Aston Villa are into the FA Cup final after yet another victory masterminded by new manager Tim Sherwood. Tactics Timmy, the butt of all constant jokes by fans, continued the Timpossible dream of staying in the Premier League and winning a trophy by following up his big wins over West Bromwich Albion and Tottenham Hotspur with an upset of Liverpool in the FA Cup on Sunday.
The right and wrong reasons to discredit Tim Sherwood
Up for the banter, m8.
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Was everyone who made fun of Sherwood’s appointment wrong? Maybe he really is a good manager and was mocked undeservedly?
Well. Kind of.
First thing’s first -- he says ‘banter’ a lot.
This word, in particular, elicits a lot of emotion in people. It was invented in the 1600s, but its use has risen steadily in the last decade, especially with the rise in popularity of banter platform Twitter dot com. Look at this upwards trend from Google Books.
This graph stops in 2008, before Twitter got particularly popular. Whenever data from then until 2015 becomes available, that line might run damn near parallel to the y-axis.
The non-mouth breathing public’s disdain for this particular word is well-founded. Hardly a day goes by on social media without the following exchange taking place:
Person A: [something extremely bigoted].
Person B: Hey, that’s extremely bigoted.
Person A: Calm down, it’s just banter mate.
Former Sky Sports commentator Richard Keys busted out that exact excuse to explain away his inexcusably sexist comments about female linesperson Sian Massey. He said women don’t know the offside rule (Massey is widely regarded as one of the game’s top officials), asked a co-host if he’d ‘smash it’, then had the nerve to say he shouldn’t have been fired for his comments because they were just banter.
So when Sherwood says he’s up for the banter, people hear Richard Keys. They hear the idiots who interact with them on social media every day. They associate Sherwood with that type of behavior, even when he’s never done anything of the sort in public. When someone says ‘banter,’ a switch flips in your head that tells you to disregard everything else that’s about to come out of that person’s mouth, because it’s definitely going to be stupid.
Sherwood also loves to biggie up himself. He’s so famous for doing this that BBC hosts make fun of him for it to his face.
And then there’s taking credit for the success of Harry Kane.
"Truth be known, if Tottenham had had their way ... then Harry Kane would not have been Harry Kane today, because he would have been on loan at a Championship club to gain even more experience. And he would not have got his opportunity to play for Tottenham. The rest is history as far as he is concerned."
That’s pretty bad, but it gets worse. Here’s Sherwood on Jack Grealish.
“When I first came in he was sitting on the bench, the fans were singing someone’s name and I thought ‘It’s not mine -- who are they chanting for?’ But it was Jack they were calling for.”
He hears the Aston Villa fans singing someone’s name and, and what’s his first thought? “Ooooh, is it my name?” No Tim, it’s not. Good god.
Banter. 59 percent win ratio. Claiming responsibility for players’ success. Assuming the fans are singing his name. It all comes together to form a caricature that’s easy to dislike. It also doesn’t make him a bad football manager.
Sherwood has less than a year in management, so it’s unsurprising that he’s not very good at talking to the press. When you’re a player or youth coach, no one asks you about your record, or your tactics, or the personalities in a team. He doesn’t have any experience talking about these things, and a lot of very smart people have said lots of very dumb things when they first started doing this. Hell, Arsene Wenger has a master’s degree and has been a manager for 30 years, and he still says things that make him sound clueless from time to time. He’s both a very bright man and a very good manager. Coming off as intelligent while talking to the press about football management is pretty hard for a lot of really smart people.
His words don’t necessarily have anything to do with his results. They probably have very little to do with his tactics, his training sessions or what he says to his players behind closed doors. They’re something to make fun of him for, sure, but to discredit his managerial abilities or mock Aston Villa for hiring him? No, not a chance. That’s unfair.
★★★
But then you look at Carles Gil rotting in Villa's reserves, and you look back at his Tottenham lineups, and you just think ... what the hell?
This is a guy who fielded a 4-4-2 with a double pivot of Paulinho and Nacer Chadli more than once. He played Christian Eriksen in two-man midfields or stuck him on the left. His four central defenders basically played musical chairs. Almost all of Tottenham's matches under him were completely insane.
And even with all of the lavish praise he heaps on Grealish, he still keeps subbing him off for Joe Cole when other players are playing worse and look more tired. "Why are you taking Grealish off instead of [insert player]?" is uttered by Aston Villa fans around the 75th minute, every game. That train's never late.
Sherwood isn't as bad at his job as you'd expect given his public persona, but exceeding very minimal expectations doesn't make someone a good manager. Sherwood is average or slightly above. He's smart enough to know that he's not Alex Ferguson, and his best bet is to play a 4-3-3 with a destroyer and a ball-circulator behind Fabian Delph, then tell the boys to have a go. It works well enough, especially when your opponent is Brendan Rodgers, who regularly thinks it's a good idea to play the corpse of Steven Gerrard as a holding midfielder, or Mauricio Pochettino, who doesn't even have decent midfielders to pick from.
Just because Sherwood isn’t a total fraud -- and the criticism hurled Villa’s way when they hired him was totally unfounded -- doesn’t mean that he’s actually good. He’s a young and inexperienced manager who’s obviously quite a bit more on top of things than he was at this time a year ago, so he’s getting better, but this FA Cup run isn’t proof that Daniel Levy and Sherwood’s detractors are completely full of it.
He’s not Dim Tim and he’s not a visionary. He’s an adequate, but not great manager who’s yet to acquire a filter for the things that come out of his mouth.
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