Sherwood SACKED

Sandie wrote:In retrospect some of that has proved to be eerily true. See for example the bit about Sherwood's use of the media.

This one also sounds very familiar: http://www.footballfancast.com/premier-league/tottenham/three-reasons-tottenham-must-sack-tim-sherwood#kQ5w0E2CuKwzsufY.97

Sandie wrote:It's amazing that he's clever enough to manage that but not clever enough to get our team winning!

On the previous occasion Aston Villa lost five successive Premier League matches, Tom Fox decided Paul Lambert needed to be sacked. Randy Lerner asked the chief executive to talk through his thought process and, satisfied with the answers he received, backed the man he trusts to run the club to relieve Lambert of his duties. Tim Sherwood was spared that fate after Villa were beaten at Chelsea but the suspicion lingers that another of those transatlantic phone calls may not be too far away.

Villa host a struggling Swansea side on Saturday and Sherwood, with one point from a possible 21, can ill afford a sixth defeat on the spin. After a fortnight of speculation, the supporters’ trust has called on the club to end the silence and back or sack the manager. Villa are saying nothing but privately insist that at no stage has Sherwood been given an ultimatum to win a match within a certain time frame, reasoning it would not be the greatest motivational tactic to go down that path.

At the same time, there is no escaping the fact the Villa board are deeply concerned at the club’s position on the back of a dismal run of results and, with that in mind, it would be a major surprise if they put out a statement in support of Sherwood. With Villa four points adrift of 17th position and without a victory since Rudy Gestede scored at Bournemouth on the opening day, the manager’s position is perilous and there is no point pretending otherwise.

It has not gone unnoticed within the club that Villa not only have a tricky run of matches ahead to negotiate but that in the corresponding games last season (Watford were in the Championship, and so their visit in November is excluded) they lost six of the next seven fixtures. Villa had also accumulated another seven points from the games played so far.

While the past is never a reliable barometer for the future, in a broader sense Villa supporters could be forgiven for arguing otherwise after what they have been through. Villa have flirted with relegation every season since 2010 and a table based on the 12 clubs that have competed in the past six Premier League campaigns shows the Midlands club bottom with more defeats and fewer goals than anyone else. The malaise, in other words, is deep-rooted and the worry is that Villa, despite their history and size, are starting to feel like a club that belongs in the bottom six.

After promising to arrest the decline if he kept Villa up last season – something that was achieved with a game to spare – Sherwood said on the eve of Saturday’s 2-0 loss at Chelsea that it was agreed in the summer “the objective was to stay in the league” because the board recognised with so many younger players signing and key figures leaving “it was going to be a difficult period for us”.

That recruitment strategy has become a major talking point. Villa reinvested the £40.5m they generated from the sales of Christian Benteke to Liverpool and Fabian Delph to Manchester City and added £10-15m on top to bring in 13 new faces, the majority of whom had never played in the Premier League.

Dismayed at what had gone before, when money was often splurged on high-earning players well past their best and with no sell-on fee, Villa implemented a philosophy this summer that focused predominantly on identifying emerging talent that could be developed and which, in the case of those recruited from overseas, represented better value compared with the English market.

Driving that strategy was Hendrik Almstadt, who joined from Arsenal in July to take up the sporting director role and is big on data analytics, and Paddy Riley, the director of recruitment. Sherwood, 46, has made no secret, whether during his time in charge at Tottenham Hotspur or his early days at Villa, he has little time for the sporting or technical director role and, rightly or wrongly, it is hard to picture him nodding away at everything he is being told by two people who have never played the game at his level.

At his pre-match press conference last week the Villa manager chose his words carefully when asked about transfer strategy and was certainly not critical of the process. He explained how he submitted a list of about 30 names at the start of the summer, that the club came back with some suggestions of their own, and said ultimately “not a player has come in who I didn’t want”. It is, however, an open secret Sherwood would have liked to return to White Hart Lane to do some shopping and was targeting players more familiar with the Premier League.

Either way, the bottom line is the present structure is here to stay at Villa Park and there is a mixture of frustration, bemusement and incredulity within the club that a process designed to bring together expertise and target players to fit a long-term philosophy, rather than the interests of each individual manager at the time, is so often questioned and criticised from outside.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the signings – and nine games feels far too early to make a judgment on players, especially for those who are trying to adapt to a new league as well as a new country – it is also the case Sherwood has not helped himself at times with his tactics, in particular some of the substitutions, and on other occasions has been let down by individual errors.

Indeed, the number crunchers, inside and outside the club, point to data and key performance indicators from the matches so far that suggest Villa should have much more to show for their efforts than four points, yet everyone – and no one more than Sherwood – knows how football operates and the only statistic that matters when a club is dropping like a stone is the result.

Lambert seemed to have nine lives as he somehow managed to hang on for two-and-a-half dire years that Villa supporters will never get back, but Sherwood is unlikely to be cut the same slack and the potential interest and availability of other managers – David Moyes and Brendan Rodgers in particular – only serves to crank up the pressure on the man who re-energised the club last season.

For those fans calling for a return to the high-tempo, dynamic attacking football that characterised Villa’s resurgence, Sherwood has pointed to the loss of Delph and Tom Cleverley, highlighted how that midfield pair set the tone for the team with their energy and industry, and said “you can only be as swashbuckling as the players will allow you to be”.

It is Benteke’s departure, though, that has hurt the manager and the team the most, and that was always going to be the case with a centre-forward who scored 42 and set up eight of Villa’s 105 Premier League goals during his three years at the club.

Sherwood, to his credit, is putting on a brave face, talking positively,promising to play on the front foot, urging the players to take inspiration from himself and vowing to “keep swinging until it works”. The time has come, however, for one of those haymakers to land.

Tim Sherwood shoots from the hip and is willing to die on his sword. He will go down fighting. If it is hard to avoid military metaphors, it is because he introduces them to the conversation and his style of management. Aston Villa seem in a relegation battle. Sherwood is a maverick of a general who may lose his commission.

He is a man under pressure and a mass of contradictions. He is the rookie who had never recruited a player until, in one transfer window at Villa, he brought in 13. He is the supposed apostle of attacking football who, in his last home game, fielded five defenders and claims to be bored by Villa’s football.

He is the outspoken critic who remains unsure of his best team. He has the best win percentage of any Tottenham Hotspur manager in the Premier League, but has won just 11 per cent of his top-flight games with Villa this season. The last eight have produced a solitary point. Even that represented a poor result as it came at home to bottom club Sunderland.

And so Saturday’s match against Swansea City assumes huge proportions for Sherwood. It is his misfortune that enviable alternatives can be eyed. Brendan Rodgers’s CV may be slimmer than his replacement at Liverpool, Jurgen Klopp’s, but it is altogether weightier than Sherwood’s.

David Moyes’s achievements on a limited budget at Everton have long suggested he would be an ideal fit for Villa. Should he leave Real Sociedad then he would be an obvious upgrade.

Moyes has a steely eyed determination that enabled him to drag Everton out of trouble. Sherwood has an emotional volatility, which means that a glance at his face, without even hearing his words, can reveal the scoreline. He has been visibly downcast since the opening-day victory at Bournemouth.

He possesses industrial quantities of self-belief. He has produced bullish rhetoric this week, but it never bodes well when interviews contain more defiance than performances.

Villa’s slide is not entirely Sherwood’s fault; not when he was stripped of the spine of his side by the summer departures of Christian Benteke, Fabian Delph and Ron Vlaar, even if all three are injured now anyway.

Much like Rodgers at Liverpool, he has attempted to deflect responsibility for some of the signings. Pointed references to “the club” in the transfer market are signs that many of the French contingent were not his choices. Sherwood can be a figure of John Bull Englishness, and the indications are that he preferred to shop at home.

Yet Joleon Lescott, who some at West Bromwich Albion were happy to see depart, has disappointed in defence. Villa have contrived to acquire a huge cast of attacking midfielders and wingers but much the brightest, Jack Grealish, is a player they already possessed. Sherwood’s struggles to accommodate others have had the feel of unsuccessful auditions. His substitutions have backfired, especially away at Crystal Palace and Leicester City. A laudable draw and a vital win became two defeats.

Now Villa meet a club who were long their inferiors but have overtaken them. It is 1982 European Cup winners against a club that almost dropped out of the Football League in 2003. It is also a meeting of brothers who arrived from Ligue 1 this summer and who symbolise their respective employers: Jordan Ayew is one of Villa’s expensive disappointments, Andre Ayew one of the signings of the season for Swansea.

In a way, Swansea brought the beginning of the end for Sherwood’s predecessor Paul Lambert. Villa only had 27 per cent of possession when they hosted the Welsh side in December 2013. The Scot had created a team with a lamentable inability to keep the ball. When he then switched to prioritise possession, they had no threat.

Lambert’s Villa lost their identity. Perhaps Sherwood’s Villa have never found one. And so a manager who invariably references armed conflict may be waiting to see if the board pull the trigger.

Tim Sherwood is scrapping to save his job at Aston Villa and increased the uncertainty surrounding his future by refusing to rule out resigning.

Sherwood faces a crucial game against Swansea with his position under growing scrutiny and he is undoubtedly battling to avoid being dismissed after a stormy eight months in charge.

The Villa manager has insisted that Saturday’s game is just as significant as last season’s FA Cup Final and knows that an eighth defeat in ten Premier League games could have severe ramifications.

Sherwood was making all the right noises at Bodymoor Heath on Friday, despite the silence from the Villa board regarding his position, and remains convinced he can mastermind a climb away from the bottom three.

But ahead of this weekend’s potentially pivotal game he has muddied the waters further by hinting at the friction behind the scenes.

Villa have signed 13 new players this summer, many of which were recommended by director of recruitment Paddy Reilly and sporting director Hendrik Almstadt, in a policy that has frustrated the 46-year-old.

And when asked if he would ever consider walking away from the job, Sherwood said: “Yeah. I would always say that. Whenever I'm not happy with the situation, and I'm not happy in my job of work, then I would [walk away], 100%. Not now – and if I can take what I've taken over the last few months and still be happy, that tells you a lot.

“I've taken the brunt of this football club over the last few months, everything that everyone wants to throw at it – negatives – it's been on my head. And that's my job as a manager to take that responsibility.

“I'm not in the background, am I? I'm the manager, I get paid to stand at the front and take it on the chin and that's what I'm doing.”

Sherwood also revealed that he has not spoken to chairman Randy Lerner or chief executive Tom Fox this week, with Villa reluctant to issue a public vote of confidence.

Last season Villa sacked Paul Lambert three weeks after Fox insisted blaming the manager was a “false narrative”, but there is deep concern over Villa’s start to the season.

“I am telling the players it’s a must-win because I think we need to win a game sooner or later,” said Sherwood. “Forget Wembley last season, this is a cup final. (you couldn't motivate them then, eh Tim?)

“It’s a massive game, not only for me but for the players as well. They all want to be Premier League footballers and this club needs to be in the Premier League.”

Villa’s problems only increased this week when former striker Stan Collymore said the board were “not fit for purpose” and demanded Lerner to sell up, after his column in the club’s match-day programme was dropped.

But Telegraph Sport understands a sale is unlikely this season after Lerner dramatically pulled out of negotiations in July. A Chinese consortium agreed an exclusivity period but Lerner had reservations and scrapped the deal, effectively taking the club off the market while the transfer window was open.

Despite the sales of Christian Benteke and Fabian Delph, which totalled just over £40million, Villa only spent £7million net and many of the new additions have no Premier League experience.

Sherwood is not blameless, with his team selection and substitutions bewildering supporters while a failure to beat the likes of Sunderland, West Brom, Leicester and Stoke was always going to set off alarm bells.

However, he has not been helped by the lack of football experience or leadership at the top. Fox impressed as Arsenal’s chief commercial officer, agreeing the £170million kit deal with Puma in 2013, but his area of expertise was not on-field matters.

Fox raided his old club for Almstad, which appeared to go against Sherwood’s wishes, and there has been no explanation over the club’s bold transfer policy.

In the three paragraphs of quotes that accompanied the announcement of Almstadt’s arrival, he said he was looking forward to “establishing a close relationship with Tim Sherwood’. The pair are understood to be barely on speaking terms now.

And then there is Reilly. It is well known that he was an analyst during Martin O’Neill’s time in charge but since returning from Liverpool he has become an integral part of the decision making.

Yet it is Sherwood under all the scrutiny and he will head into the Swansea game with his job very much on the line.