Sherwood SACKED

Sandie wrote:He's got to go.

I was thinking earlier, as a Villa fan I can go back to the mid-90s and there is no question in my mind that Sherwood is the worst manager we've had in that time. What do our more experienced supporters think? How does he rate alongside the likes of Graham Turner and Billy McNeill?

GadgetMan wrote:

Sandie wrote:He's got to go.

I was thinking earlier, as a Villa fan I can go back to the mid-90s and there is no question in my mind that Sherwood is the worst manager we've had in that time. What do our more experienced supporters think? How does he rate alongside the likes of Graham Turner and Billy McNeill?

This is as bad as those two sides imo!! With him coming out and effectively saying "The club are in a hole and not him" and if the players can't handle the pressure then they shouldn't be on the pitch (after picking them) he shouldn't be allowed another day as club manager. It's a disgrace to through the club (US) under the bus by saying he'll be fine and it's the club in trouble. Why should he get any loyalty with comments like that.

Also joked he'd turn his phone off tonight, glad he's happy knowing he'll get a shit load for an absolute stinker of a job. His post match comments have pissed me off more than the result. Disprespectful. I had posted previously it's not personal, you're just out of your depth....Well now it is, the cretin can get the hell out of my club!! Narcissistic arsehole

villabromsgrove wrote:

GadgetMan wrote:

Sandie wrote:He's got to go.

I was thinking earlier, as a Villa fan I can go back to the mid-90s and there is no question in my mind that Sherwood is the worst manager we've had in that time. What do our more experienced supporters think? How does he rate alongside the likes of Graham Turner and Billy McNeill?

This is as bad as those two sides imo!! With him coming out and effectively saying "The club are in a hole and not him" and if the players can't handle the pressure then they shouldn't be on the pitch (after picking them) he shouldn't be allowed another day as club manager. It's a disgrace to through the club (US) under the bus by saying he'll be fine and it's the club in trouble. Why should he get any loyalty with comments like that.

Also joked he'd turn his phone off tonight, glad he's happy knowing he'll get a shit load for an absolute stinker of a job. His post match comments have pissed me off more than the result. Disprespectful. I had posted previously it's not personal, you're just out of your depth....Well now it is, the cretin can get the hell out of my club!! Narcissistic arsehole

He also signed his own dismissal notice by saying that the squad is short on quality, and isn't good enough to be anything more than bottom of the table fodder. It's an admission that he can't get any more out of them, so he's sacked himself.

Sandie wrote:http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/tim-sherwood-poll-should-aston-10326438

57% Sack, 43% Back so far.

GadgetMan wrote:As good as a resignation letter? He and his staff are unable to do anymore or improve the current players. A clear case of he needs to go as he's admitted he is out of ideas.

“I am telling the players it’s a must-win because we need to win a game sooner or later. This is a cup final. Forget Wembley last season, this is a cup final.”

Considering Aston Villa whimpered to a 4-0 defeat in their last cup final in May, Tim Sherwood’s latest missive was perhaps the most ill-advised yet. Packaged as a “must-win” game against Swansea, Villa looked just as lifeless and listless as they had in their previous eight Premier League games. It is now nine league games without victory.

After an insipid first half, it appeared as though a rousing half-time Timmy team-talk had inspired his players. Jordan Ayew, signed by Sherwood for £10million in the summer, stooped to head home and Villa Park erupted with relief.

It was a relief that lasted six minutes. Gylfi Sigurdsson fired home a free-kick soon after, and Andre Ayew crowned another defeat for Sherwood, his 16th – and surely last – in 28 games with three minutes remaining.

Sherwood boasted of a fully-fit squad before the game, a statement which prompted yet more questions as soon as his starting line-up for a “must-win” game was announced.

Alan Hutton, Micah Richards, Joleon Lescott and Kieran Richardson should not have formed a Premier League defence eight years ago, never mind in 2015. Gabby Agbonlahor should not still feature in top-flight games, never mind start them. Villa’s best player in Carles Gil remains on the bench. Rudy Gestede – a man backed by Sherwood as the best header in English football – is fielded, but with no wingers on the pitch. A litany of mistakes, and that was before kick-off.

Bear in mind this is a side who spent more than every other Premier League club aside from Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City and Manchester United this summer. The problems at Villa run as deep as they do high in the infrastructure, but that no longer excuses Sherwood’s clear unsuitability not only for the Villa job, but for any managerial post currently.

“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.”

Now shackled by a win percentage of just 35% at Villa Park, this appears to be Sherwood’s last defence. He is a Football Man, willing to ‘front up’ and, as the leadership cliches pour out of his mouth, “take it on the chin”.

The thing is, no-one has ever doubted Sherwood’s determination. The issue is that he simply isn’t a Premier League manager; he’s a barely a Football League one.

As speculation concerning his job mounted throughout the week, Sherwood delivered a 427th embattled message: “I’m easy with it. My job doesn’t change. I still need to win a football match which I’m aware of. I’ll be taking full responsibility for the team’s performance and we’ll win tomorrow.”

Sherwood will surely therefore take “full responsibility” for his side having less shots than their opponents, less passing accuracy than their opponents, less passes than their opponents and less possession than their opponents. Oh, and less goals for their opponents.

This, after all, was a Swansea side who had not tasted victory of any kind since August. Only two sides have been on a worse run of form that Garry Monk’s men: 19th-placed Villa and rock-bottom Sunderland. If the Black Cats extend their Wear-Tyne winning run over Newcastle on Sunday, Villa replace them at the foot of the table.

Adamant war cries of “we’ll win tomorrow” are all well and good, and a clear staple of the Sherwood management theory. This does quite the disservice to Brendan Rodgers, but they are bosses built in a similar mould. Few are better equipped to lead a confident side in the midst of a good run of form, but both struggle to ignite that form in the first place.

Nick Miller asked a fortnight ago not only whether Sherwood was a good manager, but whether he was even a manager at all. What is clear is that at some point he has to back up the bluster. All signs suggest that he can’t.

“Am I going to be in the job next week? I’m not the person to ask. I feel like the club is in a hole,” Sherwood added after the game. What he fails to see is that he is the one holding the shovel.

Is Tim a good manager? Is he even a manager?

It’s not just that we don’t know if Tim Sherwood is a good manager, more that we don’t even know if he’s a manager at all. Things aren’t going well at Aston Villa…

When Tim Sherwood was appointed as Aston Villa manager last season, he turned up at his unveiling press conference looking like a man who had slept in the office after a work party, eyes bloodshot and stubble at five o’clock. Or, as one wag on the internet put it, he looked ‘like he’s about to appeal for the safe return of his stepdaughter, but you already know he did it.’ This, you’ll remember, was after he’d been off for eight months following his dismissal by Spurs, so one wondered how he would look after the stresses and strains of Premier League management took their toll.

We are now discovering exactly that, as Sherwood shuffles out after every defeat, his face a curious mixture of disconsolate deflation, abject fear but also a steely cockiness that may or may not be put on. He looks a bit like a man off on an extreme sports holiday with the lads who has forgot to take out any travel insurance; behind the facade is absolute terror, but his default bravado won’t stop him sinking that first pint before the 7am flight. Compare Sherwood’s visage with Paul Lambert, who looks about ten years younger these days than when he occupied the Villa big chair.

Aston Villa are, all in all, a piping hot mess at the moment. They haven’t won in the league since the opening day, losing six of their last seven matches and the only brief moment of respite, the single draw in that spell, was against Sunderland, whose incompetence (along with Newcastle’s) is the only thing keeping Villa off the bottom of the table.

This run in itself doesn’t prove that Sherwood is a fraud, a man who has reached his current position by riding a wave of his own ego but who doesn’t actually have the first idea of what he’s doing, but the signs aren’t good. Not quite so much in the results, but that in the last few games Sherwood has looked as if he’s groping around in the dark, like a man hunting for his spectacles at 2am. He seems to try different tactics and approaches in every game, usually without a huge amount of logic, and according to FootballLineups.com he has used five different formations in those seven games (the last, a 3-5-2 against Stoke, abandoned at half-time), altering personnel each time. Sometimes a flexible approach gives a manager an air of admirable adaptability, but sometimes it suggests a manager who doesn’t really know what he’s doing.

It’s for this reason that we don’t really know what sort of manager Sherwood is. In the summer he commented that this season we would see what a Tim Sherwood side really was, and when questioned as to exactly what a Tim Sherwood side was, he simply replied “Winners.” After the defeat to Stoke, he said: “I had a manager in the opposite dugout (Mark Hughes) who hasn’t had it his own way at every club but he’s come through and stuck to his beliefs. That’s exactly what Tim Sherwood will be doing.”

Leaving aside the third person reference for a second, what exactly are those beliefs? Without an intimate presence in the Villa dressing room it’s slightly difficult to say exactly what his managerial approach is, but it sure as hell isn’t obvious from the way Villa have been playing. It’s not just that we don’t really yet know if Sherwood is a good manager, but that we don’t really know if he’s a manager at all, or just a smooth talker who’s prepared to wear as many items from the club shop at one time as possible.

The one thing we do know about Sherwood is that he’s a Football Man, because people say so. People like Jamie Redknapp, admittedly, but people nonetheless. And one of the things about a Football Man is that they’re no nonsense, they don’t take any rubbish from anyone and they keep things simple. That was something one could see in Sherwood in his brief spells of promise, that he thought of simplicity as a virtue and that complexity only, well, complicated things, a perfectly valid approach that has worked in the past. That has seemingly been abandoned this season and nervous tinkering has taken its place.

Perhaps Sherwood isn’t actually a manager at all. The only real, definite and distinguishable quality that he seems to have is an ability to get the best from previously underperforming strikers. Both Emmanuel Adebayor and Christian Benteke flourished under Sherwood’s tutelage, admittedly via some relatively basic psychology which appeared to consist of him telling both men they were great. Again, simple it might be, but it worked. Maybe he should sack the managerial thing off, and simply operate as some sort of freelance striker whisperer, a consultant who goes from club to club and has a little word in the shell-like of any out of form striker, gets them scoring and skips away with a fat stack of cash from his generous hourly rate. It’d give him a bit of free time, be a nice little earner and those eyes might not look quite so sunken all the time.

Yet it seems he’s quite set on this manager thing. Sherwood has of course been handed some pretty rum cards this season, trying to fashion a Villa side after their two best players were sold. Another, Ron Vlaar, left with the hope of better things only to bugger up his knee. This is a new squad, and one that is in the process of being knitted together, so one can’t hope for instant brilliant results.

The thing is, that squad will only be knitted together by someone who knows what he’s doing, by a manager with a clear idea of how he wants to manage. At the moment, Sherwood has shown little of this.