Catching The Worm

 CATCHING THE WORM

Jamie Barnard on how Nigel Pearson's early transfer dealings are setting the tone for a crucial campaign for Leicester City next season...

Debutant youngster Harrison Panayiotou’s last-minute winner had barely hit the back of the net at Elland Road back in late April before the curtain came crashing down on an underwhelming season for Leicester City. Nigel Pearson was the man holding the cord.

Brought back to the club for a second spell mid-way through a whirlwind season, for Nigel Pearson it was mission very much unaccomplished. An authoritarian whose three principles of his people are consistency, dependability and discipline, this was unquestionably a team cast not in Pearson’s image.

"We finished with a win and that's the best you can say. The season has finished now and we are looking forward to getting a rebuild" was as enthused a summation as Pearson could muster. Although oft depicted as an abrasive character with a dour demeanour, this time there was no agenda. Pearson wore the look of a man weary of the failings and shortcomings of a squad bestowed upon him. A squad clumsily and carelessly thrown together by the free-spending Sven-Goran Eriksson.

Of the carefully crafted squad he had intricately put together in his first spell at the club, few remnants, even less resemblance.

Two months further into Pearson’s second Leicester City chapter, things have changed. So the story goes that a reconstruction is underway. Leicester City are doing their business early.

The proverb teaches that the early bird catches the worm, but in the murky undergrowth there ordinarily lies the deadwood. Matt Oakley, gone. Chris Weale, departed. The last thing Steve Howard headed for Leicester City? The exit list.

The door had scarcely missed injury-ravaged Aleksandar Tunchev also on his way out before Pearson was welcoming Richie De Laet and Matt James from Manchester United. Pearson has dusted off his blueprint, smattered with touches of black and amber from his time at Hull City, to mark the dawning of his second era.

Pearson shops at ‘The Big Four’. If Manchester United had a loyalty card then he alone would have more points than the miserable sixty-six his team could muster in The Championship last season. It is a policy that has served him well, buying and borrowing those players falling just short of the impeccable standards demanded by the clubs that have nurtured them through state-of-the-art academies, providing the best tutelage in the country.

To young players with potential to fill and a desire to succeed, Mr Pearson provides the guidance. The first lesson? His word goes.

As the weeks and months of last season passed by, as winter turned to spring, Nigel Pearson cut a forlorn, frustrated figure. Opportunities came and went, over-paid yet under-performing players failed to grasp crucial points in the same manner they failed to grasp Pearson’s philosophy. His window was locked until the summer.

Leicester City flirted with the play-offs but, unlike his predecessor Ericsson, Pearson is no football romantic.

Pearson can make unspectacular players achieve spectacular things, but for players who believe that spectacular feats are theirs alone, he has no time. Pearson has time only for the team. An ego is ergo unwelcome.

Matt Mills, rolled out last July as the headline signing of a spending-spree founded upon new Thai wealth, looks to be on his way out of the club. It’s Pearson’s way or the highway and Mills is seemingly on the road to Bolton.

Sol Bamba, an exuberant and at times exhilarating centre half whose extravagance was at times too readily related to risk rather than reward, has been sold. Lee Peltier and Paul Konchesky, both just twelve months into their Leicester City careers, and after both having had impressive seasons, have also been linked with a departure away from the club.

Such decisions are clearly financial and not football in their nature. Pearson has weighed up their value on the pitch and what they are being paid off it. And he has decided that it doesn't equate. For Pearson, a player’s worth is determined by what they bring to the team and not what they take from their wage packet. An imbalance exists in the reward given and the return received from those handed bumper contracts by Eriksson.

Another arrival at the King Power Stadium is striker Jamie Vardy. Prolific at a lower level with thirty-one goals in thirty-six games for Fleetwood Town in their promotion season from the Blue Square Premier League, Vardy has his chance at a higher level. A hunger to succeed, humble beginnings. Vardy’s endeavour has earned him the shirt cut from Pearson’s cloth.

Vardy, along with James and De Laet, joins what are the makings of a strong squad at Leicester City. Through a youth system which proclaims Emile Heskey as its last graduate of real calibre over a decade ago, promising young strikers Jeffrey Schlupp and debut match-winner Panayiotou are emerging. At Elland Road a baby-faced assassin was born, yet one who has yet to cut his teeth. Their time will come, for Vardy and new company the time is now.

For Pearson too, there is no time like the present. In trimming the wages of his squad, with one eye on the Financial Fair Play regulations that are looming large and the other on equality and balance within his playing squad, he is ridding the club of the egos that put pay to any collective substance last season. He knows that the pressure is on in the forthcoming season. Fail to prepare, prepare to fail. Pearson is preparing early.

Before that inaugural outing for Panayiotou Pearson had promised: “How I deal with the close season, I will do that in my own way”.  A man of his word, Pearson has set about the task in a quiet manner. In doing so, he aims to fulfil another promise, that of promotion made to Leicester City’s success-driven Thai owners. The very same owners who handed Sven-Goran Eriksson his latest pay-off rather ruthlessly when he was just two points of those coveted play-off positions.

There is history with Nigel Pearson and Leicester City. There remains unfinished business. He is not about to let that business take care of itself, for he knows that, in doing so, he himself could become history.