By his own admission, the initial contact between Bristol City and Nigel Pearson came out of the blue. The manager was downstairs at home in Devon making bacon sandwiches (red sauce, we can only presume) when his wife alerted him to a missed call.
A Zoom conversation with Steve Lansdown and a few hours later and Pearson was being offered the job to turn around the fortunes of the club; an experience and challenge he probably didn’t envisage when he woke that Sunday morning.
It’s a year to the day since Pearson was first appointed at Ashton Gate, initially until the end of the season, and the element of surprise has been something of a constant narrative throughout his time in the south West.
