The strange thing about Tim Sherwood, who started the weekend as manager of Aston Villa and ended it as the third Premier League managerial casualty of the season, is that there were moments, just occasionally, when it all seemed to make sense.
Aston Villa are a mess, and so was Tim Sherwood
Following their 2-1 defeat to Swansea City, Aston Villa have fired Tim Sherwood. And even though the club’s problems weren’t all of their manager’s making, it’s hard to think that this was anything other than the right decision.
Michael Regan/Getty Images
These were the moments — like last season's barely comprehensible FA Cup semifinal, in which they outclassed Liverpool — when he sent a Sherwood side out with their ears full of Sherwood soundbites, and they won. Perhaps they even won well. And any skeptical observer couldn't help but wonder hang on, maybe he's on to something. Maybe football management isn't this great complicated thing; maybe it's just about putting your arm around a few players, telling them they're great, exhorting everybody to get stuck in, and then shouting a bit from the touchlines. Perhaps you can build success on a foundation of banter, bluster and bullshit.
After all, it’s hard to view his time at Villa as a complete failure. He came into the job last February with precisely one target: to get Villa up from 18th and relegation to 17th and safety. Which he did, precisely and neatly, with the added bonus of an FA Cup final thrown in for good measure. Job done. Nice one Tim. And let’s give a shout out to that lovely win ratio at Tottenham, for old time’s sake.
It’s also hard to view this current mess of a Villa side — rock bottom of a poor Premier League, with just four points and just one win from 10 games — as being entirely of Sherwood’s making. There are no easy managerial jobs, but Villa’s looks like one of the least appealing: the owner wants to sell, and the squad bears the scars of much incompetent surgery, the curious amputations and grafts of failed project after failed project.
Over the summer Villa sold their best striker and best midfielder, Christian Benteke and Fabian Delph, released their strongest central defender, Ron Vlaar, and saw Tom Cleverley choose a permanent move to Everton. New signings have come in, but have yet to settle, and Sherwood, who does not control transfers, has made it fairly clear that he's been underwhelmed with the players that the club had signed for him. Alan Hutton started at right back on Saturday, and Kieran Richardson started at left back. Draw your own conclusions.
And yet, despite those moments and that box-ticking and those caveats, it’s hard to the point of impossibility to argue that Sherwood should have been given more time at Villa Park. Because if there are moments of coherence, there are more — far, far more — where he looks like nothing so much as a man who is trying to become a football manager by doing an impression of a football manager.
This is probably unfair. He’s done (or is doing) the relevant qualifications, and plenty of successful managers have said silly things, worn silly coats, and presented much silliness on the touchline. But Sherwood’s Villa teams, much like his Spurs teams, were constantly changing their shape and personnel. The team that lined up against Swansea on Saturday wasn’t just missing Benteke, Delph and Vlaar; it was also missing a coherent plan. Rudy Gestede is very good in the air. Maybe pick a winger? And then there have been the persistent failures in concentration, epitomised by Swansea’s winner. As Kyle Naughton puts the cross in, he’s unmarked; as Andre Ayew finishes from the edge of the six yard box, he’s closer to two of his own teammates than he is a central defender.
More from our team sites
More from our team sites
The temptation with Sherwood is to assume that everything is a gesture — this is, after all, the manager who claimed that playing miserably for 45 minutes against Birmingham City was all part of his master plan — and so to take these shifts in tactics and approach as something grander, as a statement. Look at me, oh ye of little faith. I can do management. Again, this is perhaps unfair; there aren't many players in Villa's squad that pick themselves. But then you think about the strange approach to the FA Cup final, and a few peculiar substitutions, and the inability and unwillingness to get anything out of Carles Gil, and you start to wonder.
In the final balance, Sherwood has been sacked because there is nothing to suggest that he is a manager who can squeeze points from this Villa squad. Complaining about the players he’s been bought might be an effective tactic to shift the blame — “The players are giving everything they’ve got, it is not effort and desire that’s the problem. It’s a lack of quality.” — but it doesn’t exactly make for a resounding case to be allowed to keep working with them. Particularly since it’s October, and nobody new will be coming in until January.
There is, ultimately, something slightly sad about Sherwood. He feels profoundly anachronistic: in this brave new world of sporting directors and global recruitment and transfer committees, here was a man whose argument for management seemed to be that he had a lot of good friends in the press on television. Again, possibly unfair. But all paradigm shifts have casualties, and if Tim Sherwood's credibility is part of the price that English football has to pay for finally abandoning the concept of the Proper Football Man Who Is A Good Bloke And Deserves Time, then you can't imagine too many Tottenham or Aston Villa fans will be that upset.
See More:
