Nigel Pearson believes his leadership will help transform Watford as they look to get their campaign on track.

The new head coach is the third man to be in charge of the Hornets this season, which he thinks has left them without clear leadership or guidance as they sit bottom of the league, six points from safety.

Pearson, who steered Leicester City to safety from a similar position a few years ago, believes he can do the same at Vicarage Road, despite not initially expecting to receive a call about the job.

"I didn't know about it [the job] until last week and it was not in my mind as being a possibility," he said.

"But do I believe in myself? Yeah, I do. Absolutely. And do I believe that we can rectify our situation? Yeah, I do. Absolutely. Talking about a collective buy in is one thing, but I also think our group needs leadership and I'm happy to do everything I can to provide clear leadership, for our players in particular.

"I think one of the things that I was pleased about with my own reaction was I didn't have a lot of time to overthink it, it intrigued me straight away and it was a case of coming down and basically having a chat and deciding, 'yeah, let's go for it'."

The former Foxes coach has arrived to find a squad he thinks is good enough to survive, but that is ultimately lacking in confidence.

He wants to address that issue by simplifying things for the players and ensuring they all stick together and give everything on the pitch.

"It's never an easy thing to put right quickly," he said. "You can't tell people to play with confidence. If you haven't got it, it can be a difficult journey to get it back, but this is within a collective, it's a team sport. If we don't isolate each other I think we've got a better chance of finding the solutions. The problems occur at difficult points in games when there's either the temptation or the reaction of leaving each other to find the solutions just as an individual.

"It sounds like very basic stuff, but we do complicate football at times. We're talking about dealing with people here and we need to start feeling good about ourselves and to do that first and foremost, let's come off the field of play and be able to say whatever that result was that we really applied ourselves to our maximum. If that's the starting point I'm looking for, I don't think that's one that a lot of people would necessarily think is a bad one."