Recently, an ever-present Premier League club fallen on hard times sacked an unpopular manager whose defensive style had alienated fans and players and replaced him with Tim Sherwood. Sherwood responded by bringing in a few players who hadn’t seen regular first team football in some time, by installing a simple 4-4-2 system at the club, and by getting the best out of a couple past-their-prime veterans and matching them with up-and-coming youth team players with everything to play for. The result made this team suddenly fun again as they started scoring goals regularly after a long barren stretch. Even so, his changes made their games far too open, which meant that even though the club could entertain it was unlikely to ever do more than that.
Question: Am I talking about Tottenham Hotspur or Aston Villa? Obviously Tottenham is a bigger club than Villa with wildly different expectations. But if you asked Spurs supporters about Andre Villas-Boas’s system as well as their overall opinion of the club on the eve of AVB’s firing last season they likely would have sounded a lot like Villa fans when faced with the same question a few months ago with regard to Paul Lambert.
Indeed, when you look at Sherwood’s record with both clubs the results are remarkably similar:
- Tottenham under AVB last season: .94 goals scored per game, 1.3 goals against per game, 1.69 points per game
- Tottenham under Sherwood last season: 1.8 goals scored per game, 1.36 goals against per game, 1.9 points per game
- Aston Villa under Lambert this season: .48 goals scored per game, 1.36 goals against per game, 0.88 points per game
- Aston Villa under Sherwood this season: 1.75 goals per game, 1 goal against per game, 1.5 points per game
Obviously we are only four games into the Sherwood era at Villa Park so we should expect those numbers to regress to some more probable mean in all likelihood. It’s hard to imagine a team whose main attackers are Christian Benteke, Gabriel Agbonlahor, and Scott Sinclair putting up the same number of goals per game over a season that Emmanuel Adebayor, Christian Eriksen, and Harry Kane managed for Spurs during the second half of last season.
But the early days of Sherwood’s stint at Villa look just like the early days at Spurs: He’s helped get a couple of previously ineffective strikers scoring–Adebayor and Kane at Spurs, Agbonlahor and Benteke at Villa, he’s sacrificed tactical structure for a more open, permissive style that trusts the players to make the right decision on the field, and the results have been better, even if they feel a bit as if the team is cheating the statistics a little bit.1)At this point it’s hard to say if that is what’s happening with Sherwood or not because we don’t have a large enough sample group to say. He’s only managed 26 Premier League games in his career, which is rather remarkable considering how strongly fans already feel about him.
The thing particularly striking about both of Sherwood’s teams has been the ease with which many of their goals are scored. None of Villa’s goals so far scored under the polarizing Englishman have been the sort that show up on an end-of-season highlight montage. But that’s actually not surprising when you consider Sherwood’s approach. To hear him talk is to get the idea that most modern tactics are little more than chains that hinder the expression of the player. When soccer writers up their eyeballs in stats and tactical analyses hear this it sounds absurd, of course. And in some ways I think it is. It’s undeniable that smart tactical thinking can swing a match, that the savvy use of statistics can make a team better. Go watch Simeone’s Atletico or Klopp’s Dortmund and tell me tactics don’t matter.
Even so, when you watch Sherwood’s teams play, you can begin to see what he means. Under Paul Lambert, Villa looked like a team that believed it was relegation fodder and that the best they could hope to do was survive by winning a lot of 1-0 smash-and-grab matches. And while that style can actually work, as Tony Pulis showed last season at Crystal Palace, I have to think there’s something deflating about that if you’re a player.
If you’re someone like Benteke, Agbonlahor, or Charles N’Zogbia you don’t play football because you like chasing the opponent around, tackling, chasing the opponent around, clearing the ball from your box, and chasing the opponent around some more. You play the game because you love it, because you love to have the ball at your feet, to thrill the crowd and baffle an opponent with a did-he-just-do-that? bit of skill. You want to score great goals and hear your name sung from the terraces. Lambert’s style would never allow for such a thing to happen because the players aren’t thinking about playing football, they’re thinking about marking assignments, staying organized, and then not screwing it up when they get out on the break.
Sherwood is killing that mentality at Villa, just as he did at Spurs. And that’s why he might be exactly what Aston Villa needs. Given his current approach he’s never going to win major trophies or lead teams into Europe, as was expected at Spurs. But the expectations at Villa are different. One suspects that a team of Premier League-caliber footballers with middling expectations–and Villa has that–would warm to Sherwood’s style and play with the pace and confidence we’ve seen from them so far. They won’t win trophies, but they’ll have fun. And since they were never expecting trophies, maybe that’s OK.
Will they rely on luck a bit to survive? Sure. But no football team, no matter how good they are, can escape the role that luck plays in determining the outcome of games. And if that’s the case and you don’t really care about grinding out 1-0 park-the-bus wins (and why should you if you’re a club Villa’s size?) then a manager like Sherwood who will get his team 50-60 goals per season (while conceding just as many) is probably a better fit than someone like Lambert. It won’t bring in the millions on offer in the Champions League, but it might bring back a bit of fun. And right now I think that’s probably more than sufficient for Villa fans.
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| 1. | ↑ | At this point it’s hard to say if that is what’s happening with Sherwood or not because we don’t have a large enough sample group to say. He’s only managed 26 Premier League games in his career, which is rather remarkable considering how strongly fans already feel about him. |