In a Sport Devoid of Patience Leicester Deserve Praise for Sticking With Pearson

With a ticket to the Premier League now worth £120million a season, thinking with a clear head is always going to be difficult for those pulling the strings at our clubs - but that's why Leicester deserve a pat on the back for their handling of Pearson.

Patience. An archaic word where English football is concerned, one that will cause future generations to enquire: What on Earth was that?

Whether it's Raheem Sterling hankering for £150,000 a week for being marginally better than Liverpool team-mates Rickie Lambert and Fabio Borini this season, or every teenager who's eligible being fast-tracked into the England senior squad and dubbed the nation's next great hope, patience is something we're running out of time for these days.

Managers are often the first to suffer when boardroom agitation sets in. In the Premier League this season - where, as of May 2015, the average managerial tenure is a mere 2.2 years - 60 percent of teams in the bottom half of the table have implemented changes at the top, with West Ham all but certain to bump that figure up to 70 (assuming they fail to better Everton's result on Sunday).

So how refreshing then, to see Leicester City survive having backed their boss earlier in the campaign. It must have been immensely tempting for the Foxes, newly-promoted this season of course, to guillotine Nigel Pearson at the end of March with the club seven points from safety and propping up the table, having failed to win a league game since mid-January.

It was a close call, apparently, with reports in February claiming that Pearson had been sacked before being immediately restored to his post. He of course denies that this was ever the case, though it's not hard to imagine him putting up such a fight having once defeated a pack wild dogs on a solo walking trip to Eastern Europe.

But even for a manager who hadn't instructed one of his own supporters to "f*** off and die" before grappling with an opposition player on the touchline, that would have been a precarious position to be in. Southampton's decision to dispense of Nigel Adkins two years earlier, in which time they have established themselves as one of the division's top seven or eight clubs, must have played on the minds of those in the King Power Stadium boardroom.

Clearly, Pearson has found the step up to Premier League management tough - certainly in terms of pressure-handling and coping with the increased media attention that comes with taking up residence in the world's most popular domestic league. Ostrich-gate is a prime example of that. It hasn't, however, affected his ability to manage and thankfully, the Leicester bigwigs were smart enough to visualise the bigger picture.

At the time, before the run of six wins from eight matches that preserved their top-flight status with a game to spare, the Foxes' results painted a grim picture. But the performances were always there (Leicester are yet to lose by a greater margin than two this season) and the players certainly never looked like they'd given up the fight or lost faith in their manager. Surely, it was only a matter of time before the two intertwined and that proved to be the case.

For someone like Newcastle, who practically forced Alan Pardew out of St. James' Park and into the clutches of Crystal Palace in December, you can't help but feel a glance at that bigger picture would helped the Magpies avoid their current predicament. They can still be relegated if Hull win and they lose on the season's final day.

But patience isn't always a guaranteed formula for success. Burnley persevered with Sean Dyche and could finish bottom, while Hull kept faith in Steve Bruce and are likely to follow the Clarets into the Championship next season. It's also hard to envisage Palace and West Brom being 12th and 13th respectively, had they not dispensed of their under-performing bosses over the festive period. Though, with both Alan Irvine and Neil Warnock appointed only a few months prior to their sackings, perhaps they should have given a little more deliberation to who was given the role in the first place.

With a ticket to the Premier League now worth £120million a season, thinking with a clear head is always going to be difficult for those pulling the strings at our clubs - but that's why Leicester deserve a pat on the back for their handling of Pearson. So make the most of it because managers like him might not get a chance in years to come - but then again, how many of those have battled killer dogs in the Carpathian mountains?

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