally bumped into him for just a teeny, weeny bit longer than seemed appropriate. “He said something,” snarled Pearson, although what it was exactly that McArthur is supposed to have said remains unclear. The Fiver presumes it wasn’t the pair’s prearranged safeword.
“I got a bit scared, to be honest,” said McArthur. “These things happen and you see it quite a lot with managers and players throughout the game, so I’m not bothered by it. I’ve collided into him and he said it was only a joke, so I’ll take it in that manner and we move on.” Pearson’s “banter” defence was far from convincing and we can only speculate whether or not he’d have said the same thing if McArthur had been subjected to a different sort of bullying: a bog-wash in one of the dressing room toilets, before being left hanging forlornly from a peg by the waistband of his club grundies.
In the wake of this bizarre contretemps, Pearson seemed anything but apologetic and on Sunday night it looked as if he’d been sacked from a job he once said “motivates me but it also brings out the worst in me”. Forced to release a statement confirming that Pearson would still be in charge for Tuesday’s defeat at Arsenal after widespread reports that he would not, the club shoved their manager into a hail of bullets at an unsurprisingly well-attended pre-match press briefing on Monday afternoon, where he was only too happy to clarify matters.
“I’ve just said I’m not going to talk about it,” he said by way of response to the man from Sky Sports with the microphone, sweaty palms and nervous look on his face. “Do you want to find another way of asking the same question? There are reasons I don’t want to talk about it. I’m prepared now to look forward to the next game. I can’t see too much mileage in me discussing what happened yesterday. If I’ve got things to say, I’ll say it in the appropriate way to the appropriate people. That’s how I am moving forward.”
So that’s cleared all that up, although Proud Son of Leicester, Gary Lineker, has since suggested that Pearson “was sacked by one of the owner’s family and reinstated by another”. Of his and McArthur’s impromptu recreation of the hearthrug wrestling scene from Women In Love, Pearson was equally forthcoming. “It’s not helpful when the three fountains of knowledge on Match of the Day make a mountain out of a molehill,” he said, blaming the panellists on a football highlights show for exaggerating his weird behaviour. “We’d best be careful in future, the fella can look after himself,” tweeted the show’s host, Lineker, by way of cheeky response to Pearson’s menacing and undisputed Saturday assurance that he can handle himself. Whether or not he can drag bottom-placed Leicester up the table with the same enthusiasm with which he attempted to drag McArthur’s Adam’s apple from his neck on Saturday remains to be seen.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Forest Green Rovers accept the photos of the incident do not make good viewing for a club that prides itself on being family-friendly and welcoming to away fans” – of course, nothing says ‘family-friendly’ and ‘welcoming to away fans’ like six stewards carting off Grimsby Town fan Bryan Winship in a headlock for the crime of “playing with a large inflatable football”.
RANT OF THE DAY
“There’s one person who has just kicked off in the changing rooms today. He wasn’t even on the bench and as far as I am concerned he won’t play for Telford again. He is paid to do a job and he was asked to go on to that pitch today and do some running and he said ‘no’ so, as far as I am concerned, he is finished at this club. I am not going to mess around. He has got to learn. He’s a young lad. He thinks he is better than he is. His dad rings me every other day saying how good he is and I have had enough. My patience has run out because I have left people out today and he’s travelled. And he is treating this club like it is nothing and he is going to learn the hard way, I am afraid” – Telford manager Steve Kittrick locates his top then blows it, with midfielder Sean Cooke the collateral damage.
POSSIBLY THE LAST CALL FOR MORE OF YOUR MUNDANE ENCOUNTERS WITH FAMOUS PEOPLE …
“Juan Mata parked on the road outside my office last week. There’s no requirement to pay and display there, but he jolly well found a machine and did it anyway. When he reads this, he’s gonna feel sick about that 50p he wasted” – Ryan Macdonald.
“Many years ago, back when kids bought their music in vinyl form (ask your parents), I worked for the ‘Mad about music? See a specialist!’ chain of record shops, Our Price, in their Uxbridge store. One particular day the store manager was crouched on the shop floor, moving about some stock in the Top 40 albums display, when a customer stood over him to take a CD case off a shelf. However, in doing so he somehow managed to lose his grip on the pile of CDs he already had in his hands. He made a failed, and, from my vantage point loitering behind the counter, quite comical attempt to grab at them, but only succeeded in sending them all tumbling on to my colleague’s head. My bruised workmate stood up, with the intention of remonstrating with the customer (remember that this was a record shop, customer service was never one of our highest priorities), but for the Chelsea-supporting store manager there was to be disappointment, and a resigned acceptance of his club’s bad fortune, when he found that the clumsy customer was none other than the infamous slippery-handed condiment dropper Dave Beasant” – Tim Grey.
“I’ve patiently waited all week for my brother to write in about his mundane encounter with a footballer, but since he has a life and success and a new baby and things, he mustn’t read The Fiver, so I’ll relay it for him. Flying out to Spain for a golfing holiday a couple of years back, he and his golfing buddies bumped into Kenny Dalglish at the airport. They asked him for a picture, to which he replied ‘eff off lads’. A couple of days later they were on the 11th hole, which began at the top of a hill. After all taking their shots they began to walk down the hill, only to see two old fellas pushing a broken-down golf buggy up the hill, sweating profusely in the Spanish sunshine. As the two guys approached, they realised one of them was good old King Kenny, who pleaded with these strapping young lads to help him. Their response matched his in the airport, mixed in with howls of laughter, as Kenny glumly continued to push his buggy up the hill with his pal” – Stephen Yoxall.
“With much reluctance, may I be permitted to join the 1,056 other people to demand the ‘mundane meetings’ slot focus less on c****et and more on Association football? I suggest willow and leather deviants use the popular magazine Take a Break to highlight their glamorous lives. It’s equally as funny as The Fiver and they may even win £50 if published” – Jonathan Dobson (and no others).
FIVER LETTERS
“My brother was in a London train station on Saturday when a train load of Crystal Palace fans arrived in back from Leicester. Also in the station were a bunch of Nottingham Forest fans heading home from Brighton. Some of the worse elements of both sets of fans then did some shouting and punching of each other. I know it’s hard to put logic to football fans fighting but, given Forest had just beaten a team Palace fans hate, and Palace had just beaten a team Forest fans hate, it made me wonder if these were the most idiotic people attending any football match this weekend?” – Phil Pierce.
“Re: Half Man Half Biscuit football-related tales (Friday’s Fiver letters). I had always promised my youngster a Dukla Prague away strip as immortalised in the song. While on holiday in Madrid, I spotted one of their T-shirts in a sports shop. As I was purchasing said item, the sales guy noticed my accent and asked if I was Scottish. ‘Och aye,’ I, er, och-ayed. ‘I used to play for Raith Rovers,’ he olé-ayed. He then proceeded to tell me where to get the best fish supper in Fife. Elie, since you ask” – Mike Gallacher.
• Send your letters to the.boss@theguardian.com. And if you’ve nothing better to do you can also tweet the Fiver. Today’s winner of our prizeless letter o’the day is: Ryan Macdonald.
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BITS AND BOBS
Brazilian outfit Sport Club do Recife are so fed up of crowd trouble that they’ve gone and got fans’ mums to act as stewards. “At the end of the day, no one wants to fight in front of a mother, especially his own,” parped PR suit Aricio Forte, failing to grasp the inevitability of resulting scenes such as this.
P-A-R-T. Why? “He didn’t want to cancel out of respect for the people that came,” trousered His Mr 15% Jorge Mendes.
Faced with a choice between playing at Stoke on a wet Wednesday evening or getting involved in the mother of all parties back home in the Ivory Coast, Africa Cup of Nations winners Yaya Touré and Wilfried Bony have elected to give the Potteries a miss.
Scottish fitba suits are weighing up whether they should take action after Hearts’ Sam Nicholson recklessly headbutted the boots of Livingston captain Jason Talbot and received “three or four puncture marks on his face” for his troubles. Talbot got booked. “It wasn’t a great tackle,” understated Hearts coach Robbie Neilson.
Liverpool’s Lucas Leiva may be ruled out for a month with thigh-gah! but Arsenal’s Alexis Sánchez could recover from hamstring-twang in time to face Nasty Nigel’s Leicester City.
West Ham midfielder James Tomkins has accused Robin van Persie’s elbow of being malicious, explaining that the body part’s bad character is at least part of the reason he has nose-knack. “He has always got that about him when he goes up with his hands a lot,” cry-wolfed Tomkins.
David Beckham has chosen the launch of a Unicef fund for children in danger across the world to point out that Harry Kane should play for England. Obviously.
QPR caretaker manager Chris Ramsey is doing his best to ensure he will remain QPR coach Chris Ramsey by describing Tactics Tim’s work at Tottenham as “fantastic” and pointing out his former boss is keen to get back to work. “You can only play so much golf and watch so much daytime TV,” Ramsey revealed, in what came as news to The Fiver.
And former England cricketer Steve Harmison has been named as the new manager of Northern League Division One side Ashington.
STILL WANT MORE?
Get your latest fix of AC Jimbo and co with the Football Weekly podcast.
For anyone in the market for 10 talking points about the weekend’s Premier League football, this link might have something up its sleeve for you.
From Javier Balboa’s free-kick wonderstrike to the Equatoguinean authorities buzzing the crowd in a helicopter formerly owned by Suffolk plods: it’s Nick Ames’s highs and lows of the 2015 Africa Cup of Nations!
He’s young, he’s green, he’s paid next to notheeeng … he’s Daniele Verde, and Paolo Bandini reckons the €1,000-a-month Roma man could be the club’s next star. Though we may need to re-think the last line of that chant.
Oh, and if it’s your thing, you can follow Big Website on Big Social FaceSpace.
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