Human development does not always take place in a linear manner. In medicine, politics, war, and technology, and therefore surely football, there are not only steps backwards, but steps to the side, deceptive shuffles, and Ph.D students arguing whether we should bother with the notions of forwards and backwards anyway.
Tim Sherwood’s retro revolution has been a miserable failure at Tottenham Hotspur
Tim Sherwood tried to bring back the past with his tactics and persona at Tottenham Hotspur, but it’s been a disaster from day one.
Clive Rose
For every golden age, there’s a fallow era and a look back to a more glorious past. Usually things progress steadily onwards, but sometimes Rome falls and things have to be seriously looked at again (although technological progress wasn’t actually held back by Christianity, as many people believe -- in fact, it set up a period of relative peace and stability which was essential to development.)
More from our team sites
More from our team sites
Sometimes new ideas don’t catch on solely for the fact that they’re more effective. European armies switched to all-gunpowder affairs before firearm technology had reached that point. So during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, English armies quickly found out that lots of men with muskets would do a very good job at fighting lots of other men with muskets, but were actually fairly helpless against a bunch of bearded men running at you with swords and their genitals out. Sometimes bringing back the past can actually work, and do more than just to satisfy nostalgia.
Ever since 4-5-1 came to England’s shores, and people dreamed of the distant past, there’s been the unspoken suspicion that a team of good players playing a direct 4-4-2 might be able to surprise everyone. It’s not an idea without merit, either. For the same reason the highland charge worked in 1745, so can a big man-little man combination in 2014. This is fairly obviously the case in football. There are clear boundaries and limited resources, so one improvement must necessarily cause a weakness elsewhere. Some rules may change, but others never will -- there will always be eleven players, there will always be one ball. Unfortunately, we might well add that Spurs will always let you down.
The Premier League is far better now than it was during the initial advent of 4-5-1 as the default formation. No more do we have games where Jay DeMerit, Jan Lastuvka, Moritz Volz and Gavin Mahon are all involved. And it's a good deal more exciting too, less predictable, and more competitive. Yet Spurs had earned themselves a recent reputation for playing exciting, attacking football, in something approaching the old English style under Harry Redknapp. It was working.
It didn't work quite well enough though. They looked naive at times, so Andre Villas-Boas replaced him, intending to bring in some continental nous. In a way, that's exactly what he did, but something was lost as well. The results were no better and the style sucked all the enjoyment and fun from the team. It was the old stuttering, lost transition of the mid-2000s again. Fun, honest, British, meat-and-potatoes 4-4-2 ham-fistedly replaced by this continental dreck.
So when AVB finally got canned, Spurs needed a replacement. There weren’t any big names available at the time. Bringing Harry Redknapp back in would be unthinkable, but Spurs fans and the board alike resolved what has turned out to be a near-Oedipal complex by displacing their twisted, unnatural desires onto another man. They couldn’t appoint Redknapp, so they appointed a drawing of him. Step forward Tim Sherwood.
Photo: Jamie McDonald
Redknapp has a strange relationship with public opinion in that almost everything written about him is entirely unfair and inaccurate. To his pals in the media, he’s a genius, a Brian Clough of the 21st century and a great bloke to boot. This is not true. But it’s also not true that he’s a dinosaur completely ill-suited to the modern game who is stereotypically English, only knows how to play 4-4-2 and bawls about passion and heart. If any Spurs fans had bitterly recast Redknapp as that man, they got their punishment by actually getting him as their next manager. They got Sherwood.
It’s safe to say now that the experiment has been a total failure. Spurs started off poorly and have gotten much worse, their displays have ranged from confusion to total chaos, and they haven’t even scored any more or been more exciting. To go from playing three defensive midfielders and telling everybody to sit deep to no defensive midfielders, two strikers and seemingly giving every player completely free reign on the pitch is in some way an incredible achievement. But it’s poor, and Sherwood should and probably will pay for it with his job. The dream might live on, maybe 4-4-2 can work. But this isn’t a man cleverly using an old tactic to shock and upset the present orthodoxy. This is a man doing do because he comes from the past and hasn’t learned anything else.
It's safe to say now that the experiment has been a total failure.
Not being good enough to manage Spurs is not a great crime. Sherwood could have kept it up as best he could, then let Daniel Levy write his resignation letter at the end of the season. Walk away into the sunset with your soldier's pension, and maybe they'll let you manage Fulham or West Brom someday, living the real high-life on your own merits at a level that suits you. But Sherwood chose instead to walk out to the nation and attempt to come across as one of the fans. It's supposed to make you rally behind a man who really has your interests at heart. In reality, Sherwood sounded like a 606 caller, and stood in front of Sky cameras before essentially saying "I've lost the dressing room, this team is awful and I don't know how to improve them."
Things can’t really get much worse from here. Well, they can -- Spurs aren’t doing that badly in the league -- but they certainly can’t get more comprehensive in proving that this appointment has been an unmitigated disaster. And even 1745 failed in the end, when the novelty wore off and a small tactical tweak to bayonet practice was implemented. Sherwood is no Bonnie Prince Charlie -- the latter at least had the sense to know when the jig was up and quit, although Tim may well have to leave White Hart Lane disguised as a woman if things get much worse. Raised in Rome, when the Jacobite generals found out of Charlie’s desertion, one cried out: “There you go! There you go for a damned Italian!” At this point, a damned Italian would suit Spurs just nicely. The loving embrace of catenaccio would seem like heaven now.
See More:
